When he puts on a record of Bach’s Goldberg Variations performed by the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, Thien writes, “The music went on… now quick and light, quarter notes blurring like a flash of wings, a tapering branch.” Sparrow’s father, Ba Lute, listens at night to forbidden music. Her sentences describing music spin and twirl and sound almost comes out of the pages. I usually am disappointed by a writer’s efforts to turn the sound of music into words but Thien is an exception. Others are sent to prison camps in the north or take their own lives after brutal harassment by young communist comrades. In 1966, after all 500 pianos at the Shanghai Conservatory were destroyed, the character Sparrow, a brilliant composer, must take work at a factory that makes radios. The main characters are several generations of musicians who suffer during the Cultural Revolution when they are convicted as Rightists because they perform European music on western-style instruments. Thien’s rich storytelling pulled me right in to twentieth century China and the incredible upheavals there. But the book is surprisingly easy to read. Thien writes, “In those days, your village might change hands every few weeks, one day to the Communists, the next to the Nationalists, the next to the Japanese.”ĭo Not Say We Have Nothing is over 450 pages long with a complicated plot that never progresses in a straight line. First we meet characters from forty years earlier who are trying to survive the bloody Chinese civil war of the 1940’s. Thien’s ambitious novel begins in Vancouver in 1989, the year of the Tainanmen Square massacre, but readers turn hundreds of pages before that event becomes central to the story.

Cover detail: 'Do Not Say We Have Nothing'

Do not say we have nothing