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

Been wanting to find out where Mai’s family lived in Saigon and I think it may have been LITERALLY AROUND THE CORNER from where I currently live??? Holy sh*t.

Crying big tears at the fall of Saigon chapter… living in Saigon, with the 51st anniversary just a few days away. So much tension and emotion.

Really appreciate Mai’s balanced and nuanced reflection on the range of Vietnamese political ideology and personal/economic motivations. Too often the world still only knows the U.S. stance on the American War on Vietnam. U.S. readers would learn a lot from reading this.

Fascinating to read about Mai’s time at university in the U.S., but I do wonder how much she (still) believes the American propaganda she describes, which beliefs she has internalized and which she’s changed her mind on later.

Oooh, Mai’s headed off to the U.S. Wonder what will happen to her there?

Yeah, any woman who says they’d rather be living in any other historical time period has internalized misogyny because the amount of sh*t that the Duong women and girls have to put up with from men they are related to is terrible.

Much war talk.

It’s incredible to read this and think about how I might’ve crossed paths with Mai’s ancestors across space and time. So many of the places she writes about, I have been.

This would work nicely as a nonfiction pairing with Dumb Luck.

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.