In the form of narrative poems, it tells the story of Jin He, a little girl, who fled from war-torn Vietnam to the United States with her mother and three brothers at the age of ten.
Taking every day as a time node, similar to the education of love, records the world in children's eyes.
Kuige, who wants to hatch chickens, takes Bruce Lee as his idol, renamed Angkor and Guangge, who wants to be an engineer. Every brother is very distinctive and cute.
Jinhe's father is a Vietnamese navy and works near the South China Sea. His mother is a northerner. Due to the civil war in the country and the dispute between the north and the south, when Xiaojinhe was one year old, his father was arrested by the northern army for performing his duties, and he was never heard from again. In the next nine years, all four children in the family were raised by their mothers.
They set up an altar in the most conspicuous place in their home and prayed for their father's safe return every day. But dad didn't come back until the war situation became more and more severe and the whole family was forced to board a warship and leave Vietnam.
Mom says no news is good news. This sentence sounds sad and difficult to understand. However, when they arrived in America, they suddenly learned the news of their father's death one day, and Jinhe realized that he never had a father again. Once, there was hope; Now, there is no hope.
The first half of this book is about the process of leaving Vietnam, and the second half is about life in America. The author said, I try to imagine what the world looks like in the eyes of a ten-year-old girl.
This 10-year-old girl, who went to a new school to study, can't speak English, because her yellow skin was laughed at by her classmates, and she was not happy at all.
But mom is brave. The mother encouraged the children to adapt themselves wholeheartedly to the new life. She said:
For the sake of four children, my mother wants to pawn the only valuable purple wedding ring and put on new clothes. However, my brothers disagree. Brother Guang said that this is the thought left by your father.
In the new environment, the family understands each other, supports each other and hides their pain.
Brother Guang gave up his dream of being an engineer for a while, went to their American guarantor's shop to learn to repair cars, and went home every day to wash his hands full of oil and dirt. Quigo refused to eat food with wings because the hatched chicks were crushed to death on the way to escape. Only Wu Geqiang, no one bullied him, but no one dared to go near him.
Mother's finger was rubbed and bled by an electric machine. Neighbors threw stones at home and wrote a note asking them to leave. ...
In the eyes of a ten-year-old girl, everything is sad.
However, life will always get better and better.