Madeline Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing charts the stories of two families before, during, and after China’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. Jiang Kai and Sparrow are two friends who play music together in Shanghai’s conservatory, which, during the Cultural Revolution, is the target of allegedly anti-rightest attacks by the Red Guard, a violent group of young revolutionaries. The Red Guard’s interpretation of Maoist communism inspires them to target everyone who seems to prioritize their own wellbeing over the wellbeing of the collective—evidence for this attitude ranges from wearing overly decadent clothing to playing music or doing other leisure activities that do not actively contribute to the revolution. By portraying the ways in which the Red Guard’s violence shapes individuals’ choices, Thien demonstrates how political violence in Mao’s communist China threatened people’s sense of their own identities.
When the Red Guard is attacking various members of the Conservatory, torturing and even killing some of its students and teachers, Zhuli, a talented young violinist, chooses to kill herself for fear of experiencing the Guard’s violence. After being publicly beaten for being the daughter of a “convicted rightist,” Zhuli decides to commit suicide by hanging herself in the Conservatory. Just before she kills herself, she thinks about how she “want[s] to preserve the core of herself. If they took away music, if they broke her hands, who would she be?” Thien casts Zhuli’s decision to commit suicide as the only way that she can choose her freedom and preserve her identity. Music is the most important thing in Zhuli’s life, and it is clear that she feels that a life without music isn’t much of a life. Zhuli understands that by taking away her agency to do what she loves, the Red Guard has the power to destroy her identity and therefore render her life not worth living.
Sparrow, Zhuli’s cousin who survives the Cultural Revolution and is also a musician, leads a life parallel to Zhuli’s. While Zhuli chooses to commit suicide to avoid being stripped of the most important aspect of her identity, Sparrow cooperates with the government. He is removed from his job as a teacher at the Conservatory and sent to work in a factory in the countryside. During the riots at Tiananmen Square, Sparrow’s daughter, Ai-ming, is inspired to be critical of the government that forced him to give up his music. When she asks why he doesn’t begin composing again, Sparrow thinks to himself that perhaps “the weakness of the times [has] lodged inside him, slowly pulverizing all that [is] unique and his alone, simply because he [has] allowed it to do so.” Here, Sparrow seems to recognize that in giving up music, he has given up the activity that brought the most meaning into his life. The “weakness of the times” might refer to the communist belief that people don’t need to do what they love; indeed, having individual interests is a threat to the collective. Sparrow’s thought process in this moment suggests that Zhuli’s premonition when she decided to kill herself was correct—she feared that she would have to give up music, and therefore her identity, which is exactly what happened to Sparrow.
By juxtaposing the experiences of Zhuli and Sparrow, Thien suggests that, in Mao’s China, the only way to be true to your own identity was to choose death, or to risk death through resistance. Out of fear, Sparrow chose to cooperate with the government. In a way, both he and Zhuli chose survival: Zhuli chose the survival of her true identity over her literal, physical survival, while Sparrow chose physical survival while letting his true identity die. Both cases demonstrate the extent to which Mao’s China infringed upon personal choice to the extent that maintaining an individual identity became nearly impossible.
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Individual Identity Under Communism Quotes in Do Not Say We Have Nothing
The students began offering criticisms of themselves and each other, and the girl next to her, an erhu major, mocked Zhuli for favoring music in the “negative” and “pessimistic” key of E-flat minor, and continuing to play sonatas by revisionist Soviet composers, including the disgraced formalist, Prokofiev. Zhuli rebuked herself fiercely, vowed to embrace the optimism of the C and G major keys, and ended her self-criticism with, “Long live the Great Revolution to create a proletarian culture, long live the Republic, long live Chairman Mao!”
“I am ready now,” she thought, “to bring all these flowers for…I will find all the flowers, even if I must steal them from the hands of our Great Leader, I will lay them at Prokofiev’s feet.” She had given every bit of her soul to music.
She wrote directly overtop of the denunciations on the poster, so that “brother” appeared over “leader,” “vague” over “reactionary,” and “high bluffs” sat overtop “demon-exposing mirror.”
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.
“The music you used to write, Ba, was it criminal music?” He could only say, “I don’t know.” That same night, he wrote a new banner for the front door which read, May the Red Sun keep rising for ten thousand years, in calligraphy that was accomplished but empty, a fixed smile. He might as well have written Joy! on a plastic bucket.
For as long as she could remember, right and wrong had been represented by the Party through color. Truth and beauty, for instance, were hóng (red), while criminality and falsehood were hēi (black). Her mother was red, her father was black.
The architecture was intended to make a person feel insignificant, but Ai-ming felt confusingly large, there was so much room here, a child could run in any pattern, any shape, never encounter anyone or anything.
