Chinese Amnesia and the Gift of Memory: Examining History and Remembrance in Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing

This article offers an analysis of Madeleine Thien’s 2016 novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing to stage critical questions about the politics of narrating Chinese modern history and the figure of the refugee as necessitated by the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Tracing the origins of the concept of “Chinese amnesia,” this article describes China’s erasure of the Massacre and contests the ways in which this discourse bolsters an orientalist narrative during “the rise of China”. By focusing on how the novel refuses to reify the binary of oppression in China and freedom in the US or Canada, this article argues that memory is yet another dimension to the liberal promise of rescue.