One day, early in pandemic isolation I heard Madeleine Thien interviewed on the radio. I don’t remember what it was about except that it was something about the relevance of writing in the midst of difficult times. I don’t even remember what she said but I was really taken by her thoughtfulness. I recognized her latest novel having seen it on the bestseller displays at Chapters and downloaded it from the library.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing is a wonderful, complex, moving novel set mostly in China and mostly in the cultural revolution in the ’60s and during the Tiananmen Square protests. It’s hard to say quickly what it is about though because the novel covers so much ground and does not follow a linear narrative structure. It begins and ends from the point of view of a young girl who lives in Vancouver with her mother. Her father has returned to Hong Kong where he has taken his life following which a university student arrives in Vancouver illegally seeking refuge from the violence of the Tiananmen Square protests. Somehow the two girls’ families are connected and after a long telling of the relationships between various individuals and families one comes to understand what the connection is. At the end of the reading though I wanted to read it all over again doing a better job of keeping track of all of the characters. It is a complex novel. There is so much going on it – love, family, politics, language, storytelling, music. Several of the main characters are musicians and Glenn Gould figures significantly. Another is a story teller and discussions of the complexity of Chinese as a written language figure in the stories he writes. I really loved this novel and find it has haunted me since I read it.

After reading Silone’s novel about fascist Italy it was fascinating to read a novel set in Communist China through two particularly tumultuous periods. I learned a lot of more recent Chinese history in the reading and thought a lot about conversations I had with fellow grad students in the late ’80s. I read recent news stories about the 31st anniversary of the protests differently too.

The novel also made me think a lot about my family’s history with China and that got me to read my grandma’s memoir for the first time. I have no idea why I hadn’t read it before. My father’s mother published it not long after the Tiananmen Square protests and came to Hamilton where I was studying and gave a public talk about her work in China.

Grandma’s father was a very young electrical engineer who in the first decade of the 20th century traveled from England to Canton to build an electrical plant. There he met a young English missionary teacher and they married. A year later my grandmother was born. Soon after they moved to Canada because of the political instability of China. My grandmother studied first at Manitoba University and then at UBC where she earned her teaching degree. Afterwards, in the early days of the depression, there were no teaching jobs but she was offered a position teaching in a school in Canton. She and her fiancé took teaching posts and were eventually able to marry there. My uncle and father were born there but the war had broken out and once home for a visit they were unable to return to their positions. My grandparents remained on Vancouver Island, living for a time after the war on a communal farm but living for decades in the house I knew from my earliest memories. In the ’70s as the bamboo curtain began to open a little my grandmother began to take tours to China and she continued into her ’80s.

Besides all the family history I learned reading the book it was fascinating reading her thoughts on Mao and the cultural revolution and to some extent the protests in ’89. I was a teenager when grandma starting going back to China and it was the tail end of the Cultural revolution. All I ever heard from her was glowing reports of how much China had changed since the ’30s. She spoke glowingly of the health care and education that was established and how there was no more of the horrific poverty she witnessed as a young woman. Later I learned a little of the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution when so many university faculty and other educated people were denounced and forced into labour camps and sometimes killed. This figures significantly in Thien’s novel. None of that ever figured in grandma’s accounts. But reading her memoir she does talk about it and she does acknowledge some of the criticisms of Mao (although she tends to lay the blame on his successors). It was interesting to read a more critical response to what she saw after only really ever hearing positives from her. Yet it is also clear that despite whatever reservations she had about the revolution she always contrasted what she saw in modern China with the poverty and corruption she had witnessed as a young teacher.