Madeleine Thein’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing should help stimulate our memory and provide an understanding into what life is like under tyrannical regimes, past and present, in any part of the world.

It is a Book of Records. A piece of virtuosic music. Hidden within this fictional world are true names and true deeds. Sparrow and his cousin Zhuli (for whom Prokofiev, Bach, and Old Bei occupied the space that the Party, the nation, and Chairman Mao occupied for others), Swirl, Wen the Dreamer, Big Mother , Ba Lute..."They would live on, as dangerous as revolutionists but as intangible as ghosts."

The novel begins with Marie Jiang recalling her father Jiang Kai, a pianist, who commits suicide at Hong Kong in 1989 when he was only 39 years old. He defects from China in 1978. Alive when the demonstrations began in Tiananmen Square in April 1989, he disappears from his wife and daughter in Vancouver and on June 4 the military crushes protests in Tiananmen Square. In October the family comes to know about Jiang Kai’s death.

Ai Ming, a fugitive who seeks shelter in Marie Jiang’s house for a brief period, is the daughter of Sparrow, a great composer and musician and Jiang Kai’s teacher at the Shangai Conservatory of Music.

Music lovers, the two men love each other. Sparrow gives up his talent to protect his daughter and work in factories making wooden crates, then wire and then radios for 20 years... He dies during the Tiananmen massacre. The official record would, however, say he died of "A Stroke." "At Home."

The lives of this two families intertwine and forks as the novelist, through them, takes us through the history of the country--the 1949 civil war to the year 2016...

"Tiananmen Square, that place that Chinese architects once imagined as the zero point, the location that determines all others."

It's over the sweat and blood of ordinary people and poor jawans and the political spectacle played out over the dead- photo-ops and lies, authoritarian regimes sustain themselves. So it calls for conscientiousness from our part to `new dawns' which are otherwise prone to let us down.

From, Do Not Say We Have Nothing.

“Like thousands of other surviving counter-revolutionaries, she would be informed, after years of prison labor, that she had never been a criminal. Would she weep?Would she feel joy?...”

“The camp was the very end of the earth. I am no counter-revolutionary and neither were those exiled with me. In my heart, I believe that it is this age and our leaders who one day will have to account for their crimes.”

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“My father stood in front of me, naked / in the hospital’s basement
He spoke to me / his voice muffled by cotton
Listen to me Claudia / listen to me
And all I could think of was to say / Cover yourself, Daddy / You’ll tell me all another time.”

http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2015/09/poetry