Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien

Thien was born two months later and the diner failed, which, she says, was just as well as she was diagnosed with a life-threatening kidney condition which kept her in hospital for six months, with her parents keeping vigil at her bedside.Īfter that, “it was a very typical immigrant story in the sense that they struggled for a long time and my mum had three jobs. They emigrated to Vancouver in 1974 with two small children and a plan to open a Chinese-Canadian diner, “which would serve chop suey plus bacon and egg sandwiches”. Her parents met as students in Australia then settled in Malaysia until the region became dangerously unstable.

Her mother was a Cantonese speaker from Hong Kong while her father is Hakka, ethnically Chinese but born in a part of Malaysia that was once the British protectorate of north Borneo. Like Marie, Thien is a child of several cultures who grew up in Canada. Both men are now dead, leaving their daughters to piece together their story. It was given to her by Ai-Ming, the daughter of mysteriously connected friends of her father, who has been adopted by her mother after fleeing the repercussions of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.Īi-Ming’s arrival in Canada opens the door on 60 years of catastrophic history involving the families of two talented Chinese musicians, one of whom – Marie’s father – defected to the west, while the other stayed in China. Before this latest novel – described by Guardian reviewer Isabel Hilton as “a moving and extraordinary evocation of the 20th-century tragedy of China” – came Dogs at the Perimeter, which dealt with another great tragedy, the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s.ĭo Not Say We Have Nothing opens in 1990 in the home of Marie, who disarmingly informs us that her Chinese nickname means “charming mineral”. Though virtually unknown in the UK, the 42-year-old writer has won awards in her native Canada for a small but scorching oeuvre dealing with some of the toughest history of the modern age. The novel is just out and she is feeling “befuddled and amazed” by her appearance on the Man Booker list. Thien is on her way to speak at the Edinburgh International book festival when we meet. The games start with the title of the novel which is, Thien explains, the English transliteration of a line from the anthem of the Communist party of China, which was translated via Russian from the French socialist anthem “The Internationale”.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien