6/28/2023 0 Comments Do not say we have nothing review![]() ![]() That same year, a teenage relative appeared from China: Ai Ming, a young woman forced to flee following the brutal suppression of the student occupation of Tiananmen Square. Her father, she tells us, disappeared some years earlier, and in 1989, when Marie was 10, he killed himself in Hong Kong at the age of 39. Her story begins in Vancouver, where the narrator, known by both her Chinese name Li-ling and her English name Marie, lives with her mother. At its heart are the interlocking fates of a set of characters who live for and by music, until their world is destroyed by the events the revolution unleashes. Thien takes this history and weaves it into a vivid, magisterial novel that reaches back to China’s civil war and up to the present day. Writing the wrong sort of history – one that deviates from the party line – can still get you into trouble. ![]() For more than 60 years, the historical narrative has been manipulated or suppressed in the service of the shifting needs of the regime’s politics. He Luting’s defiance was a moment of resistance in the savage history that features prominently in Canadian novelist Madeleine Thien’s powerful third novel, along with the events two decades later surrounding the Tiananmen Square protests. ![]()
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