Do Not Say We Have Nothing "Thien, Madeleine"

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In Canada in 1991, ten-year-old Marie and her mother invite a guest into their home: a young woman who has fled China in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests. Her name is Ai-Ming.As her relationship with Marie deepens, Ai-Ming tells the story of her family in revolutionary China, from the crowded teahouses in the first days of Chairman Mao's ascent, to the Shanghai Conservatory in the 1960s and the events leading to the Beijing demonstrations of 1989. It is a history of revolutionary idealism, music, and silence, in which three musicians, the shy and brilliant composer Sparrow, the violin prodigy Zhuli, and the enigmatic pianist Kai struggle during China's relentless Cultural Revolution to remain loyal to one another and to the music they have devoted their lives to. Forced to re-imagine their artistic and private selves, their fates reverberate through the years, with deep and lasting consequences for Ai-Ming - and for Marie.Written with exquisite intimacy, wit and moral complexity, Do Not Say We Have Nothing magnificently brings to life one of the most significant political regimes of the 20th century and its traumatic legacy, which still resonates for a new generation. It is a gripping evocation of the persuasive power of revolution and its effects on personal and national identity, and an unforgettable meditation on China today.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

On the 16th of December, 1990, Ma came home in a taxi with a new daughter who wore no coat, only a thick scarf, a woollen sweater, blue jeans and canvas shoes. I had never met a Chinese girl before, that is, one who, like my father, came from real mainland China. A pair of grey mittens dangled from a string around her neck and swayed in nervous rhythm against her legs. The fringed ends of her blue scarf fell one in front and one behind, like a scholar. The rain was falling hard, and she walked with her head down, holding a medium-sized suitcase that appeared to be empty. She was pale and her hair had the gleam of the sea.    Casually I opened the door and widened my eyes as if I was not expecting visitors.     "Girl," Ma said. "Take the suitcase. Hurry up."     Ai-ming stepped inside and paused on the edge of the doormat. When I reached for the suitcase, my hand accidentally touched hers, but she didn't draw back. Instead, her other hand reached out and lightly covered mine. She gazed right at me, with such openness and curiosity that, out of shyness, I closed my eyes.    "Ai-ming," Ma was saying. "Let me introduce you. This is my Girl."    I pulled away and opened my eyes again.    Ma, taking off her coat, glanced first at me and then at the room. The brown sofa with its three camel-coloured stripes had seen better days, but I had spruced it up with all the flowery pillows and stuffed animals from my bed. I had also turned on the television in order to give this room the appearance of liveliness. Ma nodded vigorously at me. "Girl, greet your aunt."    "Really, it's okay if you call me Ai-ming. Please. I really, mmm, prefer it."    To placate them both, I said, "Hello."    Just as I suspected, the suitcase was very light. With my free hand, I moved to take Ai-ming's coat, remembering too late she didn't have one. My arm wavered in the air like a question mark. She reached out, grasped my hand and firmly shook it.    She had a question in her eyes. Her hair, pinned back on one side, fell loosely on the other, so that she seemed forever in profile, about to turn towards me. Without letting go of my hand, she manoeuvred her shoes noiselessly off her feet, first one then the other. Pinpoints of rain glimmered on her scarf. Our lives had contracted to such a degree that I could not remember the last time a stranger had entered our home; Ai-ming's presence made everything unfamiliar, as if the walls were crowding a few inches nearer to see her. The previous night, we had, at last, tidied Ba's papers and notebooks, putting them into boxes and stacking the boxes under the kitchen table. Now I found the table's surface deceitfully bare. I freed my hand, saying I would put the suitcase in her bedroom.    Ma showed her around the apartment. I retreated to the sofa and pretended to watch the Weather Channel, which predicted rain for the rest of the week, the rest of 1990, the rest of the century, and even the remainder of all time. Their two voices ran one after the other like cable cars, interrupted now and then by silence. The intensity in the apartment crept inside me, and I had the sensation that the floor was made of paper, that there were words written everywhere I couldn't read, and one unthinking gesture could crumple this whole place down. Excerpted from Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

In Thien's luminescent third novel (following Dogs at the Perimeter, which won the Frankfurt Book Fair's 2015 LiBeraturpreis), stories, music, and mathematics weave together to tell one family's tale within the unfolding of recent Chinese history. Beginning in 1989 in Hong Kong and Vancouver, this narrative snakes both forward and backward, describing how a pair of sisters survived land reform, re-education at the hands of the Communists, the coming of the Red Guard, the Cultural Revolution, and the protests at Tiananmen square. The story is partially told by the central character, mathematics professor Marie Jiang (Jiang Li-ling), as she discovers her late father's past as a pianist, which was left behind and concealed when he left China for Canada. Thien takes readers into the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where Marie's father studied with composer Sparrow and violinist Zhuli in the midst of the cultural upheaval in the 1960s. Filled with intrigue, shifting loyalties, broken families, and unbroken resistance, this novel is beautifully poetic and as carefully constructed as the Bach sonatas that make frequent appearance in the text. Thien's reach-though epic -does not extend beyond her capacity, resulting in a lovely fugue of a book that meditates on fascism, resistance, and personhood. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Thien's (Certainty, 2007) new novel, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, begins in a blur of confusion and death. The narrator called Ma-Li, Li-Ling, or Marie, depending on who's addressing her has lost her beloved father at the age of 10. The circumstances of his death are baffling; all she knows is that, after leaving his family in Vancouver to return to his native China, Jiang Kai has committed suicide for reasons she cannot glean from the barely understood, long-distance conversations her overworked, long-suffering mother has with friends and family back home. Then, just as mysteriously, a young woman named Ai-ming arrives from Beijing at the apartment she and her mother share. Ai-ming's presence has something to do with the fraught student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, and something to do with Li-ling's father, but Li-ling doesn't know much more than that. At first, the child resents the young woman's presence in her small home, but soon enough, Ai-ming wins her over with stories about her family and their close connection to Jiang Kai. And what stories they are! Here, the story opens up from a child's fragmentary understanding of her immediate and painful surroundings to an omniscient and riveting account of an extended family's joys and struggles under Chairman Mao. Along the way, we are introduced to indelible characters with invariably fantastic names Big Mother Knife, Sparrow, and Old West, to name a just few and fully realized, uniformly captivating story arcs. We are treated to engaging philosophical analyses of samizdat, both of words and of notation, and of how the music of Bach, Shostakovich, and other Western composers affects people living in a place where even ghosts are illegal. We also learn how the components of Chinese characters in different dialects enhance the meaning of the words they represent and imbue them with confusion and a kind of magic. Magic, too, is how Thien manages to bring these disparate elements together without making heavy weather of it. The novel is never not immersive, nor anything less than brilliant. All its words are necessary. The book is a bonanza for fans of Richard Powers.--Williamson, Eugenia Copyright 2016 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

Shortlisted for this years Man Booker Prize, Thiens ambitious saga explores the upheavals in Chinese politics from 1949 to the present through several generations of friends, family, and lovers whose intersecting destinies are upturned by the sweep of events.In 1989, at the time of the Tiananmen Square uprising, Jiang Kai, a renowned concert pianist in China before he defected in the '70s, abandons his wife and 10-year-old daughter, Marie, in Vancouver to fly to Hong Kong, where he commits suicide. Soon afterward, Ai-ming, the 19-year-old daughter of Kais former teacher at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, who was killed by authorities during the uprising, flees China and arrives in Vancouver. The girls soon bond reading the Book of Records, a never-seeming-to-end series of notebooks left among Kais possessions and written in the handwriting of Ai-ming's father, Sparrow. The novel follows Marie as she unravels the mystery of her fathers death, his life as a musician in China, and his relationship with Sparrow. She is guided by the notebooks, which narrate a parallel, fairy-tale version of events. But the heart of the story lies with Kai and Sparrow and their attempts to define themselves inside the rapidly shifting political climate that turns against artists and intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Fear and pragmatism drive ambitious 17-year-old pianist Kai, who watched his family starve to death as a child in the 1959 famine; joining the Red Guard allows him to pursue his music within limits. Kais teacher/friend/lover Sparrow, a composer of genius whose family is torn apart by party loyalties, wills himself into creative invisibility, choosing survival over art. Sparrows cousin, the violinist Zhuli, whom both men love, refuses to join or hide, and her idealism destroys her. Through these and a host of other sharply rendered characters, Thien (Certainty, 2007) dissects Chinas social and political history while raising universal questions about creativity, loyalty, and identity. Mythic yet realistic, panoramic yet intimate, intellectual yet romanticThien has written a concerto dauntingly complex and deeply haunting. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.