There is the present day timeline of Ma-Li as an adult. Ma-Li, the narrator, and Ai-Ming become close, almost sisters in the months they are together and Ai-Ming unfolds the stories that have brought them together, telling Ma-Li about a history that is her own but that she didn’t know. Months later, a teenage girl appears in their lives, fleeing from the turmoil in Mainland China. Her world is more focused on the departure and death of her father, who has left her and her mother to return to Hong Kong and there taken his own life. About eleven years old, already in Vancouver in 1989, as events in Beijing unfold.
The narrator of Thien’s excellent novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, is a little older than me. At the age of sixteen, when I returned again to Beijing, I remember being naively surprised that there was no monument in Tiananmen Square to those whose lives were lost in 1989. I would have been about three years old on that first trip and I have no memories of the place. The first time was, I believe late 1988 or early 1989, before our family moved to Canada at the end of 1989. I’ve been to Beijing and stood in Tiananmen Square three times in my life.
Do Not Say We Have Nothing – Madeleine Thien (Knopf Canada, 2016)
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