I recently finished reading this book while I was sick. Amongst a pile of tissues and wrapped in a blanket, I found that the book was beautiful, and I regret that I could not appreciate it in more dignified manner… oh well.
Frankly, I have no idea how to describe the complex yet wonderfully captivating story without utterly failing to capture its meaningful details and risk misconstruing Thien’s novel. But it would be an even greater shame to leave the description to shallow comments like “compelling” or “riveting” or “engrossing” or “sophisticated” or “intimate” and so on, so here goes a summary of the story, since any analysis.
The novel begins through the perspective of Li-Ling, also called Marie and Ma-Li, the daughter of a widowed mother. Kai, her father, is a renowned pianist in China abandoned her after seeking his distant friend Sparrow living in Beijing at the height of the 1989 Tianamen Square Protests. In order to avoid spoiling these intense moments of the story, I will skip straight away to Sparrow’s identity.
While Sparrow, his cousin Zhuli, and Kai were all close friends who lived during Mao’s reign, these talented musicians suffered in various ways to play, compose, and critique certain music, while other forms were considered a taboo.
Sparrow’s daughter, Ai-Ming, an active protester and ambitious student moves in with Li-Ling and their mother. Where through memory, Ai-Ming retells the story of many other characters transformed by various political events.
These characters include: her grandmother, named “Big Mother Knife”, her grandfather an acclaimed war veteran named “Ba Lute”. Their two sons, and the younger brothers of Sparrow, “Big Mountain”, and “Flying Bear”. The sister of “Big Mother Knife” named “Swirl”, and her husband “Wen the Dreamer”, whose daughter is Zhuli.
While my poor explanatory skills fail to capture the story’s tender relationships strengthened through extraordinary political events, the realistic faith and emotions maintained through hardship, and the persevering quality of music and morality. I would undoubtedly recommend this novel, especially to readers who are unaware, but seek knowledge regarding the 1989 Tianamen Square protests or Chinese history in the 20th century. This novel has deeply impacted me, and I would like to finish with one of the most notable quotes in the book:
“He’d been thinking about the quality of sunshine, that is, how 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?”
Although, while I was researching the Tiananmen square, what frightened me most was the remaining injustice, censorship, and silencing of the events of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests.
According to The Guardian, “Chinese authorities have detained dozens of people as part of a ramped-up annual crackdown ahead of the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre”. The massacre ranged from hundreds to several thousand of deaths, a statistic which the government has purposely “hushed”. Furthermore, according to CNN, the Chinese government states that the 1989 protests were not “suppressed”
“This year’s pre-June 4th crackdown continues a 30-year long campaign by the Chinese government to try to erase the memory and rewrite the history of the bloody military suppression of peaceful unarmed protesters and residents of Beijing and other cities on June 3-4, 1989,” said the Chinese Human Rights Defenders.”
The effects of China’s censorship are ever more prevalent by interviewing Chinese students studying at Peking university, a key center for the Square incident, who could not recognize the famous “tank man” image, let alone know about the Tiananmen Square Protests which happened in Beijing.
However, during the interview, one of the students whispered to the student next to him “89”, revealing that the students could be deliberately hiding their knowledge of the protests, in order to avoid potential persecution.
I would like to finish by saying I had never intended to research Chinese history to this extent, and most notably the 1989 Massacre, whose anniversary is appearing this June 4th. However, Thien’s powerful novel has wielded me with serious knowledge and wisdom of the past, to cherish my freedom. I fully regret I can not express the beauty of her book succinctly within my writing, but I urge you to read this novel which can be previewed here. For I now clearly understand the meaning of the title: Do Not Say We Have Nothing.