Quote by Madeleine Thien: “We think we are escaping the past, but the past is always with us.”

History — personal, familial, national — doesn't stay where we leave it. It travels with us in our habits, wounds, and blindspots. No matter how much physical or psychological distance we put between ourselves and what happened, it keeps showing up. Acknowledging that is not weakness; it's the beginning of understanding.

Thien published Do Not Say We Have Nothing in 2016, a novel tracing the legacy of China's Cultural Revolution across generations and continents. The year marked growing awareness in the West of how authoritarian pasts in China and elsewhere were shaping contemporary politics and diaspora communities.

Canadian novelist of Malaysian-Chinese descent whose novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016 and won the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her work traces political trauma across generations through music, memory, and displacement.