Madeleine Thien’s fourth book, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, is the novel she has imagined writing ever since she was a teenager watching the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations unfold on a television screen in Canada. Thien tells the story of three musicians studying at Shanghai Conservatory during the time of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. She writes masterfully across generations and history, spiralling out and pirouetting in to the sound of Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’, which connects the lives of these three musicians and their families against the overarching violence of 20th century China. Do Not Say has been shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize. Thien and I spoke over Skype about the right to grieve, the importance of multiplicity, and whether a line needs to sing.
Your narrator, Marie, says, ‘No one person can tell a story this large,’ and yet I feel this is exactly what you’ve tried to do.
I didn’t set out to distil so much of 20th century Chinese history. It’s just a consequence of telling the life of one person. It’s a book that’s really in conversation with the books that are being written in China now and by the dissident writers living outside. Them plus mine together are able to tell the larger story because inside China it becomes quite allegorical, almost frenetic, some of the narrative techniques, with people like Mo Yan. It’s almost like you need the multiplicity of the aesthetic approaches and stylistic approaches to get at that larger story.
You were born in Vancouver and now live in Montreal, and you are of Chinese-Malay descent. Could you talk about whether any of those things had anything to do with you becoming a writer?
I think probably in every way but in ways that are difficult to pin down. My parents raised us in English but they speak minority dialects — Cantonese and Hakka. So when they speak English they’re very reserved, but when they speak their mother tongues they’re very boisterous and funny. I had this sense from a young age that language shaped them into different people. So in a way, writing for me became a way to explore another language. It’s almost like written English became a whole language for me where I could express entirely different things.
I want to talk about the music, which is central to the novel. What is your relationship with music?
I came to music through dance. I trained as a ballet dancer and in modern dance for a long time. When I was writing this book, my life had taken a major turn towards music. I’d finished a book that was really difficult for me, called Dogs at the Perimeter , about the Cambodian genocide, and I’d lost faith in some way in language and words, and I was quite down. I found that music was a consolation; it gave me a kind of joy that I wasn’t finding at that particular time in literature. So, music becomes this other existence for the characters in the book. It is, for the characters, what it became for me.
John Banville once said that while he loved Nabokov’s work, there was no music in it, and that for him, a line had to sing before it did anything else. Does a line have to sing for you?
Yes. For me it’s the same. I wonder if that comes from this long exposure to dance as well as because I don’t speak my parents’ mother tongues — they come to me as cadence, as sound. You grow up with language as sound as well as a form of communication, and they are that way from the beginning. It’s impossible to extricate one thing from the other. For me, language is very much about cadence and gesture. And tonal, in that I tend to pick up on tone almost before the meaning of the words.
So, a big question for a big book: you talk of history, memory, remembrance, disappearing, reclaiming, and how these things intertwine. I want to know how you negotiate these concepts. Is there a particular intent as you write?
For me, every novel begins with unresolved questions. When I started writing, I was looking at the unresolved history of the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations and massacre and as the novel grows that question takes on nuances; it has other questions wrapped inside that I only come to as I’m writing, and those questions open up the ideas that you talked about — memory, remembrance, historical amnesia, family and, in this book, the right to grieve. It seems like such a banal thing, the right to grieve, but that is a right that was taken away in China, the right to publicly mourn those who died due to the catastrophic policies of Mao.
The book also explores the idea of multiplicity — how individuals can become invisible or begin again, either as immigrants or as new people in their own country, because things are always changing.
The idea first came with my previous book, because in the Khmer language, they have this name for the soul, pralung , and the idea in Khmer culture is that people are born with multiple souls — some people with five or six, or 80, but also that these souls come and go throughout your life — you lose some, some return, some are lost forever. And in this novel, I think that idea stayed with me — that some method of surviving what they were living, some method of growing into who they were, who they wanted to become, was about letting go of some of these souls and allowing new ones to enter, and having faith. Maybe the hardest part was having faith that in the midst of these multiple selves, there is some essence that will remain.
There is a wonderful detail, of a girl listening to a Walkman, about which you write, “Private music led to private thoughts.” With the Internet now, we have access to so many private lives, what are your thoughts on that?
I think we’re living in a time when the private self feels that it’s in a very profound transition, and I don’t know, maybe because I’m a writer, I’m a private person, I’m a shy person, I put a lot of faith in the importance of creating space for private selves, you know? Private selves have thoughts that are not in line with society, that are questioning, that are willing to explore ideas that are uncomfortable, that are taboo or that don’t get articulated in the public sphere. And it’s not just articulating them, it’s developing the thought, pursuing where that thought leads and what other conceptual frameworks come into being if you pursue the thought long enough.
There’s a line in the book — “without obsession, there is no life’s work.” Is that how you feel about writing?
I do feel that way. I’m in my early 40s now and I think a lot about the stubbornness you need to keep going, the stubbornness that drives you through these books, and the stubbornness that’s part of those unresolved questions that the work is trying to untangle. And the realisation that they are all one body of work, and each book is building on the ideas that the last book has opened up. Some of those ideas have been resolved, and some of them have given rise to more difficult questions. So in the scheme of things you do feel you are writing one book over time, and that I’m halfway through that larger book.
And what is your obsession, the abiding concern that you return to again and again?
If you asked me this tomorrow I might give a slightly different answer but right now it feels like the persistence of individual lives in the face of not only catastrophic events but historical events that take away their power to set the courses of their lives. It’s those two motions — the trajectory of history and the trajectories of individual lives inside that.
Tishani Doshi is a writer and dancer. Her most recent book is The Adulterous Citizen: Poems, Stories, Essays.
