![]() ![]() He gave me my Chinese name, Jiang Li-ling, and my English one, Marie Jiang. Later on, when I learned my father had been a renowned concert pianist in China, I thought of the way his fingers tapped the kitchen table, how they pattered across countertops and along my mother’s soft arms all the way to her fingertips, driving her crazy and me into fits of glee. My father’s name was Jiang Kai and he was born in a small village outside of Changsha. His eyes, dark brown, are guarded and unsure he is only 39 years old. He wears glasses that have no frames and the lenses give the impression of hovering just before him, the thinnest of curtains. My father has a handsome, ageless face he is a kind but melancholy man. Afterwards, distraught, she rushed home to Vancouver where I had been alone. That year, 1989, my mother flew to Hong Kong and laid my father to rest in a cemetery near the Chinese border. The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life. In a single year, my father left us twice. Read the first chapter of her novel in full, below. ![]() Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing, published by Granta Books, has been longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. ![]()
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