Status Updates From The Sacred Willow: Four Gen...

TIL that the French outlawed the locally-made wines and pushed imported French ones on their colonial subjects and required each village to buy a certain amount of alcohol regularly so that the French could line their coffers and I am MAD.

Now I’m seeing how the Vietnamese’s strong office hierarchies may have had a foundation in French colonial practices.

Now *this* is a book in which the impact of French colonialism on the Vietnamese is front and center.

Ooh wowww, I'm getting Wild Swans / The Love Songs of W. E. B. DuBois / The Covenant of Water vibes. A multigenerational family saga (this one's nonfiction!) with very smooth prose. Nice.

Dang, this imperial exam is the same as the one in The Wall of Storms, lol.

learning about the french colonization and how that erased the old traditions of vietnam has been sad