This novel, by Canadian author Madeleine Thien, appeared in 2016. Technically part of my ongoing Shanghai series (the three musicians who form the backbone of the story all studied at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music), the book has many other settings too -- most notably Beijing.

I listened to an audio-version. I'm busy at the moment, and the 20-plus hours' narration-time ended up being chopped into segments that were too short to really do the work justice.

So it's a massive tribute to the book that, despite this infelicitous mode of encounter, I found it engrossing, thought-provoking, and deeply moving.

The narrator -- Marie, who is brought up in Vancouver as the only child of a Chinese father and a Hong Kong mother -- begins her story very starkly with a double-tragedy that took place in 1989: "In a single year, my father left us twice. The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life."

The following year, into the lives of the bereaved mother and daughter comes Ai-Ming, a teenage student from China, who fled her homeland after the Tiananmen Square events, and whose dead father (Sparrow, formerly a talented composer) knew Marie's dead father (Kai, a talented pianist who defected from China before Marie was born).


Tiananmen Square and environs, 2016





Marie, who takes on the task of piecing together the fragments of her family's story, proceeds not only to unpack these events -- to the extent that their circumstances can be known (one of the novel's points is that all knowledge is fragmentary) -- but also to burrow back into the history of related families, related times, related fates.

The tone is dark. We know from that opening sentence that there is much sadness to be traversed, and as we move back into Chinese history -- the end of the civil war, the anti-rightist campaigns, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square -- we become increasingly aware that things are not going to "come right". Consequently, there is a brooding, inexorable quality to the narrative.

Marie as an adult is an outwardly successful academic, but there is an interior hollowness about her that makes us grieve. By now, she has lost not only her father, but also her mother, who dies after an illness, and Ai-Ming, who returns to China, and vanishes without trace.

And then there are all the other losses that she has to record. The family tree that you can see at the front of the online version is full of lost siblings, lost spouses, lost children. To say nothing of loss of identity, loss of vocation, loss of freedom... The melancholy undertow to the book makes it quite a harrowing read/listen.

Sparrow is probably the character who touches our hearts the most. He sees his promising career as a composer wrested from him in the Cultural Revolution; he sees his talented and beloved violinist cousin, Zhuli, driven to suicide by the same events. Sparrow himself dies a senseless death in the Tiananmen crackdown, and the iniquity of his demise is exacerbated by official obfuscation (his death certificate refers to a "stroke"). The love between him and Kai, Marie's pianist father, is left as interrupted and unfinished as their lives.







There are two motifs that connect the sprawling story.

The first is music. Throughout the book we keep encountering Bach's Goldberg Variations, specifically Glenn Gould's recordings of them.

This element is very personal for Thien, who studied ballet for 15 years, but stopped her classes because of her family's financial difficulties, and for a very long time listened to no music at all: "It was only in my 30s... [that] I turned to music, and the first piece of music that came to me, just by chance, was Glenn Gould's recording of the Goldberg Variations." She continues: "I didn’t know I was going to be writing about music. I knew I wanted to write about the 1989 demonstrations in China... And the music snuck in. The structure of Bach’s Variations, what they were saying to me, the way they allowed me to imagine this recurrence of ideas, this cyclical nature of things, the simple motif that can be unwound in so many complex ways, bringing us to so many states of experience of feeling -- that started to inform everything about the book."

Tilly Nevin observes: "Both composing music and writing are transgressive acts... Although Thien shows how language in a political climate holds enormous power, she also explores the inadequacy of words. It is music rather than fiction which provides her characters with consolation. Music in Do Not Say We Have Nothing is, like writing, a record of human history, of personal history rather than the public narrative we are taught; Sparrow creates music even when he is forbidden to do so."

And David Hobbs explains how Thien's title also refers to a piece of music, its story again attesting to convolutions and mixtures of meaning: "It is taken from the Chinese translation of Eugene Pottier's L'Internationale, a 19th-century workers' song adopted as the national anthem of the then-Chinese Soviet Republic, and the line she has selected contains a revealing alteration. Where Pottier's 'Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout' might be cleanly translated as 'We are nothing, let's be everything,' the anthem's version has it: 'Do not say that we have nothing, / We shall be the masters of the world!' This translation shifts the burden from the singers' collective belief to the listeners, admonishing us for something we have not yet said, for the sake of something that will, but has not yet, come to pass."







The other recurring element in the narrative is "The Book of Records". This is a hand-written collection of novelistic episodes that pass among the different generations of Zhuli's, Sparrow's, and Kai's families. Chapters and characters are added or transformed, in ways that act as landmarks or identifiers or messages to those in the know.

The Book of Records, Thien explains, is "a book with no beginning, no middle and no end, in which the characters are seeing an alternative China where they recognise mirrors of themselves and which they write themselves into".

In another interview, in Hong Kong, she says: "Do Not Say has an argument to make: that we are all authors. That novels, poetry, photographs, copies of things, sheet music, sound recordings, and more, serve as the unofficial record, a messy ever-expansive record, as wide and turbulent as a river. No one can pinpoint the beginning or the end. The Book of Records is an unfolding and forever unfinished novel that has no apparent author, and has many variations. And when people read the book, they don’t know if it’s a mirror to the past, or if it’s a future that is still to come. They don’t know if it’s invention or history, all they know is that it takes hold of them, and they can’t let it go. It is them."

The novel ends with Marie, through the versions of the Book of Records that she puts on the internet, still hoping to contact Ai-Ming...

According to Dan Edwards, the Book of Records also evokes "a rich, palimpsestic tradition of Chinese historiography, quite different to linear, evidence-based Western historical discourse". Succeeding dynasties wrote their own interpretations of China's past, overlaying previous accounts: "Thien’s book is her rendition of contemporary China’s story, a narrative that will be taken up by others to express their own truths in the future. The spectres that haunt the country can still be redeemed, Thien’s account whispers, if only their presence can be acknowledged."


The Temple of Heaven, 2015









So, this is a chilling and saddening book. But it is not devoid of positivity. Responding to a questioner who wonders why she is drawn in her novels to scenarios like the Killing Fields and Tiananmen, Thien replies: "I think what I really want to understand is how we live in this time... When one door is closed to [these characters], they try to find another way. Unable to make music, [Sparrow] devotes his life to his daughter. He makes radios. He works in a factory. He changes his conditions. He tries to hear music in the sound of the world around him. The books are dark, but they’re also about how people continuously find ways to live."

Definitely something worth hanging on to in these dark global times...

Thien, incidentally, was born and grew up in Canada, but has an ethnically diverse past (her mother was a Cantonese-speaker from Hong Kong, and her father a Hakka Chinese, who was born in what is now Sabah, Malaysia), and an eclectic experience of residency. Asked where she would go, if she were to return "home", she says: "I wish I knew... Yes, where’s that place you can come completely to rest? I don’t think I have it right now. I have different places where I feel so wonderful -- Berlin, Montreal, Vancouver, Cambodia, parts of China, Hong Kong, but not one place that is able to be all those things."

I really know how she feels...