The Gift of Time and the Underground Relationality: Do Not Say We Have Nothing 's Worlding of China

Abstract: This essay explores literature's worlding potentialities (in the Heideggerian sense) through an analysis of Madeleine Thien's Do Not Say We Have Nothing , positioning it as an example of Asian North American literature that intervenes in the writing of Asian histories. Thien presents Asian North American not as a form of identity politics but as a stance that invokes worldliness through storytelling and listening. The interminable, bifurcating, and networking nature of storytelling and listening as narrative forms opens up an existential sociality and transgressive relationality that worlds China and critiques the closure of knowledge underlying any form of totalitarianism.