Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

“They’re all real.” But even as I said the words, I doubted and wondered, and feared that each name took up so much space, and might even be its own person, that I myself would eventually disappear.

a parent should always have failings, some place into which a child can sink her teeth, because only then can a child come to know herself.

This realization shocked him: Ai-ming was still so young, and already she had judged him.

“And yet throughout the world, past and present, for thousands of years, those whom we call good men, righteous men, have been accustomed to the sight of such things, have sat and looked and considered them to be matters of course, have not demanded justice for the victims or offered help to them. This is the most appalling, unjust, and unequal thing, the most inexplicable theory under heaven.”