Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeline Thien is a portrait of China before, during, and after the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. As China transitions to a fully communist government, the country becomes ridden with political violence, which directly or indirectly causes many of the characters to become separated from their families or communities. Through demonstrating the various ways in which China’s government isolates families from one another and divides communities, Thien highlights isolation as one of the lesser-known evils of authoritarian government.
The novel begins with Li-Ling’s narration of the suicide of her father, Jiang Kai. She describes her feelings of loneliness and abandonment now that her father is gone and she and her mother are left to fend for themselves in Canada, a country far from their home in China. As Li-Ling contemplates her feelings of isolation after her father’s death, she thinks to herself that in “poorer countries,” she and her mother wouldn’t be so lonely. “In fact,” she thinks, “a way to punish someone might be to remove them from their circle of family and friends, isolate them in a cold country, and shatter them with loneliness.” Here, Thien introduces readers to the idea that migration—and therefore, isolation—is a consequence of authoritarian governments. While Li-Ling does not know this, her parents fled China because they found that living under an authoritarian regime restricted their freedom to an extent they were not comfortable with. In this way, the loneliness she experiences as a migrant in Canada is, indirectly, a punishment for her parents’ refusal to accept living under the conditions the Chinese government mandated. This is the first moment that Thien introduces loneliness as a consequence of a politically oppressive society.
Indeed, Li-Ling’s loneliness is caused by China’s oppressive government in more than one way. Her father, Jiang Kai, commits suicide because he has become severely depressed over the actions he took to survive in China. As a member of the Red Guard, he tortured and berated his friend at the Conservatory, Zhuli, which likely contributed to her suicide. Later, perhaps to assuage his own guilt, he invites Zhuli’s cousin, Sparrow, to meet him in Hong Kong so the two can discuss the possibility of Kai’s sponsoring Sparrow to move to Canada. However, Sparrow is murdered by the Chinese army before they are able to meet, and Kai blames himself for this—it is possible that by having papers to go to Hong Kong, Sparrow was more suspicious to the government. All of this guilt leads Kai to commit suicide, abandoning his daughter and wife to isolation in a foreign country. Thien is intentional in discussing the many ways in which China’s political oppression created situations that caused Kai depression. Thus his suicide—and, consequently, the isolation his family experiences—is an indirect consequence of political oppression.
While Jiang Kai’s suicide represents a more indirect way that China’s political oppression causes citizens to feel isolation, Sparrow’s family’s experience with the Red Guard exemplifies a more direct way that political oppression divides communities and therefore isolates people. As the Red Guard becomes increasingly violent and active in Shanghai, Sparrow’s two younger brothers, Da Shan and Flying Bear, join the violent movement—even though the Red Guards are persecuting Zhuli, their cousin, and Ba Lute, their father. After Zhuli commits suicide, Flying Bear says she must have been guilty, because “only the guilty kill themselves,” and he “vow[s] never to come home again.” Here, the fact that Flying Bear would turn on his own cousin—with whom he was raised—demonstrates the extent to which the Red Guard’s propaganda and fearmongering is insidious. The Red Guard is powerful enough to separate family members from one another emotionally, even when they’re still together physically. What’s more, the ability to separate family members from one another only makes the Red Guard more powerful: since people are willing to turn in members of their own families, the Red Guard is truly able to persecute all who might be against the government. In this way, isolation and divided communities are not only a consequence of political oppression; the division of communities is, rather, a tool that allows political oppression under Mao to continue and grow stronger.
Through her depiction of various characters’ experiences with isolation and divided community, Thien demonstrates how family separation and isolation from one’s community is, at best, one of the most painful consequences of authoritarian regimes and, at worst, one of the most effective tools to allow authoritarianism to continue.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Political Oppression, Isolation, and Divided Communities ThemeTracker
Political Oppression, Isolation, and Divided Communities Quotes in Do Not Say We Have Nothing
[…] in poorer countries, people like Ma and me would not be so lonely. On television, poor countries were crowded places, overloaded elevators trying to rise to the sky. People slept six to a bed, a dozen to a room […] In fact, the way to punish someone might be to remove them from their circle of family and friends, isolate them in a cold country, and shatter them with loneliness.
My father had once said that music was full of silences. He had left nothing for me, no letter, no message. Not a word.
Remember what I say: music is the great love of the People. If we sing a beautiful song, the People will never abandon us. Without the musician, all life would be loneliness.
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.
Wen’s nose began to bleed. The man slapped him repeatedly, as if he were disciplining a child. The crowd was laughing and the laughter had a sharp, bleating sound. Two men on the stage were kicked until they no longer moved Swirl thought she must be hallucinating when the guns were drawn and Da Ge and his wife were executed.
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!”
Both Kai and her cousin had unassailable class backgrounds, they were Sons of the Soil, Sons of Revolutionary Heroes, Sons of…she laughed and drank the wine.
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.
If some people say what is in their hearts and other people say what glides easily off the tongue, how can we talk to one another? We will never find common purpose, I believe in the Party, of course, and I don’t want to lose faith. I will never lose faith…
“If the neighborhood can turn in one family of counterrevolutionaries, the whole block might be saved. People are just trying to get by.”
Young people were ransacking the distribution warehouse, even pulling out the workers. Zhuli closed her eyes. “Unmask them!” “Bourgeois rats!” “Drag them out!” The shouting had a merry, dancing quality, a French pierrot two-step. “Cleanly, quickly, cut off their heads!” From where had this crowd appeared? She heard a rupture like a pane coming down to land, but it was only this electrified, heaving mass of people. Time was slipping away. Soon it would be too late. “Just shout the slogans,” the girl beside her whispered, “Quickly! They’re watching you. Oh, why are you so afraid?”
The official news program announced that Lao She, whose plays Wen the Dreamer had loved, and who had once been celebrated as “the People’s artist,” had drowned himself. To celebrate his death, joyful marching music danced from the speakers.
“You wrote to Chairman Mao? You ridiculous oaf of a man.”
“Our own sons denounced me,” Ba Lute said, broken. “Da Shan and Flying Bear say they want nothing to do with us. But I have faith that Chairman Mao, our Great Leader, our Saving Star, will redeem us.”
It was, and would always be, the only thing he had ever said that made her weep.
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.
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.
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.
