Madeleine Thien: Imagine if expressing a thought meant life or death

Madeleine Thien's third novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, comes alive with one of the most striking opening lines you'll come across: "In a single year, my father left us twice. The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life."

From this dramatic entrance, the story evolves into a complex and intimate history of China in the years between Chairman Mao's declaration of the People's Republic in 1949 and the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989.

It is told first from the viewpoint of Marie, a Vancouver-born 10-year-old whose Chinese father has recently died, before expanding to cover the tragic tale of her family and their compatriots. It’s a story that touches on many of the major flashpoints in China’s communist upheaval, but Thien makes it a deeply personal story, too.

“My hope was that the reader would become so immersed with the lives of these characters they would take them as their own family,” she says, warming her hands on a small cup of green tea in the bar of a Dublin hotel. “Maybe that’s why it starts with the language, with breaking down, from the very beginning, how the ideograms work, how they’re constructed. It sets into play right away different conceptual ways of thinking, different kinds of frameworks, which the reader is actually going to have to start to move across – to live in the thinking of these characters as opposed to projecting on to them.”

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These different ways of thinking are central to the book’s plot and drama. The clashes between what Thien calls the “revolutionary language” of slogans and ideology and the personal, private language of the people caught up in that revolution, are what give the book its emotional heart and its political depth. Thien asks us to try to understand what each language, each register, is able to express.

“The revolutionary languages, all the ones that we have, are all attempts to make us question the other things we took for granted pre-revolution,” she says. “They’re ground-breaking in their own way and they also point to whole other ways of thinking that were not available to us before. But everything quickly becomes regimented. What could have reshaped our thinking quickly becomes a conformity.”

Some of the book’s most poignant moments, particularly when it comes to the 1989 demonstrations, come when the language of the revolution no longer fits with the desires of those who are forced to use it, a situation Thien says results in “a kind of idealism and a kind of cynicism”.

No villains

Cynicism is something Thien works hard to avoid. It wouldn't be right to say the characters in Do Not Say We Have Nothing are heroes exactly, but few are out-and-out villains either. They are complex products of their circumstances, changing – sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically – with the flood of years. The novel is generous enough to reserve judgment on their actions, allowing readers to make up their own minds about right and wrong.

“I think in writing, in spending so much time in this world, you also realise that it’s difficult to make a judgment on people because the pressures, the psychological pressures, are so intense,” says Thien. “Even for those of us who live in societies which seem to have very little censorship, it’s easy to see how people would start to self-censor.

You know the science thing about how you can never measure the coastline because you just keep finding more? That's what we're doing, I think

“When it comes to things that there’s a real consensus on, or at least displayed consensus: most people won’t put in jeopardy their livelihood or their friendships to express a thought. Then imagine if the consequences are life and death?”

For Thien, the only response to such censorship – imposed or otherwise – is to “keep making things that can’t be pinned down”. For her, there is some obligation to always go deeper, to keep things complex, to refuse to settle.

“You just keep opening things up,” she says. “You know the science thing about the coastline, how you can never measure the coastline because you just keep finding more? That’s what we’re doing, I think.”

It's a strategy that pays off in Do Not Say We Have Nothing, a book that rejects the claims of totalitarian systems of all kinds. For Thien, no system can be comprehensive – societies are too various, too unpredictable, to ever be fully circumscribed by any grand map or plan.

“Fact and fiction can be so powerful in literature because there are so many positions that are now in play, in collision,” she says. “It’s that idea that it’s only in these multiple ways of looking at it that we will get to any kind of truth. There’s no way that the one angle will lead that way. You need the multiple, you need the polyphony of it.”

The musical metaphor is apt. Music is central to Do Not Say We Have Nothing, functioning as a mode of expression that lies outside the certainties of everyday language. For the central characters of Sparrow, Zhuli and Kai, music has a subversive and romantic role. From the mysterious act of composition to the treasured objects of records and cassettes, music is a whole other way of being and communicating.

“I don’t know if it transcends words or it simply expresses something else that we don’t express in words,” Thien says. “It is its own language, it has its own contradictions and ideologies and all the other things, it’s all there too. It also allows for all the things they cannot express in day-to-day life, in language, in the social interactions between people. The music becomes a repository.”

Courageous choices

The question of how things are remembered and shared is pivotal to the world of Thien's novel. What happens when a personal memory is different from what the history books say? In Do Not Say We Have Nothing, the personal stories of the people are inscribed and shared through music and stories, passed down piecemeal for generations. Often it is these very intimate records that provoke the moments of greatest bravery and drive the characters into conflict. It's a testament to the power of art – of reading, writing, playing, listening – to inspire us towards making more courageous choices.

I don't think it's pure chance that you would choose one fork or another. It's what you think you know about the world that makes you choose one

“I sometimes wonder if one of the things that keeps us writing or imagining these things is that you’re trying to accrue more experience than time allows,” says Thien. “You’re living through another 80 years, in multiple ways, so that your instinct for living in the present will be more in line with your principles. And something else, even more than principles. That you will know – that you will recognise, that you may instinctively respond to – that fork in the road in a particular way rather than another. Because you’ve been thinking about these things for so long. I don’t think it’s pure chance that you would choose one fork or another. It’s what you think you know about the world that makes you choose one.”

For Thien, characters are not figures on a chessboard, and it is not her role to judge them. Do Not Say We Have Nothing gives her the freedom to put into play so many of the different voices, the different desires and drives, of a country and a culture caught in violent, dramatic flux. Thien recalls a quote from Japanese film-maker Yasujiro Ozu: "Plot uses people, and to use people is to misuse them." In the space of the novel, she can let her characters be themselves, without compromise.

“It seems completely impossible that you could withhold judgment and yet not compromise. That would be maybe what we aspire to, but can never quite reach. But that’s where I’ve been trying to go. I think the books are hugely political, but they’re aiming for exactly that – withholding judgment, without compromise.”