Reviews with content warning for Violence - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

In high school, I spent two years studying the politics of China. So I was familiar with some of the dry facts of the country's modern history since Mao Zedong's proclamation of the People's Republic of China in 1949. I had learned about the Great Leap Forward (in which an estimated 45 million people were worked or starved to death) and the Cultural Revolution, launched by Mao in 1966, in which young "Red Guards" were encouraged to purge "bourgeois elements," persecuting and torturing public intellectuals, destroying historical relics, and even killing their own teachers.

I also remember watching, on television, the student-led Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, which ended on June 4th of that year when soldiers of the People Liberation Army fired on protesters, killing and injuring thousands.

In "Do Not Say We Have Nothing," (words that come from the Chinese version of the Internationale) Madeleine Thien brings this history alive. Sparrow, a brilliant composer, his beloved student Kai, a talented pianist, and his niece Zhuli, a violin prodigy, struggle in vain to devote themselves to their music while the Cultural Revolution rages around them. Years later, Sparrow's daughter Ai-Ming witnesses and participates in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations before fleeing to Canada, where she lives briefly with Kai's daughter Marie and her mother and slowly shares her family's history.

"Do Not Say We Have Nothing" prompts the reader to struggle with disturbing questions. What turns people leading apparently harmless, everyday lives into a murderous, screaming mob? What would force a family patriarch to demand that his own sons denounce their teenage cousin in hand-calligraphed posters in which they call her "the daughter of rightist filth", after a mob has cut off great clumps of her hair, jeering and spitting and slapping and dousing her with ink? What leads people to tiny, personal rebellions, and later, enormous protests against tyranny that seem to emerge overnight?

As one character says during the Tiananmen Square protests, "you couldn't live against the reality of the time but it was still possible to keep your private dreams, only they had to stay that way, intensely, powerfully private [....]. Everything was decided by the Party. When the demonstrations began, the students were asking for something simple. In the beginning it wasn't about changing the system, or bringing down the government, let alone the Party. It was about having the freedom to live where you chose, to pursue the work you loved. All those years, our parents had to pretend. To see the future in a different light takes time. But we thought everything could begin with this first movement."

Thien's writing is beautiful, evocative and haunting, and her love of language and music flows, like a song, through every page of this book. I love this novel and recommend it highly.

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