Wednesday 3 August 2016

Do Not Say We Have Nothing



“Jiang Kai,” she said spitefully, “now I understand. I'll forget Prokofiev. I'll play the 'March of the Volunteers' and 'The Internationale' for all eternity. The old world shall be destroyed. Arise, slaves, arise! Do not say that we have nothing. That should win me the Tchaikovsky Competition and please everyone, you most of all.”
I remember having read this article on the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests (back in 2014), and the point that impressed upon me most of all is that the young Chinese students of today's Beijing – with their smart phones and consumer goods and upwardly mobile prospects – have no awareness of the near grasp of democracy that happened scant years before their births; indeed, of the one hundred random students shown the famous “Tank Man” picture, only nineteen knew what it represented, and of them, no one was comfortable talking about it. It's nearly comprehensible that a dictatorship like the Chinese government could erase all public acknowledgement of Tiananmen and the massacre that happened there, but what about word of mouth? Have the witnesses from that day never told the story to their children, behind closed doors, in hushed whispers? In the narrative laid out by Madeleine Thien in Do Not Say We Have Nothing, this is exactly what happens: official and private silence has been the routine response to the various tragedies suffered by the Chinese people throughout the twentieth century. In Thien's hands, this makes for a fascinating story.

As the book opens, it is 1989 Vancouver, and ten-year-old Chinese-Canadian Marie is mourning her father's sudden disappearance and suicide earlier in the year. Soon, a relative of sorts, Ai-ming, comes from Beijing to stay with Marie and her mother, and when Ai-ming discovers a chapter of a hand-written novel (known as the Book of Records) among Marie's father's notebooks, she is able to explain its history and recite the rest of the known chapters to Marie from memory. As it turns out, the Book of Records was an incomplete samizdat-type document that Ai-ming's great uncle, Wen the Dreamer, had used to court her great aunt Swirl, and when they were later separated during the Cultural Revolution, each of them created further copies of the novel, inserting small variations in the Chinese characters in order to communicate with one another. After Wen escaped from a remote prison camp and reunited with Swirl, he determined to preserve the names of those who had died in prison by continuing the story of the still unfinished Book of Records:
He would populate this fictional world with true names and true deeds. They would live on, as dangerous as revolutionaries but as intangible as ghosts. What new movement could the Party proclaim that would bring these dead souls into line? What crackdown could erase something that was hidden in plain sight?
Each chapter of Do Not Say We Have Nothing starts from Marie's perspective – in either her “present” of 1989/90, when she is learning from Ai-ming, or her “present” of 2016, when she is searching China and the internet for the now-missing Ai-ming – and through all of the time-hopping and Ai-ming's storytelling, the reader is eventually filled in on the three generations of Ai-ming's family that span the post-WWII years: Swirl and Wen the Dreamer who, as minor figures in a family of landowners, are attacked and sent for re-education (during Mao's years of land reformation) by the angry mob that used to be their friends and neighbours; their daughter Zhuli (a violinist) and her cousin Sparrow (a composer and Ai-ming's father) who were attacked by their former friends and colleagues (now Red Guards) at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music during the Cultural Revolution; and Ai-ming's participation in the student protests at Tiananmen Square (and the consequences of that participation that prompted her to flee China). In every one of these violent government-sponsored crackdowns, it's the people who join the mob who seem to escape punishment; and those who cannot join do well to remain silent. Throughout it all, while the citizens may rightly fear for their own lives, they actually believe in the Revolution; understand that the few must be sacrificed in order to secure the happiness and prosperity of the many; little wonder that they who witnessed the massacre at Tiananmen would protect the next generation from the knowledge that protest is even possible.
I assumed that when the story finished, life would continue and I would go back to being myself. But it wasn't true. The stories got longer and longer, and I got smaller and smaller. When I told Big Mother this, she laughed her head off. “But that's how the world is, isn't it?”
That is a very bare bones outline of the plot, but this book is dense with history and ideas. It's also one of those books about musicians where the musically uneducated reader is at a definite disadvantage: I'm sure I would have identified more with the characters if I knew the physical need to perform certain music or the intimate process of composition; if I could tell the difference between Bach and Shostakovitch. This book has funny passages, and touching passages, and devastating passages. I loved the framing device of the Book of Records: initially discovered by Wen the Dreamer, he recognised that variations in hand-drawn Chinese characters between editions probably meant it was being used for secret communication ---> this leads to Wen and Swirl using the book in the same manner to communicate with one another; now aided by the use of a mimeograph machine ---> this leads to Marie trying to communicate with the lost Ai-ming by digitally leaving the book around the world; now aided by the use of the internet: despite generations of government censors trying to purge the Chinese citizens of individual thought, this little novel remains beneath the radar; and despite the fact that those censors are still at work today, this book seems like an important continuation of the (fictional) Book of Records itself. 

Here's the bottom line: there is much to like about Do Not Say We Have Nothing, but in the end, I respected it more than I enjoyed it; it feels important, if not totally accessible. I have no doubt that it will make more awards lists (it was recently longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize), but ultimately, I got the sense that Thien was writing more for her peers in the literary community than for the general reading public. Even so, what she has created bears witness to decades of what the Chinese government has suppressed: it needed to be written and I can't deny that it represents a worthy achievement.

    The 2016 Man Booker Prize Longlist


    Upon the release of the shortlist (and as my two favourite titles didn't make the cut), this is my ranking for the finalists (signifying my enjoyment of the books, not necessarily which one I think will/should win):

    Deborah Levy : Hot Milk 
    Ottessa Moshfegh : Eileen 
    Paul Beatty : The Sellout 
    Madeleine Thien : Do Not Say We Have Nothing 
    Graeme Macrae Burnet : His Bloody Project 
    David Szalay : All That Man Is 

    Later edit: The Man Booker was won by The Sellout, and although it was not my pick, I'm not dissatisfied by the result.



*****


The  2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlist:

Mona Awad : 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl
Gary Barwin : Yiddish for Pirates
Andrew Battershill : Pillow
David Bergen : Stranger
Emma Donoghue : The Wonder
Catherine Leroux : The Party Wall
Kathy Page : The Two of Us
Susan Perly : Death Valley
Kerry Lee Powell : Willem De Kooning's Paintbrush
Steven Price : By Gaslight
Madeleine Thien : Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Zoe Whittall : The Best Kind of People

*Won by Madeleine Thien for Do Not Say We Have Nothing. Not really a surprise, but this is how I ranked the shortlist, entirely according to my own enjoyment level with the reading experience:

Gary Barwin : Yiddish for Pirates
Catherine Leroux : The Party Wall
Madeleine Thien : Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Mona Awad : 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl
Emma Donoghue : The Wonder
Zoe Whittall : The Best Kind of People
*****
Governor General's Literary Awards (English Fiction) Finalists 2016:

Gary Barwin : Yiddish for Pirates
Anosh Irani : The Parcel
Kerry Lee Powell : Willem de Kooning's Paintbrush
Madeleine Thien : Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Katherena Vermette : The Break

 *Won by Thien; not my favourite, but not really a surprise.
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