The Orange Tree

Dong Li’s debut collection is tenderly premised around the multiplicity of language. With a translator’s precision and an ethnographer’s comprehensiveness, The Orange Tree narrates generations of a family’s 20th-century history. The noteworthy title poem traverses a period spanning the Japanese invasion of China and the Cultural Revolution, measured by the life of a single tree: “no one ever picked oranges again. / Still the orange tree bore fruit.” Li’s lyric account connects domestic plots to national movements, sometimes avoiding subject or verb to indicate people being acted upon rather than being able to act: “New memory took over. Old memory rusted. Would new memory last.” Such interrupted syntax contrasts with breathlessly associative sections that refuse punctuation altogether: “someone jumped into the river with his brother japanese soldiers threw grenades his brother shredded to pieces he floated on these body parts.”

The book is “[i]n memory of C.D. [Wright],” with whom the author shares an attentiveness to a wholeness that can only be made of fragments, and a concentration that renders place into page (in Li’s case, by writing on the Yalu River and Nanjing). The epigraph for the poem “The Maple Bridge” also comes from Wright: “only the crossing counts”; reading the vertical lines of text that follow requires crossing.

Further visual play includes varied text justification, lines surrounded by pairs of curly brackets, and Chinese characters (painted vividly by Xu Jing) alongside compound English words, for example: “the shreddeddays / the augustwoman / the shufflingthreshold / the farawayorangetree.” In his foreword, Srikanth Reddy poses these as a kind of orientalist Rorschach test for the “Western reader,” since the relationships between the Chinese characters and the English neologisms are unclear. The latter sometimes extracts words from the poems that follow, and for Chinese readers can also invoke the hypotext of a collective and ancient voice: a famous eighth-century Zhang Ji poem about Maple Bridge in Suzhou is translated through key images into “the crowcawsforestfrost / the moonslidesdownriver / the matboatmuteshores / the fishermantorchlight.” Like its calligraphy, The Orange Tree is stranger and more chasmic than it immediately appears, embedding relentlessly into a shared history.