Do not say we have nothing

I don't remember a great deal about the Tianamen Square protests in 1989. 1989 is a bit of a hazy year altogether for me, though it was to be an important year in my life. I'd graduated from university in the previous summer, and decided to take a year out while I decided what I was going to do with my future. I'd been offered a place at a conservatoire to do a performance course that year, but turned it down, not liking the college (ironically my audition was probably the best one of my life). As it turned out, it was just as well that I turned it down as just before the New Year of 1989 my mother was taken seriously ill. She spent the next 6 months in and out of hospital with a series of misdiagnoses, before she was finally given a diagnosis of terminal colon cancer just a fortnight before she died. In the meantime I'd managed to get myself on a teacher training course; so Mum died, and within a few days of her funeral Dad had packed me off to Cambridge where I've lived or worked ever since.

Looking back on it now it was an oddly disjointed year, filled with horrible things; a turning point in my life, but with very few memories except for some particularly dreadful ones (there is a point to this, as you'll see in the next review). There is a link here though to Madeleine Thien's brilliant Booker 2016 long-listed novel Do not say we have nothing. Mainly because of the events in my own life, what was happening in Tianamen Square that April-June was largely overshadowed; but there are two things that I remember. I remember the young man standing in front of the tank and gracefully moving with it. I remember the shock of hearing the bloody and confused ending of the demonstrations; but what I most remember is music. For the first time I can clearly remember hearing the Internationale being sung with great emotion and conviction. The students had taken the old left-wing anthem, the anthem of the Communist parties of the Soviet Union and China, and re-purposed it. It was now their anthem, the anthem of a new society.

This memory proved to be particularly important when reading Madeleine Thien's stunning novel Do not say we have nothing (which is a translation of a line from the Chinese version of the Internationale). Do not say tells the story of a Chinese family bound together by their love for music, but who will also lead very different lives as a result of the Cultural Revolution, a horribly dark moment in Chinese history that began in 1966.

Big Mother Knife and her sister, Swirl, are folk musicians, who survive the Second World War thanks to their musical abilities. Sparrow, Big Mother Knife's eldest child, is a quiet boy, who is full of music - he will become a hugely talented composer, who cannot imagine a world without music. Swirl, who loses her husband and child to the war, meets Wen the dreamer, who has written (or possibly just copied) a wonderful novel which is partly based on the twentieth century history of China, but dares to be different, even prophetic. When Swirl and Wen fall foul of Chinese politics and are exiled, their daughter Zhuli, moves to Shanghai to the safety of her aunt, where she too becomes a musician, a violinist. In Shanghai she meets Jiang Kai - if Sparrow is quiet but full of music, Kai is the extrovert performer who is going to make a name for himself. Their lives are constrained by the politics of their country, but in music all find freedom and a place for themselves. But then the Cultural Revolution arrives, and all are forced to make choices, even if the choice is only that there can be no choice but to be faithful to oneself. Many years later Kai, who has always loved Sparrow, tries to reconcile himself to his own actions during that period, but it is 1989, and Sparrow and his family will be drawn back into the struggle for change in China.

I thought this book was quite wonderful. It's not without problems though. The narrative moves swiftly from the 1940's to the 1980's and '90's, up to contemporary times, and back again, swooping through the 1960's, and even into other fictions such as the story of Da-Wei and May Fourth as dreamed up by Wen the Dreamer. It was sometimes rather confusing. The writing around the outer boundary of the narrative, that of the daughters of Sparrow and Kai felt not so assured to me. It was a necessary layer to enable the story to be told, but it almost felt like one layer too many.

I was a little confused too by the relationship between Sparrow and Kai, and the age of Zhuli. In the case of the relationship it was implied that it was a gay relationship, but yet, I also felt that the writer veered away from this slightly as though she wanted the relationship to be an important part of the story, but yet was reluctant to fully commit to it. Similarly with Zhuli, it was important in many ways that she should be a young girl (just 14), and yet, there were moments, when I felt this was forgotten, and the writing was as though it was an older woman.

It may have been subtly flawed, but despite this I loved this novel. The power of the writing was awesome. I will never ever forget Thien's description of the horrors that were committed under the Cultural Revolution. The choices that people were compelled to make, the lives that were ruined, the guilt that endured, the hideousness of the Struggle sessions, and occasionally the sheer heroism of the artists and musicians who suffered under the changes. Her description of Zhuli's struggle and acknowledgement that she couldn't live without music was undoubtedly one of the most moving pieces of writing I have ever read.

I was also awe-inspired by the bravery of many real-life characters who were mentioned as part of the novel, most notably He Luting, a composer and director at the time of the Cultural Revolution of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. His bravery in standing up to bullying during a public mocking-session on Chinese TV was incredible. It's more than worthy that the current Shanghai concert hall bears his name, and that his music has been quite rightly re-instated to a place of pride in China.



Do not say we have nothing is an amazing novel. It's one of those books that recalls history better than history books placing the reader at the centre of events. A stunning emotional read that explains why music matters.