At times, their untenable love of Western music functions as a parallel for the deepening, unspoken intimacy between her father and Sparrow (lest we become too comfortable in our Western freedoms, one could imagine Van Cliburn as the basis for the narrator's father, or Tchaikovsky himself). Overnight, they find the music they write and perform, written hundreds of years in the past, to be forbidden by the state – yet it continues to run through their heads and impels them to find an outlet. The story that emerges revolves around her father, his mentor (Sparrow the composer), and Sparrow's cousin, the violinist Zhuli, all three of whom were studying at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music at the start of Mao's Cultural Revolution. She's known to some as Jiang Li-ling, or Marie, but to him, she was "Girl." She's telling us about her father, once a brilliant pianist, who committed suicide in Hong Kong when she was just 10 years old. It is a gorgeous intergenerational saga, stretching as far back at the 1940s and traversing China from Beijing in the north to rural Guangxi in the south, but Madeleine Thien's narrator speaks to us from present-day Vancouver. Do Not Say We Have Nothing begins at the end, so to speak.
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