Discussion for Do Not Say We Have Nothing

[Diane , Armchair Tour Guide]

Start discussion here for Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien.

[Diane , Armchair Tour Guide]

About the Book (from LitLovers)

Master storyteller Madeleine Thien takes us inside an extended family in China, showing us the lives of two successive generations—those who lived through Mao’s Cultural Revolution and their children, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square.

At the center of this epic story are two young women, Marie and Ai-Ming. Through their relationship Marie strives to piece together the tale of her fractured family in present-day Vancouver, seeking answers in the fragile layers of their collective story.

Her quest will unveil how Kai, her enigmatic father, a talented pianist, and Ai-Ming’s father, the shy and brilliant composer, Sparrow, along with the violin prodigy Zhuli were forced to reimagine their artistic and private selves during China’s political campaigns and how their fates reverberate through the years with lasting consequences.

With maturity and sophistication, humor and beauty, Thien has crafted a novel that is at once intimate and grandly political, rooted in the details of life inside China yet transcendent in its universality. (From the publisher.)


About the Author

Madeleine Thien is a Canadian short story writer and novelist. Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, to a Malaysian Chinese father and a Hong Kong Chinese mother, she studied contemporary dance at Simon Fraser University and literature at the University of British Columbia.

Thien's first book, Simple Recipes (2002), is a collection of short stories, of which Alice Monroe said, "I am astonished by the clarity and ease of the writing, and a kind of emotional purity."

Thien's first novel, Certainty (2007), has been translated into 16 languages. Her second novel, Dogs at the Perimeter (2012), about the aftermath of the Cambodian genocide, has been translated into 9 languages.

In 2008, Thien was invited to participate in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, as well as its 2010 State Department-funded study tour of the U.S. The tour involved eight international writers who were asked to explore the unresolved legacies of American history. Thien's essay, "The Grand Tour: In the Shadow of James Baldwin," concludes the 2015 program's essay collection, Fall and Rise, American Style: Eight International Writers Between Gettysburg and the Gulf. The study tour was also the subject of filmmaker Sahar Sarshar's documentary, Writing in Motion: A Nation Divided.

From 2010 to 2015, Thien was part of City University of Hong Kong's International Faculty in the MFA Program for Creative Writing. After Hong Kong's crackdown on freedom of speech, she wrote a controversial essay about the writing program's abrupt closure for the UK's Guardian newspaper.

In 2013, Thien became the Simon Fraser University Writer-in-Residence.

Thien's 2016 novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, won the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction and the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize. It was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In advance of its U.S. publication, it was longlisted (fiction list) for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence.

Thien is the common-law partner of novelist Rawi Hage.

[Diane , Armchair Tour Guide]

Discussion Questions (from the publisher)

1. Why do you think the author chose this particular structure of alternating past and present, or of stories opening through doorways into other stories? What does the counterpoint structure imply about time’s relationships with music and history?

2. Ai-Ming explains to Marie that during the protests in Tiananmen Square, Ai-Ming had “understood, for the first time, what it felt like to look at her country through her own eyes and her own history, to come awake alongside millions of others.” Why wasn’t this possible before?

3. Explore the ideas of patriotism, complicity, and subversion in Do Not Say We Have Nothing. How do the characters relate to the Communist political regime? In what ways do they voice their fealty to the state, through sound or silence, and in what ways do they subvert the regime?

4. The characters in the novel have deep relationships to music. How does their appreciation of music relate to idealism and revolution? How does the state’s treatment of music change throughout the novel?

5. Tiananmen Square is referred to as the “zero point.” What does this mean? How does the mathematical concept of zero, an idea on which other numbers depend, manifest itself in the general novel? (292, 297, 463) Marie observes that “dividing by zero equals infinity” and that “a small thing never entirely disappears.” Is silence a form of nothingness or does it contain contradictory possibilities?

6. At the conservatory, Sparrow views Zhuli’s and Kai’s ambitions with concern. Why? How is their conception of freedom and will different from his?

7. How would you characterize the relationships between Sparrow, Kai, and Zhuli? Do you think Zhuli was in love with Kai? How did Sparrow and Kai think of each other? How might their relationships have evolved if they’d been allowed other kinds of freedom?

8. Characters like Ba Lute and the president of the conservatory, He Luting, go from being hailed as Communist heroes and influential figures to being denounced as traitors. What forces are really at play? How do the Maoist slogans and practices, and ideas of goodness and violence, contradict themselves in the story?

9. Comrade Glass Eye tells Sparrow, “I wonder which story [Wen the Dreamer] wanted you to hear. You know how it is: pull one thread, and the whole curtain unravels.” How is this remark true for the stories in the novel? What stories still remain untold? What questions are left unanswered?

10. Jiang Kai suggests that the people from his village are part of a pattern that recurs, generation after generation. How does this cyclical nature manifest itself in the novel and in the generations, revolutions, and desires it explores? How might this be related to the structure of Bach and the recurring motifs of the Goldberg Variations?

11. Examine the methods of storytelling. What is the purpose and significance of the Book of Records for the characters in Do Not Say We Have Nothing? How does story, in its different forms of music, mathematics, language, and history, relate to the idea of a story that remains unfinished, partial, fragmented, unheard, or ongoing?

12. What do you think happens to Ai-Ming? Does Marie think she will ever find her? What do you think?