A story is a shifting creature, an eternal mirror that catches our lives at unexpected angles – Madeline Thein, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

The story of who we are is constantly being told. Everyone continually adds new chapters into the Book of Records in an attempt to tell a story that is impossible for a single person to tell. The story is often one of trauma. A tale of abuse, oppression, fear, destruction, renewal, rebirth, and growth. Reading back on painful chapters of fire in the distant past of the family gifts memories you never had, scars of a past you can’t understand yet are foundational to you. Most of us might feel that we are carrying our stories with us through all our hardships. We cling to the stories that define us even as we wander through the desert like Wen the Dreamer.

Madeline Thein explores this relationship we have to our stories in Do Not Say We Have Nothing, asking us: Does it affect us more to hear or to be heard? Kai, Zhuli, Wen, and Sparrow explore this idea through the creation of artistic works on paper, the destruction or salvation of which are the primary concern of the novel. Chapters of the book of records persist in defiance, hidden away to be enjoyed by future generations. Sparrow burns letters and musical works to avoid suspicion by The Party, and perhaps as penance for his feelings of failure regarding Zhuli. Sparrow’s work also finds new life, his later compositions escaping into Canada to be discovered by Li-ling. Memory and stories of the past persist in the form of physical art to be consumed. Even the caligraphy of the Book of Records itself is something to be admired as art in itself, in addition to the quality of its prose. Thein draws attention to this point by pointing out that the Mandarin word for remembrance can also mean art. The act of creation is an act of commemoration.

Where Thein values these physical remembrances, Janika Oza almost seems to value the cleansing power of their destruction in the aptly titled A History of Burning. The closing line of the book, “they would let it burn and insist on something better”, attests to the value of the family bond itself over the physical artifacts of the past. Vinod goes so far as to hide the photos from the family’s past in Uganda from Hari. Hari, stumbling across the photos by accident realizes that “They had unwillingly moved away and willfully forgotten”. Instead of clinging to the pain of the past, Hari in that moment taps into the “ancient, restless joy” of the moment: of existing with your loved ones now. Those moments with one and other are sacred. Sore memories of the past are sewn up, and even once those stitches are unstitched all the physical memories are burned away to only leave what we have: each other and the “slow determined birth of something new”.

Both these novels explore how we can relate to the past. Do Not Say We Have Nothing stresses the importance of the record of the past, something we can go back to and read later in all its glory. Photographs, records, books, and letters are preserved and re-earthed later on so that the new generation can explore their relationship to the past, while A History of Burning views the past as something to move on from; a soil in which new hope can grow. Despite this, Vinod does still hold on to the pictures from Uganda, and an obsession with the past is what leads to political unrest during the Cultural Revolution and the Tienanmen Square protests. History, and family history, is essential to the self. What makes both of these novels so powerful is in how they explore the ways in which we can relate to that history. In exploring the stories that define us in the eternal mirror, we continually rebirth ourselves. Time makes a new person.