The Book of Records symbolizes family bonds and storytelling as an act of resistance. In the novel, The Book of Records is a mysterious piece of fiction that Ai-ming discovers in the papers that Kai left behind for Li-ling and her mother after his suicide. Ai-ming begins to read Li-ling The Book of Records, and through the stories told in it, Li-ling learns about the stories of past generations of both her family and Ai-ming’s family. She learns that The Book of Records first appeared when Ai-ming’s great uncle, Wen the Dreamer gifts Swirl, her great aunt, chapters of it to woo her. Eventually, however, Wen the Dreamer cannot find any more chapters, and he begins to write new chapters himself. In these, he tells his own story, and, what’s more, encodes secret messages for his family that allow them to discover his whereabouts—Wen the Dreamer has been sent to a re-education camp in the Northwest of China, only to escape and live on the run from the government. When Swirl learns of this, she scatters altered chapters of The Book of Records in the region where Wen is traveling that include an encoded message that tell him where to meet her. It is through communicating via codes hidden in the novel that Swirl and Wen are eventually reunited, even though the government has, through sending them to separate re-education camps, tried to separate them. In this way, not only does The Book of Records serve to connect family members to one another, both within and across generations, but it also acts as a tool that allows the characters to resist the oppressive political regime that tries to isolate family members from one another.
The Book of Records Quotes in Do Not Say We Have Nothing
The novel leaped and turned, as if entire chapters or pages had been ripped out; but Swirl, too, had been uprooted by the war, and she had no trouble filling in the missing gaps.
Big Mother continued through the rooms. Now she found herself at the foot of the alcove steps. Putting aside her walking stick. She paused to offer a poem to the God of Literature because, after all, these mysterious notebooks belonged to his domain. She recited:
When the mind is exalted,
the body is lightened
and feels as if it could float in the wind.
This city is famed as a center of letters;
and all you writers coming here
prove that the name of a great land
is made by better things than wealth.
Not knowing what else to do, Ma and I wandered through Chinatown, carrying a photograph of Ai-ming from restaurant to restaurant. One after another, people studied the picture and shook their heads […] A poem from the Book of Records lodged in my thought, Family members wander, scattered on the road, attached to shadows / Longing for home, five landscapes merge into a single city.
Written on the inside of the lining were the names of all the men who had died, and the dates of their falling. It is, I believe, the only accurate record that exists. He told me he had a plan to do something more. He would take the names of the dead and hide them, one by one, in the Book of Records, alongside May Fourth and Da-wei. He would populate this fictional world with true names and true deeds. They would live on, as dangerous as revolutionaries but as intangible as ghosts.
In school, they recited essays about what made a good revolutionary. She began to wonder what made a good father, a good grandmother, a good enemy, a good person.
In the morning, loudspeakers cried out the same turbulent song: “The Esteemed and Great Leader of our Party, our army and the People, Comrade Mao Zedong, leader of the international proletariat, has died…” Big Mother walked the shrouded streets. […] She thought of her sister and Wen, of her lost boys and Ba Lute, the unwritten music, the desperate lives, the bitter untruths they had told themselves and passed on to their children. How every day of Sparrow’s factor life was filled with humiliations. Party cadres withheld his rations, demanded self-criticisms, scorned the way he held his head, his pencil, his hands, his silence.
In the new trousers, baby blue shirt, and leather shoes that Ling had given him for the 1988 Spring Festival, her father looked taller. Or, maybe he only looked this way because, when he wore his usual clothes, the uniform of Huizhou Semiconductor Factory No. 1, Sparrow never stood up straight.
I continue to live my life, to let my parents go and seek my own freedom. I will wait for Ai-ming to find me and I continue to believe that I will find her—tomorrow, perhaps, or in a dozen years. She will reach up for a book on a shelf. […] And when she does, she will disbelieve and then a line will come back to her, words she overheard on the street long ago but has never fully forgotten. Tomorrow beings from another dawn, when we will be fast asleep. Remember what I say; not everything will pass.
The Book of Records Symbol Timeline in Do Not Say We Have Nothing
