Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Individual Identity Under Communism
Class and Communism
Freedom of Expression vs. Propaganda
Political Oppression, Isolation, and Divided Communities
Storytelling, Family Connection, and History
Summary
Analysis
Li-ling’s father, Jiang Kai, left her family twice in the span of a single year. The first time, he left Li-ling’s mother; the second time, he took his own life. Li-ling was 10 years old when her father died, and now, as an adult, she has few memories of her father. She does recall that in life, her father had a “handsome, ageless face,” and that although he was kind, he had an air of sadness about him. It was only after her father’s death that Li-ling discovered he was a renowned pianist in China— in light of that, she remembers how her father was always tapping his fingers on the countertop or tickling her and her mother.
Thien begins the story with a story of loss, abandonment, and family separation. This sets readers up to explore extensively the theme of family’s isolation from one another throughout the novel. Additionally, the fact that Li-ling knew so little about her father when he was alive sets readers up for a story in which uncovering family histories and learning more about family members’ identities becomes a central theme.
Themes
When Li-ling was in her twenties, she lost her mother too. The grief Li-ling experienced propelled her to focus only on her work. Now, as a mathematician, she often spends the entire day buried in the world of numbers, which helps her to keep her feelings of grief and loneliness at bay. Still, sometimes Li-ling is overcome by emotion when something reminds her of either parent: she recalls that in 2010, she was walking through Vancouver’s Chinatown when she passed a music store playing Bach’s Sonata for Piano and Violin No. 4. Though Li-ling’s pianist father had been dead for 20 years at that point, the memories the music inspired in her were so overwhelming that she became dizzy.
Here, the fact that Li-ling is unable to distract herself from her emotional suffering through work demonstrates the importance of understanding family connection in the novel. Although she tries to forget everything that has happened, the grief she feels around having been separated from both of her parents remains powerful even after years of trying to overcome it. Additionally, the fact that music is what inspires such a strong emotional response in Li-ling highlights music’s importance and its power as a form of creative, emotional expression.
Themes
Back in 1989, right after Li-ling’s father commits suicide, the political situation in his home country, China, is tense. Li-ling’s mother obsessively watches CNN, which broadcasts news about the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. On June 4th, Li-ling’s father has already left her mother. It is the day after the massacre at Tiananmen Square, and Li-ling’s mother weeps uncontrollably. In October, two police officers arrive at the family’s door in Canada to inform them that Kai has died by suicide. At this point, “quiet (qù) be[comes] another person living inside [their house]. It [sleeps] in [her] father’s shirts, trousers and shoes, it guard[s] his Beethoven.”
In this moment, Thien highlights Li-ling and her mother’s isolation. As migrants in Canada, they are not connected to community, Kai’s absence isolates them completely. Thien skillfully links Li-ling’s mother’s grief about Tiananmen Square with the moment in which she learns that she has lost her husband. This invites readers to consider that the political situation in China may be why Li-ling’s family migrated in the first place, thus becoming a factor in their isolation.
Themes
Following Li-ling’s father’s death, her mother goes about collecting the bits and pieces leftover from his life. Every day, it seems, she finds more and more paper—musical scores, letters written but unsent, and many notebooks. Slowly, the collection of papers grows so large that the entire dining room table is covered with archives from Kai’s life. In March 1990, Li-ling’s mother shows her one of the longest documents her father left over: The Book of Records. She thinks it’s a novel but she isn’t certain; the book is about an adventurer named Da-wei who takes a journey to America, and another named May Fourth who gets lost in the Gobi Desert. Li-ling is curious to know the story, but her mother sends her off to bed instead of explaining further.
In this passage, Thien describes how Kai’s documents slowly take over the dining table in the family’s house. The dining table is a central meeting place in family life, and the fact that it is covered in documents from a dead family member’s files demonstrates how important it is for Li-ling and her mother to understand Kai’s history, even though he is gone. The documents serve to tell the story, in bits and fragments, of Kai’s life. The documents’ placement in the middle of the house highlights the importance of preserving family stories and connections, even after death.
Themes
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In bed, Li-ling thinks of her father and of the life he has left Li-ling and her mother to lead in Canada. Although Li-ling is often sad at home, she thinks to herself that she is very different in her fifth grade class: where she is a successful, well-liked student. She also considers that “in poorer countries, people like Ma and [her] would not be so lonely.”
Here, Thien highlights the ways in which migration has isolated Li-ling and her mother from being able to participate in loving community. Her reference to “poorer countries” plays with the assumption that these are places migrants would likely want to escape from in order to live in more developed countries, like Canada. However, Li-ling herself is descended from a “poorer country” and yet the isolation she experiences as a migrant, in her 10-year-old mind, outweighs the potential challenges of living in a less wealthy nation.
Themes
Finally, Li-ling wonders to herself her father didn’t care enough about her to stay alive. When she wakes up in the middle of the night, her mother is sitting on her bed, wiping the tears off her face—Li-ling never cries while she’s awake, only while she’s asleep.
Here, Thien again draws readers’ attention to Li-ling’s grief at having lost her father. The fact that she is only able to cry when she is asleep suggests that the grief she feels about this loss is too heavy for her to process while she is awake, which further emphasizes the power of her feelings of loss, abandonment, and sorrow.
Themes
One day in early December, Li-ling’s mother receives a 30-page letter from Shanghai. As she reads with the aid of a dictionary (Li-ling’s mother was educated in traditional Cantonese calligraphy, while the new Chinese government mandates that everyone use the simplified script), she begins to cry. The letter is from a woman who is “like family”—the author’s husband was Li-ling’s father’s teacher at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, but the two lost touch “during the difficult years.” In fact, Li-ling was named after the author of the letter, who has written to say that her daughter, Ai-Ming, has arrived in Toronto but she can’t use her passport. Ai-Ming has nowhere to go and she needs Li-ling’s mother’s help. Ai-ming, according to the letter, was involved in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, and she had to flee the country. Li-ling’s mother agrees to help Ai-Ming and she sends her money for a bus ticket to Vancouver.
In this moment, Thien tells a story that highlights how China’s political climate isolated communities from one another, and yet how, in spite of this environment, people were able to forge meaningful, lasting bonds anyway. The fact that Li-ling’s father lost touch with a close friend during “difficult years” speaks to the severity with which the Chinese government acted in ways that harmed its citizens, creating policies that isolated people from one another. However, the fact that years later, the same friend’s wife would feel comfortable reaching out to Kai’s wife goes to show the strength of the bond that originally existed between the two men. This, in turn, demonstrates community resilience in the face of political movements that seek to separate people from one another.
Themes
When Ai-Ming arrives, Li-ling observes that she has never met a “real” Chinese girl before—one from the mainland. Li-ling’s mother instructs Li-ling to take Ai-Ming’s coat, and Li-ling realizes that she and her mother’s “lives [have] contracted to such a degree that [she cannot] remember the last time a stranger [has] entered [their] home.” In preparation for the visit, Li-ling’s mother has hidden all of the documents her husband left behind under the table.
Ai-ming is presented as an antidote to Li-ling and her mother’s suffering and isolation. Indeed, not only is she another person entering the home, she is a person from China who has come to stay with them. In other words, not only does she fulfill their basic need for human connection, but she also fulfills their need to be connected to their country, and, by extension, their cultural community and ancestry.
Themes
At dinner that night, Ai-ming shares her story with her hosts. As she speaks about leaving China, her hands shake. Sometimes she still dreams that none of this has happened, that she is still in China able to take care of her struggling mother. Ai-ming admits that she doesn’t even have a passport—her only hope is to try to get into the United States, where the government has offered amnesty for Chinese students after the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Ai-ming’s story of having been persecuted as a student during the Tiananmen Square massacre highlights how the Chinese government persecuted people for expressing individual opinions. At a young age, Ai-ming is already a political refugee due to her country’s policies of repressing freedom of speech. Her desperation—evidenced by the fact that she left even without a passport—implies that the extent of the government’s political oppression is extreme.
Themes
It isn’t long before Ai-ming discovers the boxes of paper under the dining table and she becomes curious about them. Li-ling observes that Ai-ming, raised in China, can read every character of Li-ling’s father’s diary—while Li-ling can hardly make out anything. One day, after reading some of Li-ling’s father’s journal, Ai-ming tells Li-ling that The Book of Records is written in Ai-ming’s father, Sparrow’s, handwriting. Suddenly, Ai-Ming is overcome with emotion about the loss of her father, who she says was a talented musician who “gave up his talent so that he could protect [her].” Even though her father was a good and honest person, Ai-ming says that “they killed him as if he were an animal.” If her father were alive, she says, she wouldn’t be so alone. She breaks down crying, and Li-ling, also overwhelmed, leaves the room.
In this moment, Ai-ming again serves as someone who can link Li-ling to her ancestral Chinese culture and, consequently, her own heritage. While Li-ling herself would never be able to understand the documents her father left behind, Ai-ming can, and therefore serves as the character who initiates Li-ling into the act of uncovering family stories and preserving them. Additionally, Ai-ming’s mention that Sparrow had to give up his music—an integral part of his identity—to protect her highlights the ways in which expression of individual identity was impossible at the time Ai-ming was raised.
Themes
Soon after, Ai-ming comes to Li-ling’s room and apologizes for having read her father’s journal. She tries to tell Li-ling about how Li-ling’s father, Jiang Kai, once came to visit Ai-ming and her family in their village. But Li-ling doesn’t want to talk about her father at all—in fact, she declares that she never wants to hear his name again. Instead, she pulls out The Book of Records and she asks Ai-ming to read it to her. Ai-ming doesn’t want to, but Li-ling persists. Ai-ming tells Li-ling that she reminds her of herself when Ai-ling used to badger her grandmother, Big Mother Knife, into doing things she didn’t want to do.
This moment in the story is highly ironic. By burying herself in mathematics, the adult Li-ling replicates denial that her younger self expresses surrounding understanding family history and working through the grief that is part of that process. However, Li-ling tries to distract herself by asking Ai-ming to read The Book of Records to her—little does she know that The Book of Records will prove to be nothing other than a record of her family’s history, connecting her to the very stories that she is trying to avoid. In this moment, then, Thien emphasizes that dealing with family history is not only important, but possibly inevitable—in spite of all of Li-ling’s efforts to avoid it, she ends up diving straight into family stories.
Themes
Big Mother Knife, Ai-ming says, is a ferocious character—so strong and aggressive that even when she was a child, everyone would treat her very seriously. Big Mother Knife and her sister, Swirl, used to perform as singers and storytellers in their local region, traveling from village to village. Swirl and Big Mother Knife came of age in a time of great instability—“a time of chaos, of bombs and floods, when love songs streamed from the radios and wept down the streets.” At that time, “music sustained weddings, births, rituals, work, marching, boredom, confrontation and death; music and stories, even in times like these, were a refuge, a passport, everywhere.”
Here, Thien introduces storytelling as an important tool not only for preserving family history, as it has been until now, but also as a tool for resilience under politically challenging circumstances. Music appears, through Big Mother Knife and Swirl’s work as performers, as an antidote to the violence, grief, and oppression that the Chinese people were suffering under their government. Through casting music in this framework, Thien highlights the importance of creative expression not just for individual fulfillment, but for the wellness of entire communities.
Themes
Indeed, during those times, one’s village could be ruled one day by Nationalists and the next day by Communists. Big Mother Knife gives birth during those years to a baby boy, Sparrow. She raises Sparrow on the road as a traveling musician, and by the time Sparrow is five he is performing heartbreaking love songs to audiences who can’t resist. One day on the road, they pass a group of blind musicians, led by a young girl who could see but must have been eight or nine years old. Shocked, Sparrow asks his mother how the group could avoid the warplanes when they come. His mother tells him that it’s likely these blind musicians won’t survive long. Still, this group is one of the only memories Sparrow retains of the war when he is older.
Here, Thien juxtaposes music with political ideology. She casts political ideologies as relatively inconsistent and short-lived—the villages are constantly changing hands between supporters of different parties, for instance. On the other hand, she casts music as resilient through the image of the musicians who, all blind, manage to survive a great part even though the only person leading them is a child. Not only do the musicians manage to survive the war, they also manage to survive in Sparrow’s memory, which itself is surprising, as one might imagine that memories of violence and suffering would take precedence over music in a child’s recollection of wartime. Thien’s choice to privilege music’s survival in fact and in memory underscores its power as an art form.
Themes
As all across China death and destruction plague millions, Big Mother Knife drills into Sparrow the importance of music. In spite of all of the hardship, she trusts that as long as she and her son give people music, they won’t be abandoned. “Without the musician, all life would be loneliness,” she tells her young son. And, with everything Sparrow has seen in the war, even at a young age, he knows well what loneliness is.
In this moment, Thien gives further attention to music and its importance. Big Mother Knife depicts music as an antidote to loneliness, which suggests that people need to feel connected to art or creative expression in order to feel whole. This again drives home the importance of creative expression in the novel. What’s more, the fact that Sparrow has such a deep understanding of loneliness at such a young age highlights the violence of the political situation he grew up in and the way that political violence separates destroy communities.
Themes
Soon after, Chairman Mao declares victory for the Communists in Tiananmen Square, declaring that China will be a new, Communist society. Big Mother Knife is so happy that she gives Sparrow a bone-crushing hug and enough candies to make him dizzy. The next day, Big Mother Knife takes Sparrow back on the road, but this time they’re going home to Shanghai.
Here, Mao’s victory seems significant to Big Mother Knife not because she necessarily agrees with his ideology, but because the war ending means that she can finally go home. This again emphasizes how war and political instability disconnect people from what is most important to them: family and community.
Themes
In Shanghai, Sparrow and Big Mother Knife meet Sparrow’s father, Ba Lute, who has been fighting with the Communists. Now that the Communists have won, Ba Lute—bald, tall, enormously strong, and constantly smoking cigarettes—is a revolutionary hero. Thanks to his dedication to the Party, Ba Lute and his family get to live in a large, two-story home near the Conservatory. Their neighbors are a couple who lost all three of their revolutionary sons in the war. Ba Lute directs his family to paint “Trust the Party in Everything” on the brick wall they share with the couple.
Thien’s mention that Ba Lute and his family get to live in a nice house to reward Ba Lute for his work as a revolutionary draws readers’ attention to the way the Communist government treats class. Although, ideologically, everyone should have access to equally high-quality housing under Communism, the Party’s choice to favor its allies tells a different story and suggests their own hypocrisy. Ba Lute’s insistence on writing the slogan on the wall is the first introduction of propaganda in the novel, and implies that he may want to continue benefitting from the privileges of being favored by the Party by openly demonstrating his support.
Themes
Big Mother Knife, although separated from Ba Lute for many years, isn’t as glad to be reunited with him as she expected to be. Now, in addition to being bald, Ba Lute is the “king of slogans” and insists on things like wearing “humble straw” shoes rather than regular cloth. What’s more, Big Mother Knife has been assigned an administrative position at the Shanghai No. 2 Electric Wire Company, where she has to endure political meetings twice a day. These meetings are “so endless and excruciating she want[s] to stick her fingers in the sockets.” But Sparrow, now 11, enjoys his father’s company, chiefly because Ba Lute tutors Sparrow in music theory as well as regular schoolwork. Soon, Big Mother Knife gives birth to two more sons, Da Shan and Flying Bear, who take after their father more in his political commitment than in his work as a musician.
Thien characterizes Big Mother Knife as more independent than her husband in this passage. While Ba Lute seems to be the embodiment of the Communist Party itself—speaking only in slogans to the extent that his personal idea and opinions, Thien implies, are hidden—Big Mother Knife grows bored of consistent discussion about Communist policies and beliefs. Indeed, Thien’s choice to show how annoyed Big Mother Knife becomes at her workplace’s political meetings emphasizes the extent to which Mao’s Communist Party immersed the Chinese people in propaganda.
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