Status Updates From Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Didn't finish. The narrative voice is a bit too dreamy and fragmented for me. And perhaps I had a fatigue of reading the Cultural Revolution and all these historical trauma stories to some extent.

Do you understand? All these things that we don’t have are nothing compared to the things we did have. A life can be long or short but inside it, if we’re lucky, is this one opening…

As spring of 1958 gave way to summer, Sparrow went back and reread earlier chapters, he crowded the open spaces of the novel with landscapes and wishes of his own so that he, too, could become an inseparable part of this new world where desires he had never acknowledged were, in these characters, given form and substance and freedom.

And yet here we were, crossing the city embraced by this victorious music, so that the past, Beethoven’s and my father’s, was never dead but only reverberated beneath the windshield, then rose and covered us like the sun.

We tend to think of history as what survives, but Do Not Say We Have Nothing is already making me think about everything that was lost: every voice that was silenced, every story that was never written, every memory that died with someone. I think this is why I like taking so many pictures! So I don’t lose anything! It reminds me of Dr. Wolf in Brilliant Minds and his focus on taking care of memories like plants.