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Do Not Say We Have Nothing (novel)

Plot Summary

The novel begins with a girl named Marie living with her mother in Vancouver, Canada. The year is 1991, and the addition to their household of a Chinese refugee fleeing the post-Tiananmen Square crackdown, Ai-Ming, is the catalyst that sets the rest of the plot into motion. The novel quickly fractures into a number of different sub-plots, introduced by Ai-Ming, which span generations of both Marie and Ai-Ming’s families, who are later revealed to be intrinsically connected. These sub-plots are set during a tumultuous period in China’s history, from the beginning of Mao Zedong's reign in the late 1940s to the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. There are four main eras that the novel focuses on, though they do not necessarily occur in chronological order. The first involves Big Mother Knife, her sister Swirl, and Swirl's husband Wen the Dreamer during the land reform campaign and the executions that were involved. Secondly is the era focusing on Sparrow, Kai and Zhuli during the Cultural Revolution which centers around the Shanghai Conservatory and their experiences there. Thirdly is Sparrow and Ai-Ming, his daughter, during the Tiananmen Square protests and aftermath. Finally, the last era is the “present” which is Marie discovering her connection to all these stories. As well, the story contained in the Book of Records is a constant presence throughout all these other narratives. While Wen the Dreamer is the principle translator and contributor to the book, as the novel progresses the stories of all the characters become so incorporated into the Book of Records that the line is blurred between fact and fiction, past and present.

Historical Contexts

Thien references numerous songs and texts from Chinese history. This includes Sima Qian's "Historical Records." The title, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, is a reference to the Chinese version of the left-wing anthem: “The Internationale,” which has been a staple anthem of the Communist Party of China after Qu Qiubai’s translation of the Russian version in 1923. Within the plot of the novel this anthem occurs at numerous points, particularly as a rallying cry for the student protesters at Tienanmen Square, at which Ai-Ming and Sparrow were present: “The people around her were weeping. At the front, the student leaders began to sing the Internationale.” (Thien 438). Also referenced in the novel is the song “The East is Red,” which was used as the unofficial national anthem during the Cultural Revolution, within which many of the events in the Kai and Sparrow’s subplots occur. Additionally "Song of the Guerrillas," a Chinese anthem that describes Chinese guerrilla fighters during the Second Sino-Japanese War. In a 2017 interview, Thien created a 'Book Note' playlist that included numerous musical artists who influenced her writing of the novel. These artists included J.S. Bach, Ros Sereysothea, Sinn Sisamouth, Dmitri Shostakovich, Leonard Cohen, and Sun Belt.

Research

• summary and biography of author by The Man Booker Prize
• New York Times book review
• National Post book review
• 100 Notable Books of 2016
• Macleans Book Review

Characters

Jiang Li-ling

Li-ling, also referred to as Marie and Ma-li, is the main character and narrator of the book. The novel shifts from present day where Marie interacts with her Ma and Ai-ming, to past generations where characters like Big Mother Knife and Sparrow struggle with the Cultural Revolution in China.

Jiang Kai

Kai is Marie's father. We learn at the beginning of the novel that he leaves his daughter and wife to go to Hong Kong and eventually commits suicide. Later we learn that he had a close relationship with Sparrow growing up, which stemmed from an interest in classical music at the Shanghai Conservatory.

Ma

Ma takes care of her daughter, Marie, back in Vancouver. She also takes Ai-ming into her home upon receiving word that she is seeking refuge after the Tiananmen Square protests.

Ai-ming

Ai-ming is the daughter of Sparrow and Ling as well as the friend and neighbour of Yiwen. Ai-ming flees China after participating in the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 and finds a home with Marie and Ma for a short while in Vancouver. Eventually she leaves for America with the hope that she can make a better life for herself.

Big Mother Knife

Big Mother Knife is the wife of Ba Lute, sister of Swirl, and mother to Sparrow, Flying Bear, and Big Mountain. She has a close relationship with her sister and has a hard time reconciling the horrors that Swirl faces with the political powers that Ba Lute fights for.

Swirl

Swirl is the sister of Big Mother Knife and the wife of Wen the Dreamer. Wen the Dreamer and Swirl are punished with re-education through hard labour under Mao Zedong's regime in order to help them learn from their mistakes – they harbour a secret library cellar where they store valuable heirlooms, documents, American books, and other contraband.

Ba Lute

Ba Lute is the husband of Big Mother Knife and fought for the People's Liberation Army during the birth of his son Sparrow. He places a lot of trust in Mao's Communist Party.

Sparrow

Sparrow is the brother of Flying Bear and Big Mountain, as well as Zhuli's cousin. He develops a musical relationship with Zhuli through their interests at the conservatory. Sparrow writes several symphonies throughout the novel but struggles to share them out of fear of judgement. He has a close relationship with Kai because of their work together with classical music, but it grows into something more.

Wen the Dreamer

Wen the Dreamer is the husband of Swirl and the son of renowned Chinese scholar Old West. Old West was selected by the Emperor to embark on a trip to America in order to foster his learning. Upon returning, and before he could share a lot of his knowledge, Wen's father passed away. Wen faces some resentment in the novel because Old West still owed 10 years of skilled labour to the emperor when he died. Wen is a poet.

Zhuli

Zhuli is the daughter of Wen the Dreamer and Swirl. She is comforted by Big Mother Knife while her parents are tortured and is dropped off on her doorstep. She also is a gifted violinist and has a close relationship with Kai as well as Sparrow, despite being 10 years his junior.

Flying Bear and Big Mountain

Flying Bear and Big Mountain are brothers to Sparrow and sons to Big Mother Knife and Ba Lute. They are interchangeable at the beginning of the novel but eventually grow apart.

Reception

Jiayang Fan, a staff writer of The New York Times, calls the novel "a powerfully expansive novel", specifically calling Thien's "Book of Records" the root of the novel's "remarkable authenticity".  Jennifer Senior, another writer for The New York Times, writes that the book "impresses in many senses. ... It successfully explores larger ideas about politics and art. ... It has the satisfying, epic sweep of a 19th-century Russian novel, spanning three generations and lapping up against the shores of two continents".

On a similar vein, Brian Bethune, a writer for Maclean's, calls the novel "a worthy winner of the Governor General's Award". Highlighting the novel's interaction "with history and memory in [an] extraordinarily delicate fashion", Bethune claims that "it is a story of such beauty that it provokes a paradoxical hope".

Upon winning the Giller Prize, Mark Medley of The Globe and Mail writes that "while Ms. Thien has long been considered one of the [Canada]'s most talented young writers, with her books receiving critical acclaim, the country's major literary awards had eluded her - until this year".

Lawrence Hill, a juror on the panel for the Giller Prize, calls the novel a "beautiful look at the salvation of music and love and life in the face of genocide. It’s a huge epic novel told in an unusual way – without a single protagonist, without a single struggle. It’s a challenging book, and you have to work to read it".

Bronwyn Drainie of the Literary Review of Canada writes that Thien "[creates] a memorial for the millions of lives lost, disappeared, shriveled or wasted during not just the years of Mao’s reign but back to the famine of 1910 and forward to the dashed hopes of Tiananmen in 1989. That is some accomplishment”.

Awards

2017 Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction, won.

Group Reflection

The Wikipedia community has far stricter rules than we had first realized. They pride themselves on maintaining an environment for unbiased content that focuses solely on the facts of a situation, event, or person. This ruled out using many of the academic articles that we are accustomed to using in our university research. Despite these constraints, however, it is interesting to see the power that Wikipedia articles have. We were struck many times by the idea of how many people might one day visit our article and use the information we have provided for their own studies. While this idea made us excited about having the opportunity to work on such a project, there was also a sense of responsibility involved to provide correct and comprehensible information.

The “Do Not Say We Have Nothing” page as it existed before our work was a stub and, therefore, very limited in the information it provided. Particularly lacking was a full plot summary, character list, and sense of the real historical content Thien was working with. By adding this information, we hope to help future readers of Thien’s book to better understand the plot and characters which can at times be overwhelming in its complexity.

We believe that we did accomplish what we set out to achieve and we seemed to learn more than we thought we would originally about the novel which was very helpful.

Our team found the manner in which Wikipedia pages are formatted to be helpful in dividing up the workload. We found that our sources often could be used for more than one section, this made it easier to compile information, as each group member looked out for any information relevant to the article as a whole, rather than their individual sections.

If we were to do this assignment again, it would be helpful to go into a topic with more expertise, rather than simply having read the book. At the same time, midway through the assignment, we had the panel discussion on Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which was an excellent way to enhance our understanding.

This assignment showed us how Web 2.0 can be utilized to better disseminate information on a large scale. Furthermore, it made clear the potential that small groups of editors have in providing reliable and sourced information to large groups of readers on the Web. The format of Wikipedia as a whole proved to be a relatively simple, and democrat way in which information can be spread to a large audience.