Epic story of ideological terror of life in revolutionary China
Thien’s tale of a cruel regime sears in readers’ consciousness
In Do Not Say We Have Nothing, the new novel by acclaimed Montreal-based author Madeleine Thien ( Simple Recipes, Certainty, Dogs at the Perimeter), she strives mightily to decant the tragedy of revolutionary-cum-communist China into a literary epic.
Thien manages the feat — this tale of a voracious totalitarianism devouring several memorable characters registers an intense and lingering emotional impression — yet keeps having to expand her story’s spatial and temporal margins to accommodate the overspill.
“How did a composer live his life unheard?” muses Marie, the Chinese-Canadian narrator of those chapters set in the present day. “Could music record a time that otherwise left no trace?”
Marie is thinking of a then-budding composer nicknamed Sparrow. In the 1960s, Sparrow, a young instructor at the prestigious Shanghai Conservatory, forms a socio-musical trio with his precocious female cousin, 14-year-old violin prodigy Zhuli, and his male student and would-be lover, gifted pianist and zealous Mao acolyte Jiang Kai. In a series of arresting chapters related in the third person, Thien depicts the Cultural Revolution intruding upon this genteel scene with state-sanctioned violence targeting the Conservatory.
“I never stopped loving my country but I wanted to be loyal to something else, too,” agonizes Zhuli. Alas, that is no longer possible. A stricken Zhuli commits suicide, Sparrow’s name falls into disrepute and loyal Kai gains official favour.
How does all this relate to Marie of Vancouver? Well, Kai — who eventually grows disillusioned with communist China, wends his way to Canada and starts a family — is her father.
In 1990, shortly after his death, Marie and her mother take in a young Chinese woman, Ai-ming, left traumatized by recent events back home. Having joined the student protesters at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square a year earlier, she witnessed the Chinese military’s massacre of civil- ians trying to protect them. Ai-ming is Sparrow’s daughter. When she was a child whose homework entailed denouncing him in her notebooks “her father had to help her write the tricky characters.” He was killed near Tiananmen.
Just as Thien flitted from Marie to Sparrow/Zhuli/Kai and back, now she jumps between 1980s Beijing, where Ai-ming comes of age and slowly gravitates toward student protest and Marie’s present-day quest for the troubled woman, who, after her year-long post-Tiananmen stint in Vancouver, moves to New York City before returning to China.
That such a diffuse tale should prove shattering serves as testament to Thien’s formidable storytelling skills. The vortex of ideological terror that sweeps up the characters, the harrowing experiences a cruel and pitiless regime foists upon them, and even the potent yet witty prose conveying all this drama sear themselves into your consciousness. The result? Do Not Say We Have Nothing, though undeniably bloated, will enthrall just about any reader. Rayyan Al-Shawaf is a writer and book critic in Beirut.