This was one powerful book to read during Thanksgiving - a holiday where we heard that our president was grateful for himself, as troops were deployed to the border to keep away a caravan of asylum seekers and where the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade featured synchronized pom pom girls with plastic grins, a grotesque Sponge Bob hung suspended over laughing crowds. How many tweaks would turn this into satire? What have we turned ourselves into, I wondered, as my husband watched, and I turned away, to prepare with my son our thanksgiving meal.
What is real? What is true? What is worth something and what is worth nothing? "Revolutionary music hurts the ears after awhile," Madeleine Thien writes. "There's no nostalgia in it, no place for people to share their sorrows."
What sorrows - the Macy's Parade seems to ask. Everything is WONDERFUL!
But "Beauty leaves its imprints on the mind. Throughout history, there have been many moments that can never be recovered, but you and I know that they existed." These words are written at the top of a score by Sparrow, a gifted Chinese composer, and his daughter finds them when he is gone. They come towards the end of Madeleine Thien's epic novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing. As I immersed myself in this incredible book over the holiday, it seemed to me the best I had read all year.
It's about the Cultural Revolution in China and the fallout across generations, including the 1989 student protests and massacre in Tienanmen Square. It's also about music and the influence of Western composers on a circle of Chinese musicians at the Shanghai Conservatory. It's a novel about friendship, love and loss, about the power of music written and practiced, but never heard. Most significantly, it's about a secret Book Of Records, copied and recopied, each time newly encoded with Chinese characters holding hidden meanings, so as to record their stories.
Chinese characters figure strongly in the novel, right from its opening, when Ai-Ming, a young Chinese refugee, arrives at the home of Li-ling (Marie is her western name) in Vancouver, Canada. Marie asks the meaning of Ai-Ming's name. "My parents wanted the idea of mi ming - she said - to cherish wisdom. But you're right, there's a misgiving in it. An idea that is... mmm, not cherishing fate but not quite accepting it."
Later, Ai-Ming explains how her grandmother's stories, inscribed in the Book of Records, got longer and longer - and "I got smaller and smaller. When I told my grandmother this, she laughed her head off. She said, 'But that's how the world is, isn't it? Or did you think you were bigger than the world?'"
As I read, I began to understand how the world could swallow you whole. Ai-Ming's father Sparrow is a composer and his gifted student Kai (Marie's father) is a pianist. Their love and connection carries much of the narrative forward, as does the narrative of Sparrow's cousin Khuli, a violinist. Their stories are unseen and hidden from the world, but they are powerful and true, and once you get caught up in the stories of Swirl, Sparrow, Kai and Khuli - you all but forget the narrator. Marie's ancestral stories are bigger than she is.
Another important character, Wen the Dreamer, is sent to labor camp and when he escapes he must keep his whereabouts secret. He makes it his mission to keep track of those who died in the labor camps. He keeps a record of dates in the lining of his suitcase and records them in the Book of Records - subtly changing the Chinese characters so as to preserve their histories. "When he finished copying," Big Mother Knife wonders of her husband, "did he go back to being himself or were the very structures of his thoughts, their hue and rhythm subtly changed?"
Because they are from the intellectual and educated classes, these characters are oppressed and tortured during Chairman Mao's regime. Each must make a different and very painful choice. One escapes to the west. Most do not. As Kai tells Zhuli, "one day soon we'll arrive at the exits but all the doors will be locked."
As you read, you see how a whole generation is destroyed. The characters watch as fellow musicians and faculty members at the conservatory are mocked, tortured and killed. Sparrow must burn his glorious symphony, so that it survives just in memory - before he becomes a factory worker in a labor camp. Much later, when Marie listens to his music she wonders if music could record a time that otherwise left no trace.
Then there's the story of Swirl, Zhuli's mother, taken to prison camp to be reeducated. When Sparrow finally finds her, after years of looking, he tells her he's been thinking about the quality of sunshine. Let me just say that I read this part while I was at work, on my lunch break, and it moved me so much that I had to read it aloud for one of my colleagues.
"Daylight wipes away the stars and the planets, making them invisible to human eyes. If one needed the darkness in order to see the heavens, might daylight be a form of blindness? Could it be that sound was also a form of deafness? if so what was silence?"
For me, Zhuli is the most tragic and noble of all the characters in this novel. As a young and gifted violinist, her love and understanding of Prokofiev and Bach carries her through the troubled times, even as she writes essays on discarded newspaper and butcher paper: "'Are we gifted?' the essays asked. 'If so, who cares? What good is this music, these empty enchantments that only entrench the bourgeoisie and isolate the poor?'"
At the end of her life, Zhuli asks her cousin Sparrow, "Haven't you understood yet Sparrow?.... the only life that matters is in your mind. The only truth is the one that lives invisibly, that waits even after you close the book. Silence too, is a kind of music. Silence will last."
Do Not Say We Have Nothing is extraordinary beautiful, painful and complex. If you want to know what it was like in Tienanmen Square during the 1989 massacre, you will find no more heartbreaking account than in the final pages of this book.
"The present is all we have," writes Madeleine Thien, "yet it is the one thing we will never learn to hold in our hands." Or as Marie, a mathematician observes at the end of the novel
#madeleinethien #donotsaywehavenothing
1 comment:
interesting post thanks for sharing.
beauty write for us
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