Aural Memory in Madeleine Thien's Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Aural Memory in Madeleine Thien's Do Not Say We Have Nothing Kelly Baron (bio) It's not an understatement to say that Goldberg Variations created this book. But why? And how? It seems to me that music has a truth or some form of understanding. Madeleine Thien, in conversation with Hsiu-Chuan Lee In the opening pages of Madeleine Thien's Do Not Say We Have Nothing, a novel that considers the intergenerational trauma resulting from the Chinese Cultural Revolution in Asian Canadian communities, Li-ling, the novel's protagonist, is walking through Vancouver's Chinatown when she hears Bach's Sonata for Piano and Violin no. 4 from the speakers of a store. She feels "drawn towards it as keenly as if someone were pulling [her] by hand. The counterpoint, holding together composer, musicians and even silence, the music, with its spiralling waves of grief and rapture, was everything [she] remembered" (4). The result is that she recalls her father, when, in the moments of listening to Bach, he became "so alive, so beloved, that the incomprehensibility of his suicide grieved [her] all over again" (4). By her own admission, she had never before experienced such a "pure memory" of her father, Jiang Kai, in the two decades since his death (4). [End Page 181] Initially, she does not name the musician performing Bach's Sonata no. 4. But when she journeys to mainland China to hear the last composition written by Sparrow, one of her father's former music teachers at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, she feels a "strange humming, as if [she'd] heard this music in [her] childhood," reflecting that it was perhaps an "echo of Bach's Sonata no. 4, an echo of that recording of Glenn Gould and Yehudie Menuhin [she] would later chance upon in Chinatown" (197). It is impossible that she could remember Sparrow's The Sun Shines on the People's Square, a sonata for piano and violin he finished composing shortly before his death during the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Before he died, he sent the only copy to her father, who killed himself shortly after. But the connections she makes indicate the nature of intergenerational memory in the novel. Although Li-ling is the daughter of Jiang Kai, a pianist at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music during the Cultural Revolution, her father never played piano in her presence; by the time he moved to Vancouver, he refused to show interest in the classical music of his life in China, going as far as to deny Li-ling's request for violin lessons during her youth. Instead, the significance of the music of Bach, Glenn Gould, and Sparrow comes to Li-ling through the storytelling she listens to from Ai-ming, Sparrow's daughter. When Li-ling remembers her father that day in Vancouver's Chinatown, the sensory stimulus strong enough to incite such a "pure memory" of her father is not one that has been passed down to her from Jiang Kai but was passed down from Ai-ming instead (4). Li-ling's experience in Vancouver's Chinatown raises important questions for the role of music in studying literary depictions of intergenerational memory and trauma. What role does music have in understanding memory recall for intergenerational novels of trauma? How can listening to the music of such novels expand our understanding of trauma and memory recall? In this article, I explore the role of music and listening as the sensory stimulus behind a literary depiction of sensorimotor memory, or memories stored in the body. Specifically, I posit that listening in a literary context provides a methodology for understanding intergenerational memory and trauma. The sensory experiences which accompany the scenes of trauma that I analyze are defined by rhythmic repetition and music, resulting in a distinctly sonic approach to intergenerational memory and trauma that can be identified well in the visceral descriptions of classical music in Do Not Say We Have Nothing. Resultingly, I want to suggest that listening to the music in Do Not Say We Have Nothing is indicative of a new method for identifying intergenerational memory, one focused both on literary depictions of sound...

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