Will I love Do Not Say We Have Nothing?

This is a sweeping saga, the kind I love because it keeps me turning pages.

Against a backdrop of 20th-century China, I was drawn into the fate of a cast of captivating characters. Split into two locales and timelines—Vancouver in 1991 and China from the mid-20th century to the tragedy in1989—the novel is a jigsaw puzzle of countless bits, revealed with skill and delicacy as the pieces finally fit together.

Here is the Cultural Revolution; there Tiananmen Square and in between I was caught up in the lives so cruelly marked by history. 

Understated yet utterly devastating, Do Not Say We Have Nothing sings like a finely-tuned instrument, but the song itself is heartrending. The author employs a dual timeline, grounding us in the present even as she weaves a manifold story of the past.

Sparrow grows up listening to his mother and aunt sing. He and his niece eventually attend the Shanghai conservatory where, from one day to the next, western classical music is labelled counter-revolutionary. Sparrow gives up on his music as the political climate becomes more and more oppressive, until the events of Tiananmen Square decades later when, finally,… show more.

This novel broke my heart so many times. It did so with beautiful and subtle prose, with its astonishing depiction of tragedy and loss, and with its magical insistence that the music we make can outlive us all. But what broke my heart the most in Thien’s novel is the reminder, or perhaps the revelation, of how much art’s existence depends on an unpredictable, ever-shifting, uncaring, brutal world.

It was staggering, watching generations of a family of musicians fight through a century of political turmoil in China and not knowing if they, and the music, would survive. But I loved… show more.

Incredible. Like a great Russian novel, this book asks its readers for effort, time, and patience, but it all pays off one thousand times over. It is a story about how quiet lives come up against the sky-high pile of debris known as history, the beauty of art, and kindness amidst the wreckages and catastrophes of human politics.

I feel almost obligated to begin by noting that I found Thien’s prose absolutely gorgeous. This is both a brave novel—in its representation of the massacre of student demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in 1989—and beautifully contextualized by further timelines spanning 1960s China and 1990s Canada.

I felt at once that Thien was showing me not only a snapshot of the infamous military response to student protests in Beijing but helping me understand what this brutal event might mean to those directly affected by it. The emotional and psychological power of the storylines and their exploration of grief and joy left… show more.

I picked it up because it had Nothing in the title, but I discovered a powerful story about the Cultural Revolution in China and how that traumatic event has been remembered across generations in a diaspora.

I was drawn in by the characters, their quirks, and their tragedies. While the story is about a family of classical musicians, there are so many beautiful Nothings woven in, like the meaning of zero or how the daily experience of encountering propaganda shapes people’s lives even when it means Nothing to them personally. Do not say we have Nothing in common with them… show more.

Reading this book was like listening to beautiful music. It’s similar to Pachinko in that it covers a generational family saga, but this story has bite!

I loved how much I learned about pre-communist China in this book, but I also loved that the stories of family resonated so deeply. 

This multigenerational saga leaps across decades and continents, from the life of a Chinese-Canadian girl growing up in Vancouver in the 1990s, to the horrors of WWII and the Cultural Revolution in China, when Western classical music was banned. The role of music in the book is complex: it can be both passion and livelihood, private beauty, or blunt political instrument. When love for music can threaten someone's physical survival, a “pretty” piece of piano music is anything but: the notes “drip down to the parlour, seeping like rainwater over the persimmons on the table, the winter coats of her… show more.