By Yue Chen

My history with Madeleine Thien’s work is almost as long as my tenure with Sine Theta—approaching nine years. In many ways, my literary life has led up to this profile. I’m sure it was our editor-in-chief, Jiaqi, who recommended Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016, Knopf Canada) to our group chat in 2017, and since then, it’s been my favorite book. I wrote about it for my master’s dissertation (alongside Bestiary by K-Ming Chang, who I interviewed for sinθ #16 in 2020) on themes and techniques of copying in Asian diasporic literature. I look for it in every library and bookstore and collect its different editions (the cover with the bird eludes me). I flip my well-worn copies open to random pages and comfortably locate myself in its narratives crossing and doubling back over borders of space and time.

Now a new novel will join the shelf of Thien’s books in my childhood bedroom in San Jose. It’s from there that I chat with Montreal-based Thien over Zoom on a sunny March afternoon about craft and history, record-keeping, and the grain of a “truth” she seeks through writing. This is the first in a series of interviews she is giving about The Book of Records, out in May 2025 from Norton & Company.

Born in Vancouver, Thien is an author, editor, and teacher whose work spans fiction, literary criticism, and essays on topics ranging from historical Chinese poets to race and human rights to the Quebec rodeo. Her first book was Simple Recipes (2001, McClelland & Stewart), a collection of short stories; it was followed by The Chinese Violin (2001, Whitecap Books), a picture book about a newly emigrated family and their precious erhu. She then released three novels: Certainty (2006, McClelland & Stewart), Dogs at the Perimeter (2013, Granta Books), and Do Not Say We Have Nothing. This latter novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Folio Prize, and Italy’s Premio Bottari Lattes Grinzane, and was awarded a 2016 Governor-General’s Literary Award. Thien has also taught creative writing at a range of institutions, including, most recently, as a Professor of English at Brooklyn College at the City University of New York.

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Thien’s first novel, Certainty, is the hardest for her to talk about. Written following her mother’s sudden death, it tracks several familial generations from survival under Japanese occupation of British North Borneo (now eastern Malaysia) to diasporic life in the Netherlands and Canada. The immigration journeys shown in Certainty at times mirror those of Thien’s own parents before her birth in 1974—although it is Simple Recipes, whose tidy images and plain aches belie complex immigrant family interiors, which Thien would consider her most autobiographical work to-date. To me, what distinguishes Certainty is that its main storyteller, radio producer Gail Lim, is dead at the start. We back into her passing through the long memories of those around her. Gail believes “that histories touch,” and her journey to decode and document Canadian soldier William Sullivan’s secret diary, kept when he was captured by Japanese troops in 1942, leads her to the Netherlands to unpack her father’s childhood in occupied North Borneo. Even in this first novel, Thien expresses interest in entwined and imbricated narratives, a history equally splintered and shared, and the painful devotion of keeping the record over and against time.

Twelve years later, Thien published Dogs at the Perimeter, a novel about the fractured memories and timelines of people whose lives have been permanently altered by the Khmer Rouge regime. A labor of five years and six trips to Cambodia, Dogs at the Perimeter feels, in Thien’s words, like her first book. “I feel like that book showed me so much about writing and the limits of language. [It’s] what made me really believe in fiction and literature,” she says. “It’s the book I believe the most in, in a funny way… Maybe because there's something unrelenting about Dogs at the Perimeter. And that perseverance and not looking away were extremely difficult.” Thien touches on how the “shattering” experience of Dogs at the Perimeter enabled her to find a buoyant, deftly funny voice that especially shines in her later works: “It showed me that when I could find joy and happiness, and the comedic and the witty, in my novels, it came from the darker place, actually.”

Importantly, Dogs at the Perimeter also concretized something Thien had begun probing as early as Simple Recipes: portraying multiple perspectives, rather than trusting and empowering just one narrator to relay a prismatic history. In a 2017 interview with Zolima CityMag, Thien talked about stories she wrote as a child that featured this fragmentation and convergence: “I really liked multi-character stories that would converge. I remember one that I wrote that was about three people crossing certain parts of a mountain path and colliding with each other.”

On conceiving of the self as split and multiplicative, Thien recalls witnessing a ceremony in rural Cambodia where participants were calling for the souls of someone who was ill: “It was the first time I'd really thought about souls, in the plural, belonging to one person,” she says. “This unified person that we are is the shelter from which sometimes those souls have to leave, sometimes they get frightened out of your body… But you are still the shelter they could return to. I found that incredibly moving.”

In Dogs at the Perimeter, Janie and Hiroji are both drawn to a Cambodia that has vanished. The search for this missing homeland correlates with Janie’s slow withdrawal from the narrative, her disappearance into memories of souls—including some of her own—that have departed. In our conversation, Thien tells me, “I was also trying to sort out this problem of the lost homeland, or the way the exterior home itself shattered, and what it would mean to try to find a solid home that is oneself, in the hopes the exterior home can become a home again.” Thien wryly shares that her partner, Lebanese Canadian novelist Rawi Hage, once joked: “It’s not just the rich who have many homes.” So much of Thien’s writing contends with locating a home and a self, and how loss and rebirth of the two are inseparable.

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Thien’s explosive third novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, spans three generations of two interwoven Chinese families from the founding of the People’s Republic to Tiananmen Square and one Vancouver young girl’s search for her father’s story. It explores history’s penchant for repeating major political rifts and ambitions, or “zero points;” the importance of alternate history-making and -recording; and the largeness of grief and, even larger than that, love and remembrance. One of the novel’s many motifs, repeated and revisited throughout the narrative, is the Book of Records, an illicit print saga about two fictional Chinese revolutionaries named May Fourth and Dawei, which Do Not Say We Have Nothing’s characters copy, maintain, and pass down.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing’s intergenerational cast—particularly Wen the Dreamer, poet and copier of the living, iterative Book of Records; central trio Sparrow, Zhuli, and Kai, classical music students at the Shanghai Music Academy during the Cultural Revolution; and the post-generational Ai-ming and Marie in Vancouver—try to maintain and leave records that will survive politics and time. Do Not Say We Have Nothing unpacks ideas of artistic newness, authenticity, and integrity in a history that compulsively recycles.

Writing about copies and copiers, Thien casts doubt on veneration of individualism: “The idea of individual genius: I think I don't recognize it. What I recognize is everything that I have been lucky enough to have learned, and how imitation and learning at a young age are very connected. We imitate the tonal patterns of our parents; we imitate their gestures.” Do Not Say We Have Nothing depicts inheritances that make characters themselves through repeating phrases, actions, and visages between generations. Thien adds, “I wanted to pay tribute to that part of us that is the carrier. Originality will come from the reconfiguration of those things at a particular moment in time. I wanted to pay tribute to the act of copying and the idea that we can learn from embodying something else that's not us.”

For Thien, copying and pushback against “individual genius” emerge most clearly in art. She recalls a Chinese painting class from childhood, when “the teacher would put his hand over mine. I would come home with these amazing paintings, because the teacher had painted them, really, and my hand was just carried along with his. But that was my first experience of what it felt like to be in the mind of the artistry of another.” Bach’s Goldberg Variations is a prominent motif in Do Not Say We Have Nothing. The composition’s counterpoint structure displays the same repetition and mutation seen in the novel’s historical and interpersonal events, and Glenn Gould’s famous 1959 and 1981 recordings bookend Sparrow’s own musical career. The Variations’ aria and pursuant echoes, each with a little life of its own, exhibit how multitudes develop within closed systems, and how an object or event may reproduce into singular, self-standing instances.

Even the Book of Records, a site and symbol of resistance, defies identification with a mastermind—it was penned by an unknown author and transcribed by Wen the Dreamer. The book itself changes as it changes hands; copyists, including Wen and his wife Swirl, encode covert messages in the text by altering characters in distributed copies. When Wen runs out of chapters to copy, he transitions into authorship. He infuses his family’s story into the book, vowing to “populate this fictional world with true name and true deeds. They would live on, as dangerous as revolutionaries but as intangible as ghosts.” Ai-ming takes up the task decades later, repeating this refrain when fleeing with the Book of Records to Canada after the massacre at Tiananmen Square. She and Marie sustain the Book of Records long after the creators and copyists who stored their histories in its pages have passed from this world.

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As it so happens, The Book of Records is also the title of Thien’s new novel, an almost decade-long project. It anchors at the Sea, an ever-growing living compound modeled after Kowloon Walled City, where refugees from across time and space seek asylum. The protagonist, Lina, reaches the Sea at age seven with her ailing, grief-stricken father and three installments of her lost brother’s The Great Lives of Voyagers books that record the lives and exploits of major historical figures. Lina grows up alongside quaint, storytelling neighbors Jupiter, Bento, and Blucher, who regale her with tales about the books’ Voyagers—poet Du Fu, philosopher Baruch Spinoza, and theorist Hannah Arendt—that complicate the linear textual narrative she has absorbed.

The novel was originally titled Lina and the Sea—a name Thien (and I) found whimsical but that was not similarly appreciated by editors. I asked Thien about the choice to change it to The Book of Records, given the natural association readers would make with Do Not Say We Have Nothing. She says, “I always knew that I was writing, exploring that idea of what it meant to keep the record. That was a question that remained unresolved for me after [Do Not Say We Have Nothing]… It’s not the ‘Book of Records’ as we know it in [Do Not Say We Have Nothing], but it is that same desire. It made me happy to have this connection between two books that are quite different.”

Echoing themes in Thien’s previous works, The Book of Records delves into memory, record-keeping, and storytelling. The figures of Du Fu, Spinoza, and Arendt have loomed large in Thien’s own life, informing her thinking and values. In a similar vein to Do Not Say We Have Nothing’s act of drafting “an alternate version of history,” Thien, in writing The Book of Records, sought not to merely retell these writers’ lives directly and faithfully, but also to throw light on the remote, unseen corners of their universes. She diffuses their lives and philosophies across a broader context that she partially interprets, partially invents through Jupiter, Bento, and Blucher.

When I ask her about nuances of composing another person’s autobiography, Thien says, “It’s always a trespass. It’s also an act of love.” She continues, “I was aware all the time of where I felt I was trespassing and where I felt I had their blessing. Of course, I'm projecting—it’s total imagination—but there were moments when I did feel I got close to something that they would recognize.” In the novel itself, Thien writes, “Was it possible that the ones we love are the ones we most powerfully imagine, the ones we create, continuously, inside our minds?” Revisiting Do Not Say We Have Nothing’s themes of cultural and intellectual reproduction, she tells me, “I'm continuing that resistance to the idea of the singular genius. These ideas came from the world around them, as they do for all of us who create—it's the world that keeps showing us things.”

The Book of Records’ meta-biographies, relayed through a chorus of voices, speak to the innumerable influences shaping our worldviews. Thien says, “It was a pleasure for me to put some of their words into the mouths of others, to have these ideas expressed in another form.” She chose to “distribute some of [Du Fu, Spinoza, and Arendt’s] ideas into the world for them to receive.” For example, Spinoza’s views on affect and determinism are, in the novel, spoken aloud by his coworkers in Gasparo Obissi’s glass workshop, Fluweel and Sonnius. When Fluweel remarks, “I think Sadness and Happiness exist for themselves, like water and sky. They alight in us, as if we were vessels for their travels,” he foretells Spinoza’s writing in Ethics on conatus, or how “each thing, as far as it lies in itself, strives to persevere in its being.” And Sonnius gestures toward causal determinism through his refrain: “Every detail foretells the future.” Thien elaborates, “One of the most joyful things for me [was] to give this philosophy, an agency, to what would be the minor characters, those who just appear for a moment and leave, but without whom none of [these figures’] work could have been possible.”

Historical redress and reimagination also appear through “perforation,” a condition of porousness that enables disruption of an otherwise top-down system. This idea is explicitly introduced through Lina’s father Wui’s work in cyberspace governance before they flee from Foshan to the Sea. Perforation describes the pressures placed on a cybernetic entity that stretch it thinner and thinner, until an unassuming set of cultural codes may completely surround and destabilize an incumbent structure from the outside. In The Book of Records, a group of rogue engineers called the Floating World conceive of perforation as new ideologies and behaviors, inevitably brought by generational change, that insinuate themselves into Chinese cyberspace’s highly regulated, vertically integrated architecture through its own data pathways—like fresh water flowing through well-worn tributaries. “The Floating World thought of it in a technical way, but also as how culture and power move against each other,” Thien explains to me. “It’s not actually possible to dismantle the structure, but maybe there’s some way to perforate it, and in doing so, actually change its material structure… which is quite different from trying to tear the whole thing down and rebuild it.”

In Thien’s eyes, this vulnerability is also immanent in storytelling: a text can imperceptibly alter a reader or listener until they are forever changed. Thien has been probing this possibility since Gail’s efforts to crack Sullivan’s diary in Certainty. “Throughout [The Book of Records], there’s a wrestling with porousness in the way Lina hears and tells the stories, the way in which these stories have become a part of her, and how she has hidden herself—or, rather, tried to transmit herself,” Thien tells me. “That hidden self in the act of fiction: in a way, when I tell you a story, you’ll actually know more about me, what I care about.” Those who architect porousness, from the Floating World to storytellers at the Sea coloring Du Fu, Spinoza, and Arendt’s lives, coalesce and codify divergent strands of thinking. “This porousness for me is a powerful thing,” Thien says. “It is part of the process of trying to come to that ‘true thing,’ of letting these other ways of existing infiltrate your own way of existing—and in that ruptured, perforated, porous space, trying to see where the truth of the world sits between us.” Thien herself participates in the perforation of history: her books are different tellings of historical events and aftershocks, mobilizing and troubling dominant paradigms.

We eventually learn that The Book of Records is Lina’s work of memory: it is a joint effort to draw close her missing brother, Wei, and capture her years at the Sea growing up and out of time. When Lina tells Blucher and Wui she will record their stories faithfully—“I’ll remember it exactly the way you tell me. Word for word”—they chide her, saying, “The only way to really remember is to forget everything and let time fill the story up.” Blucher adds, “To reach it through a different doorway. Things have to inhabit the living or else disappear from the world and cease to exist. If things survive it’s not through abstract thought, but the realities that gave rise to those thoughts.” Just as Thien’s portrayals of Du Fu, Spinoza, and Arendt are versions of immutably opaque and uncertain biographies, Lina’s account of times and tales at the Sea is but one—it is animated by the blanks she cannot fill, stories that won’t end.

In these ways, The Book of Records is an intellectual and spiritual successor to Thien’s previous works. But she also notes this novel’s singularities: for instance, though young Lina arrives at the Sea having lost her home and family, Thien affirms she was searching beyond the “darkness” of familial loss and grief palpable in Dogs at the Perimeter and Do Not Say We Have Nothing. In The Book of Records, she tells me, “I frankly just needed to look at something else. I wondered what sustains us in our minds, in our ethics, our politics, our heart, our willingness to survive—because it's also a choice not to survive. A decision about what to carry into the future.” On the necessary burden of a personal ethic amidst change, Thien adds, “We usually think about [what to carry] in terms of material things, but what ideas are we the vessel for, that are going to be apparent based on what we do and say and choose?”

Thien herself has had to assert moral commitments in her professional sphere. Winner of the 2016 Giller Prize, Thien has in recent years protested the award’s sponsorship by Scotiabank, which partially owns Israeli military tech company Elbit Systems. Though her public advocacy has drawn backlash—including from members of the prize organization—and the literary world remains divided on Palestinian genocide, Thien remains hopeful: “I saw a lot of [writers] taking difficult and courageous and principled stands, and refusing to dehumanize people,” she says. “What makes me hopeful is that, regardless of what our vocations are, first of all, the duty is to be a human, to refuse what is going to make you diminish whatever is of value to you in this life.” Recalling the refusal to “look away” that defined Dogs at the Perimeter’s starkness, Thien’s experience writing on genocide informs what she considers her responsibility to witness and agitate for Palestine: “I almost couldn't think of it as a writer. But if I were thinking of it as a writer… How could I be silent? It’s impossible.” She adds, “I have been to the West Bank. I have had long conversations with Palestinian and Israeli activists. I had a responsibility.”

An artist’s responsibility to protest is not their own—they’re part of a collective of predecessors, peers, and audiences. “In a funny way, I'm not sure that my moral compass is so strong—it's just that to a certain degree, I don't want to let these people that I have written about so deeply, I don't want to let them down,” Thien says. “I feel the responsibility to carry a certain tenacity forward in the hopes that someone else will carry it as well.” Another option is silence—which can be tempting, especially amidst increasing political repression. Thien brings up Du Fu’s agony over serving a regime to ensure his family’s survival: “That question of how not to be complicit—I think it was very alive in him. Was it better to simply withdraw to the woods and do no harm? Is that actually maybe the only ethical choice that can be made, to leave society and do no harm? I definitely empathize with that perspective.” Thien pauses. “But, you know, the tension is always: we have to keep the record. Because something will come afterwards. And the same forces will renew themselves. Good and bad. The same time is going to come again, and we have a duty to not let these things become oblivion.”

Thien’s words instantly remind me of a passage from Do Not Say We Have Nothing that, to me, crystallizes revolution’s inevitable and unflinching repetition. Old Cat, a peddler of forbidden books who watches the coin of politics flip over and over throughout her century-long life, tells Zhuli: “The things you experience are written on your cells as memories and patterns, which are reprinted again on the next generation… All we have on this earth, all we are, is a record… Maybe the only things that persist are not the evildoers and demons (though, admittedly, they do have a certain longevity) but copies of things. The original has long since passed away from this universe, but on and on we copy. I have devoted my minuscule life to the act of copying.”

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Thien’s own devotion to keeping the record is visible through her thorough penetration of characters’ lives and worlds. Thien has traveled extensively through the lands that reappear in her books—namely China, Cambodia, and the Netherlands. While writing The Book of Records, she and Hage retraced Arendt’s 1940 escape out of Nazi-occupied France across the Pyrenees on foot. Additionally, Thien maintains archives of documents, soundtracks, and photographs—some that she herself produced—informing the development of Do Not Say We Have Nothing and Dogs at the Perimeter, which can be perused on her website.

On thoughtful engagement with diverse scholastic fields that appear in her books—including Sparrow, Zhuli, and Kai’s classical music; Marie’s mathematics; Jamie and Hiroji’s neuroscience; Gail’s investigative foray into cryptography; Sipke’s war photography, and Spinoza’s lens-making—Thien reflects, “I remember, when I was young, we didn’t have books. We had one set of encyclopedias, and I was so greedy for books… I don’t think I’m an envious person, but something I do envy sometimes is people’s education.” She continues, “I had a longing to learn so many things when I was young. It's a hunger that has never gone away. Partly because life is so short, and the complexity of the world is so astonishing… There’s so little that's around us that we will actually come into contact with in a deep way. For me, writing fiction has been a way to have that education—to really immerse in other ways of existing and experiencing this world, to live other lives.”

Thien acknowledges, “Because I write often quite far beyond my personal experience, a lot of me thinking about the imagination is also understanding the distance that is inescapable from where I am and where the character is.” However, for Thien, this failure of perfect embodiment is a craft touchstone: “I find that the education comes not necessarily from the books and ideas themselves, but from the characters that come to life on the page because they themselves are carrying this whole other education or library in their head,” she says. “They [show] me something else about this world. That's what I really love about writing.”

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In addition to writing novels, Thien continues to work across multiple mediums. I ask about a recent project—the trilingual libretto for Chinatown (with music by Alice Ping Yee Ho and Hoisan translations by Paul Yee), currently in development with Vancouver Opera. In contrast with book-writing, which she calls a sometimes “necessarily lonely” craft, Thien says, “Just being around all that talent with the musicians, the singers, their love, [and] for some of them to be cast in roles that had a lot of echoes with the histories of their own families… it's been so hard, but really inspiring and exciting. Like having a giant Asian family.”

I often describe, to anyone who will listen, the distinct emotionality Thien’s work inspires in me. Perhaps because I have attended to it closely and scholastically, perhaps because it returns to so many questions I can never satisfactorily resolve alone. From Certainty to The Book of Records, I have watched Thien’s engagements with time, history, record-keeping, and political and emotional inheritances develop and sophisticate over the years. There is something ineffably and almost unbearably precious, I think, about witnessing someone’s own record. Just as Du Fu, Spinoza, and Arendt have patterned and inflected Thien’s thinking, her work colors how I see, touch, love, and spite the world.

In 2022, Thien’s long-time friend, Y-Dang Troeung, professor at the University of British Columbia across transnational Asian literatures and transpacific studies, passed away from pancreatic cancer. The Book of Records is written in memory of Troeung. On her friend’s legacy, Thien says, “We had gone to protest for Palestine in Hong Kong together. I knew what she would be feeling, and I could imagine what she would have been going through as she saw what we all saw, knowing the long, long shadow that will come even once the war is over.” When Troeung’s second book, Landbridge [life in fragments], a memoir exploring multiple generations of Troeung’s family, was published posthumously in 2023 by Penguin, Thien contributed a blurb. Landbridge is Troeung’s own familial record, an edit to the media glamorizing her family’s 1980 arrival as among the last of 60,000 Cambodian refugees fleeing to Canada from the Khmer Rouge. “I hope that [Landbridge] lives in so many people's minds and hearts,” Thien says. “I'm doing that thing of The Book of Records, of writing true names into these stories. I just want to place her name everywhere.”

Toward the end of our call, I ask if Thien is closer to naming the “true thing” she has been seeking in her work. Do Not Say We Have Nothing invokes the architectural concept of a “zero point,” a structural and symbolic “location that determines all others” embodied by both Tiananmen Square and the novel’s own Book of Records: hearts of different Chinese cultural histories to which we always return. After being with Thien’s oeuvre for nearly a decade, I want to visit her zero point, a place to return. “I have an idea of what it is, but I hesitate to name it because the word doesn't hold,” Thien confesses. “The word, I think, is love.” She adds, “It’s a little word that we have to use for so many complicated things. I don't think one would keep the record if one didn't believe it mattered, and I don't know if one would seek that stable point if one didn't believe it existed.”

Writing, I’ve come to realize, is the endurance and emission of love. To keep a record—despite grief, suppression, and a record’s basic and irremediable incompleteness—because you have no other choice. From Gail’s dogged pursuit of Sullivan’s and her parents’ pasts to Janie’s obsessive dives into Hiroji’s trauma case files while haunted by memories of her childhood under the Khmer Rouge, Thien’s characters mine and create records to edge toward uncertain truths.

To me, Wen, Zhuli, and Ai-ming from Do Not Say We Have Nothing exemplify this act of keeping the record out of an indispensable and fragile love. Succeeding Wen as the Book of Record’s keeper, Ai-ming affirms she will preserve this storyworld—an alternate, insurgent, and equally true version of history: “Could it be that everything in this life has been written from the beginning? Ai-ming could not accept this. I am taking this written record with me, she thought. I am keeping it safe.” Years before, in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, choosing to disappear without explanation before her love of forbidden music would imperil her family, Zhuli resolves through tears, “The first aria of the Goldberg Variations was also its end. Could it be that everything in this life had been written from the beginning? She could not accept this. I am taking this written record with me, she thought. It is mine and I’m the only one who can keep it safe.” Fighting to survive their own political times, Zhuli and Ai-ming approach record-keeping differently—Zhuli leaves no trace to protect her family, and Ai-ming perpetuates the traces and ghosts of her family within the Book of Records. But, for both, the record is an object of love.

On what comes next, Thien says, “The only thing I know for sure is I’m desperate to be writing.” The end of our conversation reminds me of my favorite lines from Do Not Say We Have Nothing on trauma and resistance’s cyclicality: “[Ling] couldn’t stop her own heart from breaking. But for her daughter, behind this mountain was another mountain, behind this sea, another sea.” A line echoed in The Book of Records as Arendt, interned by Nazis in Gurs, hazily recalls an ink landscape hanging above Heidegger’s desk: “A poignant Eastern painting… where behind every mountain stood yet another mountain.” In her books, each written during a different yet enduring political moment, Thien revisits her eternal question with tenderness, novelty, and stark honesty. I know that despite the darkness about us, art persists. It will remind us, again and again, to answer what it means to live with integrity and, certainly, love.