Do Not Say We Have Nothing Study Guide

Madeleine Thein was born in British Columbia to a Hong Kong Chinese mother and a Malaysian father. Before dedicating herself to creative writing, she studied contemporary dance in college. She then went on to earn a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. She claims to have felt she was not talented enough to pursue writing as a career at a younger age. Still, in 1999 Thien won the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop’s Emerging Writers Award for her short story collection, Simple Recipes. Her debut collection treats the themes of intercultural relationships and intergenerational dynamics within families, both of which occur as themes in Do Not Say We Have Nothing. She published Certainty, her first novel, in 2006, which is about her father’s experience growing up in Japanese-occupied Malaysia. From 2010 to 2015, she taught in the Creative Writing department at City University of Hong Kong. When she left, she published an essay about Hong Kong’s restrictions on freedom of speech and the abrupt dissolution of the creative writing program. Do Not Say We Have Nothing is her most successful novel to date, and it was published in 2016 to widespread critical acclaim. Thien is partnered to the Lebanese Canadian writer Rawi Hage and teaches creative writing at Brooklyn College.

Much of Do Not Say We Have Nothing centers on exploring the effects that China’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s had on individuals and communities. Mao Zedong, the Chairman of the Communist Party of China, launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966 in order to purge what remained of capitalist values and traditional practices in Chinese culture. He encouraged young people to rebel against authority figures—not including himself—and in doing so incited China’s youth into a violent class struggle. Many youth joined Red Guard groups across the country, and in these groups they targeted alleged “rightists,” torturing, publicly humiliating, and sometimes killing them. Many more so-called rightists were sent to re-education hard labor camps, where conditions were brutal and many more died. It is estimated that tens of millions of people died during the Cultural Revolution. Officially, the Cultural Revolution ended in 1969, but the aftermath continued until 1971, when the leader of the People’s Liberation Army fled the country.

Like Do Not Say We Have Nothing, Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress tells the story of the Chinese Cultural Revolution from the perspectives of young artists. Like several characters in Thien’s novel, the protagonists of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress are sent to re-education camps during the Cultural Revolution. The main characters are two young men who are talented storytellers, who entertain fellow members of the hard labor camp by telling stories every evening. Many of their tales are influenced by Western literature, and when the official in charge of the camp finds out, he punishes them. This moment in the plot ties into a broader theme in Thien’s work: many of her characters are punished or socially excluded because they enjoy various Western artistic traditions. Both Thien and Sijie seem to argue that it is acceptable and even desirable for Chinese people to be able to integrate Western thought and aesthetic into their lives. This belief, however, goes directly against the Cultural Revolution’s policies. Another thematically similar work is By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño. Bolaño’s novella—his English-language debut—is about an author who, on his deathbed, defends the dictator Pinochet’s regime in Chile, although, as a young man, he opposed the dictatorship. The novella is obviously satirical, and through his criticism of his own narrator’s complicity with the oppressive government, Bolaño highlights the importance of art’s role as a form of political resistance and criticism. He emphasizes that artists must defend their freedom of speech rather than simply comply with the government in order to avoid censorship or punishment.  This is similar to Thien’s message: in Do Not Say We Have Nothing, the main characters resist their oppressive government by continuing to exercise freedom of speech and creating music and art. Certainty, another novel by Thien, is about a young, Asian-Canadian woman trying to trace her father’s traumatic past as a child growing up in war-torn Malaysia. Similar to Li-ling in Do Not Say We Have Nothing, Certainty’s protagonist is the child of Chinese migrants in Canada who dedicates much of her time and energy to understanding the stories of the generation that came before her. Certainty also explores themes of storytelling: the main character is a radio documentarian and tries to apply her journalistic skills to uncovering her father’s story. Finally, Thien directly references Notes from Underground in Do Not Say We Have Nothing—the plant and flower clinic where Swirl and Wen the Dreamer finally meet after years of separation is named Notes from the Underground. Thien’s use of this particular Dostoevsky novel augments the theme of isolation and loneliness. It is significant that Notes from the Underground, in Thien’s novel, serves as the location where two of the main characters end their period of isolation from one another. This strikes a contrast with the theme of Dostoevsky’s text, which charts the psychological decline of the protagonist as he becomes increasingly isolated within his own mind. Both novels highlight the dangers and the pain of living in isolation. Finally, Thien has stated in interviews that 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of her favorite novels, and its influence on Do Not Say We Have Nothing is clear. Both novels paint thorough, nuanced portraits of families by sharing the perspectives of family members across generations.