Disrupted Stories and the Remembered Past: Generational Trauma in Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel

Abstract:

Lucy Schoenrock, Agnes Scott College

Madeleine Thien’s 2016 novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, provides an expansive retelling of the story of a family separated by oceans, death, and time within Mao Tse Tung’s Communist China. This dynamic novel holds power in retelling the narrative of family and life through references to the past that transcend into the present. Thien’s novel serves to display the fortitude of culture, tradition, and life within Communist China that moves beyond the boundaries of time and place. This paper analyzes this novel and its impact in using trauma theory to make the case for this novel’s placement in the canon of literature. Further, this paper analyzes trauma theory in the context of generational trauma to evaluate how myth, silence, and generational distance can play a role in elongating trauma’s effects. Thien’s novel has a strong presence under the critical eye of literary trauma theory through its provocative and often intense language.

Introduction:

Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel written by Madeleine Thien in 2016 weaves together the histories of two families impacted by the violence of the Communist Revolution into the Massacres at Tiananmen Square. Through her character’s eyes, Thien drafts a generational story that surveys these historical events and provides a human connection to what transpired. Her character, Sparrow, describes the chaos of the early 1960s by reflecting that “Year after year, the roads cratered and collapsed, entire towns vanished, crushed into the mud, leaving behind only garbage, dogs, and the putrid, sickly sweet smell of bodies numbering in the hundreds, the thousands, the millions” (Thien 29-30). Through voices like Sparrow’s, Thien is able to provide a written image that illustrates what occurred in China during this period. The history, while embellished with prosaic language, remains true to what occurred. The

novel becomes a catalogue for the pain, beauty, and memory that culminates in a significant piece of trauma fiction.

Trauma theory is an expansive area of research that bridges between disciplines and genres, however; this paper will narrow in on three points of trauma theory in reference to the novel. First, this paper will address the conflation of trauma and myth as it is passed down from generation to generation. Secondly, I will show how silence perpetuates trauma due to the inability to properly address the event, which would allow it to be processed and mourned. Finally, the paper will discuss the concept of the “hinge generation” about the transmission of trauma from generation to generation. In sum, this paper will acknowledge Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel, as a work that shows the effects of generational trauma and make the argument that the novel itself represents an impactful piece for analysis within the canon of literature.

Trauma Theory:

In his article, The Myth of the Trauma/The Trauma of Myth: Myths as Mediators of Some Long-

Term Effects of War Trauma, Thomas Pick describes how myth is the combination of both legend and history, where fact and fiction become indistinguishable, creating a story that tells history in a digestible form (Pick 202). Pick writes that this myth becomes incorporated into a group’s identity and is unconsciously passed down to following generations through the manifestation of a collective memory (2023). This expression of memory is a defining piece of a group’s history that spreads into pride in one’s national history (Pick 203). As these memories become instituted in the community’s identity, they are easily inherited and a cycle emerges that is difficult to break. Myth and trauma merge because of how each feed into the existence of the other and the group afflicted can never truly mourn what trauma took from them. The inability to mourn renders time differently for the victim because they are in a constant state of re-living their traumas. While myth represents trauma in its, often spoken, narrative state; trauma can also be conveyed through instances of silence.

Cathy Caruth argues that trauma can be understood as the re-visiting of a moment where the “confrontation with the necessity and impossibility of grasping the threat to one’s own life” (“Violence and Time” 25). Judith Fewell expands this concept to show how these experiences require structured,

meaningful words that can properly describe the emotions of having to face a threat to one’s life. However, the chaotic, traumatized mind cannot always discover these words and are left silent (83-4). Without processing the experience, the victim is unable to develop a language with which to speak about their experiences in a healing fashion (Pederson 334). A victim can forget the experience immediately after it occurs and not remember the trauma till years later. When these memories do arise, the victim is unable to develop a language with which to speak about their experiences because they have not been able to process them naturally (Pederson 334).

Some researchers disagree with Caruth, Richard McNally in his work Remembering

Trauma (2003) argues that trauma cannot result in an amnesia effect, instead; the memory is enhanced in one’s mind following the experience of trauma. And, victims of trauma do not necessarily lack the ability to voice their traumas because they do not remember them. Instead, they avoid talking about their experiences as a means of not having to experience their trauma again. Silence in McNally’s argument describes the victim as having the power to process their experiences but avoids re-experiencing them through speech with family, friends, and other individuals. Part of the mourning process can be found in the act of storytelling, orally, or in written form (Fewell 82). Storytellers have the responsibility to reattach the sequence of events to dispel the silence and the myth and bring about a grieving period.

The “hinge generation” is identified as the successive generation following a distinct, traumatic event and their duty is to translate the stories of trauma that have been passed to them from their parents and/or grandparents. This concept, developed by Tarryn Frankish and Jill Bradbury emphasizes the need for this successive generation to create a “living archive” of the stories they inherit (Bradbury 294). The “hinge generation” can never go back and witness traumatic events for themselves, instead; they must develop their understanding of these events from the narratives given to them. Children, as the next generation, are left with having to pick up the pieces of their family’s trauma. Their lives are marred by the traumas of their parents and/or grandparents from conception and inherited trauma becomes a burden that the child will carry with them into adulthood.

Marianne Hirsch describes this phenomenon further in her article, The Generation of Postmem-

ory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. Her term postmemory describes the relationship

that the next generation has to the “personal collective, and cultural trauma” that came before them (5). These traumas become ensconced in their experiences so deeply that they transfer the ownership of the trauma from that of their predecessors to their own (Hirsch 5). Here, the “hinge generation” is faced with mediating the spaces between what is a memory of something they were an eye-witness to and what is an inherited memory that has been translated into something of their own.

Historical Context: Mao Tse-Tung’s China

In handling intergenerational trauma within the novel, it is important to reference the contextual history of the culture that Thien describes. Thien, herself, is of Chinese descent and was born in Canada, mirroring the background of her character Marie (Jiang Li-ling). Chinese Canadian writers can double as “community activists and archivists,” and will call on a communal identity/history to write their stories (Liu 27). Her work is impactful in that it tells a story that is often lost in silence and mythology by creating her own retelling of the history that is superimposed onto a cast of characters, humanizing the history. Do Not Say We Have Nothing details the history of China from 1950s to 1990s, including the Great Leap Forward, Mao Tse-Tung’s Cultural Revolution, and the Massacre at Tiananmen Square.

Mao Tse-Tung resided as the chairman of the People’s Republic of China from 1949 to 1959 and served as the leader of the Chinese Communist Party till his death (Schram 1). Philip Bridgham provides an analysis of Mao Tse-Tung’s leadership during the 1960s in his article Mao’s “Cultural Revolution”:

Origin and Development. He argues that what motivated Mao was a fear of disloyalty within his party, leading him to carry out a “‘great proletarian cultural revolution’” that tested his followers’ loyalty based on their adherence to his ideology” (3). This is best understood in the context of 1962 with the ‘social education’ campaign, which re-educated individuals that were suspected of attempting to reinstate capitalism in China through acts of dissent. In the rural areas, incidents of a “violent nature with accounts of struggle sessions, public trials, and beatings of erring cadres” were common in support of the re-education initiative (Bridgham 10). 1965 escalated purging to attack literary, scholarly, and political leaders that were accused of presenting the public with falsified information in support of returning to capitalism (Bridgman 16). The violence was extended to target innocent civilians by employing teenagers into Mao’s Red Guard to ransack homes in search of incriminating evidence (Bridgham 27).

Anne M. Brown describes the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989 writing, “The Tiananmen Square killings can be understood as one, particularly savage, swing of the pendulum between official calls for reform and official repression of and violence towards those Chinese pushing the limits and pace of reform…” (93). On the night of the 3rd to 4th of June 1989, the People’s Liberation Army drove tanks to a protest of unarmed citizens around Tiananmen Square. The number of dead (shot or crushed) from this event ranged from 240 to 5,000 individuals. The international outcry over these protests was significant, however; they quickly leveled out due to the prowess of the Chinese government.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel:

The novel begins with a family tree, a visual explanation for her intricate structure of characters. The novel incorporates the stories of two families, which are drawn together through the relationship of the men Sparrow (b. 1940) and Jiang Kai (b. 1950). Sparrow’s family is the ultimate focus of the novel, looking to the past to speak of his mother Big Mother Knife (b. 1920), his aunt Swirl (b. 1925), his uncle Wen the Dreamer (b. 1923), and cousin Zhuli (b. 1952). The stories of this family ultimately coincide with Marie (Jiang Li-Ling, b. 1979), Jiang Kai’s daughter, who lives in Canada with her mother. Marie is the one that begins archiving Sparrow’s and her family’s story as she interacts with his daughter, Ai-Ming (b. 1971). Ai-Ming comes to live with Marie and her mother after having fled China due to the protests in Tiananmen Square. She brings with her a knowledge of China, the language, and a past that Marie has been unable to touch. The two connect over histories of pain and loss, both of their fathers have died, Marie’s father lost to suicide not long before Ai-Ming comes into her life. Ai-Ming brings to Marie The Book of Records, which comes from her family and acts as a reference to investigate her family’s history. She translates the story to Marie and begins to give her the pieces to fill in the gaps of her cultural/familial history. With Ai-Ming, Marie has access to the past unlike she has ever had before and she takes advantage of this connection to begin to bring together stories, which were once lost.

Myth, Trauma, and the Novel:

Trauma has a unique relationship with myth by allowing the traumatized to be able to bring new meaning to their experiences, find security, and address the emotions centered around the trauma. By 38

utilizing historical facts in conversation with fictional characters and instances, the novel’s structure somewhat resembles that of a myth. While these moments of violence cannot be specifically traced to an actual event, it is clear through historical analysis that many events like those witnessed by characters in the novel occurred. Early on in the novel, the reader is introduced to the forms of violence that were borne out of fear of the bourgeoise that Mao inscribed into the population of the 1950s:

Swirl thought she must be hallucinating when the guns were drawn and Da Ge and his wife were executed. Torches were lit and others demanded yet more killing. She saw Wen dragged forward. Her husband begged for mercy….Swirl felt herself losing consciousness. A deep silence seemed to come at her from every side (Thien 69-70)

The narrator is reflecting on this memory, coinciding with Caruth’s explanation that experiences where respect for humanity is lost often demand that they be processed at a later date (“Unclaimed Experience” 186). Here, the narrator is fulfilling this action, while also creating an opportunity for myth to be formed.

Shortly after this event, Wen the Dreamer and his wife Swirl are sentenced, without evidence or trial, to eight years of hard labor due to their counter-revolutionary crimes and leave their daughter Zhuli with her aunt. Zhuli is forced to enter the world, prematurely, without her parents’ protection and her own experiences of trauma begin. This trauma is a direct result of the trauma of her parents’ absence and they go to experience their own traumas while incarcerated. Now, trauma within the family has been piled on top of one another and the parent and the child suffer, creating a collective memory of trauma rooted in the family. Generational trauma is often witnessed in the parent-to-child relationship, and within the novel, this is developed in the mother-daughter dynamic.

In this section, the mother-daughter unit is Zhuli and her mother Swirl, connected by their individual experiences that occurred while separated, “Last month, Zhuli had overheard her mother saying that the bodies of those who died in the desert camps were left to decompose in the sand dunes. Scientists and teachers, longtime Party members, doctors, soldiers, paper-pushers and engineers, more than enough to build a better China in the underworld” (Thien 138). As Zhuli overhears her mother talking about her experiences, they are unconsciously adopted into Zhuli’s own memory. While Zhuli was not 39

present for her mother’s time at the camp, she can reflect in tandem with her mother and they are irreparably connected by a traumatic retelling of the story.

Marianne Hirsch describes the concept of postmemory in relation to myth by writing that the transmission of trauma between the mother and daughter figures occurs as the daughter can translate her mother’s trauma into the present day. Between the two, they can create a myth that can perpetuate the trauma into the next generation through continuous re-telling (10-11). Swirl’s experiences are inscribed that of her child by transferring her history into the memory of her daughter, Zhuli (Hirsch 31). This connection corresponds with another concept of Marianne Hirsch’s, “allo-identification,” which represents a closer relationship to the trauma of a relative that is not marked by physical scars but is meant to show how trauma can leave wounds without a physical mark (Hirsch 85).

In the mother-daughter relationship, the daughter will attempt to protect and guard the mother through “allo-identification,” where she will relieve her mother’s memories as if they were her own. This subversion of ownership allows for the daughter to feel as though her adoption has taken the memory away from her mother (Hirsch 90). Zhuli acts in this role by reliving her mother’s memory through her act of listening. She is adopting her mother’s first-person narrative as if it was her in the re-education camps, not her mother. She does this to protect her mother, overcoming her role as the child and stepping into one of an adult. These traumas were never meant to be hers but her aim to protect her mother and listen to these stories make them apart of her own catalog of trauma that can only continue to grow.

The traditions of oral story-telling allow for multiple truths to exist, which carry the stories of trauma and the past forward into the present (Cheung 86). The Book of Records in Do Not Say We Have

Nothing acts as a novel inside the novel that is passed down through generations until it reaches Marie in Canada. It represents a type of mythology that interrupts the mourning process because fact cannot be separated from fiction within its pages. The book, written by Wen the Dreamer takes on characters that represent connections between him and his wife, Swirl, and the world he lives in. In the novel, the Book

of Records presents itself mysteriously, calling on its readers to decipher it to find the truth in-between bits of myth:

The book was still in its hiding place inside the family home. Tucked into the pages were all the 40

letters Wen the Dreamer had written to Swirl. When those hungry spirits found no silver coins, they would open the walls. Nothing hidden would remain unseen. Swirl described the coded names, how the ideograms used for Da-Wei and May Fourth changed, and seemed to refer to compass points on a map. Big Mother felt a terrible chill. The love letters would be bad enough but what was in that book anyway? What if it turned out to be written by a Nationalist traitor? They would all be screwed to the eighteenth generation (Thien 64)

The elements of translation from language, code, and authorship make The Book of Records a piece of myth that is rooted in trauma. As Swirl can decode her husband’s letters in The Book of Records, she

not only can find pieces of him in the past but also pieces of herself in the present. Her actions have the countereffect of bringing the past into the present and allowing enabling it to continue to circulate. Swirl’s actions will culminate in The Book of Records reaching her daughter, Zhuli, ultimately touching Ai-Ming and Marie in Canada.

Trauma theory is often utilized in analyzing novels that look into the violent, historical past in literature of the U.S. South, specifically in the context of slavery. In particular, Toni Morrison’s Beloved can be identified as part of the canon within trauma studies in literature. Lisa Hinrichsen writes, “Critics such as J. Brooks Bouson (1999) have focused on how Morrison utilizes literary techniques that mirror at a formal level the effects of trauma, noting the novel’s insistence on circling back to violent events, and its disrupted timeline, structures of belatedness, and withholding of important information, as well as its literalization of the haunting past through a ghost” (643). I argue that Do

Not Say We Have Nothing accomplishes a very similar structure through the Book of Records and its mythological components. Like Beloved’s ghost, The Book of Records circles back throughout the novel and serves as a form of placeholder within time that allows contemporary characters to root out the truth within the myth of their family’s past. The collective memory that is formed around The Book of Re-

cords serves to join the family system together around an oscillating myth that has mystery in its origins. It represents a conflation of myth with its fictional characters, while bridging into reality with stories that resemble historical fact.

Silence as a Symbol for Trauma:

In withholding the intimate details of the trauma, the character’s experiences are translated from the personal to the collective. This element of trauma theory allows for trauma to be transmittable because it is not so personal that others are unable to empathize with the experience. Instead, as Michelle Balaev argues in Trends in Literary Trauma, it is a part of the collective psyche of the culture and the family unit, even though details are absent from their understandings of the event, they still can comprehend and grieve what was lost in their lives from before the event (158). Thien adopts this phenomenon into Do Not Say We Have Nothing through the prevalence of silence. Before committing suicide, Zhuli realizes that, “‘Silence had come to her. It did not try to connect all its pieces, to pretend they were part of the same thing. It didn’t need to pretend. Silence saw everything owned everything, eventually took everything’” (Thien 255). Zhuli clings to death as an escape from not only her present but also from a traumatic past that was given to her by her parents and their generation. The chaos of trauma, as Cathy Caruth describes it, has left Zhuli unable to formulate a proper language to speak of her traumas with, and with no parental guidance to find this language, she turns to silence (Pederson 334). Silence was Zhuli’s only option to escape the maddening chaos around her, she saw no other option and turned to what would be most final. At this moment, death has become a symbol of silence. Zhuli can find peace in death and process her trauma in eternal silence.

Zhuli’s silence in death is passed from to those she leaves behind. Sparrow, her cousin, and close friend, realizes what Zhuli has done and falls into the chaos of grief. He does not know fully how to experience life without her in it and is left reeling from the trauma of having to grieve the life he once had. He thinks to himself, “‘But in my life, Sparrow thought, I think there is a quiet coming now. He felt so certain of it that a sharp pain spread across his chest. A deep silence was about to arrive. How could he live with it?’” (Thien 225). The sharp pain he describes, brings together the physical with the emotional pain, and the oncoming silence signals the introduction of trauma. Caruth describes this interaction as “trauma for[cing] itself into hiding,” while the brain continues to record the sensory parts of the experience. The combination of hiding and recording creates chaos that the brain is unable to work itself through, lodging trauma into the experience and Sparrow’s future as he recedes into silence (Pederson

335). Since Sparrow is unable to fully vocalize his trauma, it will continue to haunt him as he learns to live without Zhuli (Hinrichsen 637). He hides from these memories and until he can confront them, they will continue to haunt him. Sparrow passes on the legacy of haunting to his daughter Ai-Ming, and ultimately, it will be inherited by Marie’s father as well, as they both knew Zhuli.

Trauma represents a function of language that gives power to the victim to be able to control their grief as they begin to mourn the life that they once had before the incident. However, this ownership can become counterproductive as the victim’s inability or unwillingness to speak of their traumas can prevent the mourning process from occurring. With this, there is no culmination to trauma’s impact, instead; trauma will be passed on through the untold stories and whispered words to their loved ones. As Marie stands on the precipice of having to acknowledge family’s trauma, she thinks, “Sometimes, I think, you can look at a person and know they are full of words. Maybe the words are withheld due to pain or privacy, or maybe subterfuge. Maybe there are knife-edged words waiting to draw blood. I felt like both a child and a grown-up” (Thien 17-18). As she watches her mother grieve, she feels both inside and outside of time, both a child and an adult. Her mother’s trauma disrupts her linear sense of time and disjointedly affects her timeline of growth. She is forced to take on the role of the daughter, dependent on her mother, and the role of an adult, the protector of her mother. Marie can understand the pain that is incorporated in the spoken word, however; she is both afraid and unafraid of it as she draws herself into the lives of those that came before her.

Marie and her mother represent a second mother-daughter relationship in the novel, the first being Zhuli and Swirl, which has been marred by the pains of trauma and immigration. Marie and her mother are separated by the lack of a shared native language. Marie’s childhood in Canada meant that she did not have the same access to growing up in her family’s native tongue, as her mother did in China. Her inability to read and write in her mother’s language creates another layer of separation, as Marie cannot access the stories of her family. King-Kok Cheung describes this dynamic in his article, Articu-

late Silences about the novel The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. The child in the novel is unable to find her own identity because she is caught on a bridge between the two. She is alienated by her inability to communicate with her family, her past, and present (Cheung 83-84). Ma-

rie is faced with the same need to reconcile her identities to find herself within her family story and to continue her own story as it unfolds in the present. She is caught between two cultures, East and West, and must find a way to connect her contemporary Western lifestyle and upbringing with the contextual, familial identity found in the West. Her relationship with Ai-Ming shows her attempt to find the words to describe her family’s past, in using Ai-Ming’s language skills to translate and describe the past, she is given an agency in her own story that would have not been possible without translation. This new-found information ignites in Marie a want to discover and uncover more about her family, continuously bring what was unspoken into the light, and developing her own voice.

Without words, it is difficult to truly tell a story. What Thien accomplishes in her novel, is giving words to the unspoken traumas of China’s past. In displaying silence, Thien can show how the trauma and silence go hand in hand while showing that silence does not equate to a lack of communication. Lien Chao writes that “what silence can connote is infinite,” and the novel shows where this statement can come to life (21). Silence can transmit trauma by being a powerful form of communication. Do Not

Say We Have Nothing represents this unlocking of time, by allowing different generations to interact with each other through the passing down of story and artifact.

The Hinge Generation within the Novel:

As Marie begins to unpack the trauma that her mother carries and is introduced to Ai-Ming, she becomes a representation of Bradbury and Frankish’s “hinge generation.” She feels the pain of her family around her and that of her late father. She looks to Ai-Ming and reflects, “I was terrified that if I touched her [Ai-Ming], her pain would swell inside my body and become my own forever. I couldn’t bear it. I turned away from her. I went into my bedroom and closed the door” (Thien 24). Marie cannot bear to face the pain that is threatening to overtake her and her mind. She is afraid of taking on the trauma of her family and runs away from Ai-Ming as a means of blocking this trauma from reaching her. This relationship with the past that Marie attempts to avoid illustrates trauma theory as often the contemporary generation is unable to fully empathize with their family or cultural traumas because they are not contextualized within the same generation. So, they block the type of dialogue that is necessary to mourn these events (Krondorfer 99). However, avoiding this is a futile effort, Marie cannot turn her back

on her family. This need for information can be understood as the existence of a “soul wound” that has scarred Marie without her consent. She is destined to find a way to heal this wound unless she chooses to live with its weight for the rest of her life.

Marie attaches herself to Ai-Ming because she cannot deny the past, nor can she avoid it. She is drawn into this world that is both a piece of her and something that she can never truly experience because of its presence in the past. She says, “I set myself to remembering everything she had told me, the beautiful, cruel and courageous acts, committed by her father and by mine, which bound our lives together” (Thien 90). The bond between her and Ai-Ming shows the extended bond she has to her family’s past in China and the violence they experienced at the hands of Mao’s actions. Trauma is transmittable because it is not a singular moment, all individuals have some understanding of trauma within their lives and can use their own experiences to connect to those of others. Marie inherits the collective psyche of her culture and family unit and can understand the past despite holes in the truth (Balaev 158). Marie’s search for the truth acknowledges her want to mourn and process the trauma of her family members and her attachments to her personal trauma of losing her father.

Marie continues her search until she reaches China and walks the streets that her family did once. Place is a central concept in understanding trauma within a narrative because of how it situates both the reader and the characters within a condensed setting. The physical place becomes a marker of suffering, grief, and self-identification. The traumatized can become haunted by the place and constantly have to re-experience the event and be in a state of mediating the present with the returning past when in this space (Balaev 160). Marie reflects on this connection as she enters the physical spaces where the trauma occurred:

It’s possible that I have lost track of the dates, the time, the chapters and permutations of the story. That afterwards, I reconstructed what I could about Ai-Ming’s family and mine. Years later, certain images persisted in my memory–a vast desert, a poet who courted beautiful Swirl with a story not his own, music that made not a sound–and I returned to them with greater frequency. I wanted to find her again, to let her know what I remembered, and to return something of what she had given me (Thien 149-150).

Here, Marie is continuing the processes of trauma, while also ending them. She is forging truth over myth and trying to mediate the two spheres to create a holistic representation of the past. She is also erasing the silences of her parents’ by using her voice to supplement the absence of theirs. Marie learns the names of her family members and in repeating them in the present, she can bring them back to life in an act of mourning. Her voice shines as the most powerful tool she has to combat the ever-present trauma that has inflicted her identity. However, Marie is not entirely successful in this act and the trauma, from the past, continues to exist in the present. She still carries Swirl’s memories, and while they have given her some solace, they still will continue to visit her as she holds Swirl in her memory. Her haunting leads to travel, to continue to uncover these stories.

Marie feels Ai-Ming as she travels to China and acknowledges Ai-Ming’s ever-presence in her actions as an archivist of the family history, “She was a sister to me; from the beginning we were joined, two halves of the world Sparrow and Kai had left behind” (Thien 199). Even though she is physically separated from Ai-Ming as she leaves to travel to the U.S., where they were providing a safe haven for Chinese students having escaped the Tiananmen Massacre, she still feels this intense bond to her because of their shared position within the generations of their families. And, part of Marie’s draw to visit China comes from her want to finish Ai-Ming’s story. She comes across those that knew Ai-Ming and Sparrow. Her interaction with a young woman at the local radio station with a copy of Sparrow’s music shows the impacts of the family’s trauma that goes beyond the scope of the family system. She says as they listen to the composition, “‘The first movement is finished. It will never come back again, But, Marie, how can I put it? It might be finished, it might be over, but that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped hearing it’” (Thien 418). This music is forever a symbol of what her family went through, maintained in the archives of a radio host it will live on, outside of Marie’s control. She can only sit and listen to its effects and the story it holds. For Marie, she can leave behind the music itself but its past will stay with her. This past can never be rewritten or truly revisited, but it remains.

The Coda shows a final weaving together of the stories within these family lines. It shows the holes that still remain within the narrative that Marie is attempting to fill. Marie’s grief is something that she can begin to let go of as she processes these accounts and continues her archival work. She says, “I

continue to live my life, to let my parents go and seek my own freedom” (Thien 461). In this statement, Marie is able to permit herself to let go of some of the trauma she has inherited, stopping its continuous cycle within the family line. It is the voice she provides to these stories that allow her to mourn and to understand her family and their actions. However, the inability to find Ai-Ming holds her back from entirely grieving, “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” (Thien 463). As one of the final statements within the novel, it is clear that trauma’s effects are all-encompassing to the point that it will take decades to reconcile what Marie has lost. There are unknowns by the end of the novel and questions unanswered, however; like Marie, the reader is left somewhat in the past because there is so much unsaid.

Conclusion:

In a review for The Oxford Culture Review, Tilly Nevin writes, “Although Thien shows how language in a political climate holds enormous power, she also explores the inadequacy of words. It is music rather than fiction which provides her characters with consolation” (1). Like many reviews of Thien’s novel, the significance of its legacy lies in Thien’s ability to intertwine history, politics, and music to tell the stories of the Cultural Revolution. I agree with the argument that music plays a key role in Thien’s narrative, in its ability to elevate the written word to be something lyrical and heard. Senses are enlightened in Thien’s use of music and violence is not forgotten, instead it is tamed through the musical retelling. Stephanie Boland in the New Statesman isolates politics and violence in the novel, “All regimes rely on secrets and silence to operate. Do Not Say We Have Nothing reminds us what fiction can do for the truth. It speaks to the humanity that continues even in the harshest, most self-destructive paranoid conditions, and it shows how the savagery of destroying culture comes hand-in-hand with the destruction of human bodies” (3). What Boland writes is what the basis of this paper was founded on, a want to reveal the forms of violence inflicted on the Chinese population by the Chinese Communist Party. From this point, I saw a gap in the conversation about Thien’s novel that could be fulfilled through the application of trauma theory to show the influence that Thien’s novel would have, if added to a canon of research on generational trauma. Joshua Pederson argues that literary critics need to be ready to experience authors writing trauma

in lengthy language because of how “multi-sensory” trauma can be. More words need to be used to describe its totality in mind, body, soul, rather than sparse prose that does include the scope of the victims’ experiences (339). Thien accomplishes this in Do Not Say We Have Nothing by exposing the traumas of her characters, simultaneously exposing the traumas of many, and entering into a form of grieving for the community. Thien represents a group of Chinese Canadian writers that are working to provide support to the community through a presence in the arts and literature community. Zhen Liu writes that, literature can allow for the community to dismantle traditional ideas of cultural oppression and racism that has held Asian-Canadians at bay (87). Thien emblazons this voice through Do Not Say We Have

Nothing: A Novel in her profound account for the history that has been passed down within China. This is where the significance of Thien’s work lies, in her ability to provide voice to those that have had their voices taken away by censorship or been lost in the passing of time. Her novel provides an account of generational trauma that encapsulates two families and three generations, carrying her reader throughout this intense history and violence. Thien enables the reader to become intertwined with this history through the human view it is told through, allowing for hope that these traumas can be mourned.

Works Cited

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