Can you comment a bit more on what those questions are and the initial process of writing Do Not Say We Have Nothing? I read recently that you started Do Not Say We Have Nothing as a way to explore some of the unresolved questions from Dogs at the Perimeter, allowing yourself a more expansive canvas. I was still haunted by my own trip to Cambodia in 1997, and loved the way you captured that haunting quality in your novel. Your novel Dogs at the Perimeter had just been released. SB: We met through the City University of Hong Kong’s MFA program in the summer of 2011. Now that Do Not Say We Have Nothing is available in the US, I’m very happy that Americans will have a chance to read more from this gifted and generous writer.
Today, as I prepare this interview for posting, The Guardian has published an article whose headline reads “ In Hong Kong’s Book Industry ‘everybody is scared.’” In the past few years, we have witnessed the deterioration of artistic and political freedom in Hong Kong. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and a New York Times best book for 2016, Do Not Say We Have Nothing traces the lives of three Chinese musicians and their legacy from Mao’s Cultural Revolution to Tiananmen Square to the present. It is a structurally complex novel that is large in scope and heart, a novel very much for our times. By the time I’d received my copy and started reading it, Do Not Say We Have Nothing was on its way to being something big, and deservedly so.
When I came back to the States in August, I ordered the novel internationally and waited for it to arrive. I started reading the novel PDF when I was in South Africa in July, but I was so taken with it, I knew I had to read it in its proper book form. Since I was unable to get a copy of the novel in the States, she sent me a galley PDF. When Madeleine Thien first kindly agreed to do this interview in May 2016, her novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing was soon to be published in Canada and England, but there was as yet no publisher for it in the US.
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