Aural Memory in Madeleine Thien's Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Abstract

In the opening pages of Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing, a novel that considers the intergenerational trauma resulting from the Chinese Cultural Revolution in Asian Canadian communities, Li-ling, the novel’s protagonist, is walking through Vancouver’s Chinatown when she hears Bach’s Sonata for Piano and Violin no. 4 from the speakers of a store. She feels “drawn towards it as keenly as if someone were pulling [her] by hand. The counterpoint, holding together composer, musicians and even silence, the music, with its spiralling waves of grief and rapture, was everything [she] remembered” (4). The result is that she recalls her father, when, in the moments of listening to Bach, he became “so alive, so beloved, that the incomprehensibility of his suicide grieved [her] all over again” (4). By her own admission, she had never before experienced such a “pure memory” of her father, Jiang Kai, in the two decades since his death (4). Aural Memory in Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing