“The Chinese government has actually made it illegal to grieve. Families are prevented from leaving their homes on the anniversary and on Qingming, the Chinese day of the dead.
The Chinese, Thien notes, are even today forbidden from mourning the victims of the massacre, twenty-seven years on. “Because it’s still one moment, in a way.” There are more crackdowns today than ever. “I was trying to connect with an unfolding Chinese history since the Revolution,” Thien explains. Do Not Say We Have Nothing is Thien’s most complex work narratively.
And, when Wen the Dreamer and Swirl, along with their daughter Zhuli, get swallowed by the violence of collectivization and re-education, the notebooks are recopied again and again with minute encoded alterations and scattered across the country to make the family whole again. Part romance, part adventure, The Book of Records surfaces also half a century earlier, when a young dreamer named Wen uses it to woo his beloved.
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