no traveler brought a good name to the family
And yet, as we see in this collection, they travelled.
Dong Li's collection the orange tree is also a history of China and it certainly doesn't shy away from the devastation included in that history. 'Tell our Daughters' certainly stands out in that regard, which focuses on the Japanese invasion and was gruesome. Of course, violence is also included in the titular poem The Orange Tree, which focuses on a family and the horror that formation of history can unleash.
I'm not going to lie, if the introduction hadn't told me that this story was being told from the point of view of a child, I genuinely would not have realised that.
The formatting was really different and I would love to get my hands on a paperback!