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Paradise of the Blind: A Novelby Duong Thu Huong, Nina McPherson |
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Paradise of the Blind is an exquisite portrait of three Vietnamese women struggling to survive in a society where subservience to men is expected and Communist corruption crushes every dream. Through the eyes of Hang, a young woman in her twenties who has grown up amidst the slums and intermittent beauty of Hanoi, we come to know the tragedy of her family as land reform rips apart their village. When her uncle Chinh's political loyalties replace family devotion, Hang is torn between her mother's appalling self?sacrifice and the bitterness of her aunt who can avenge but not forgive. Only by freeing herself from the past will Hang be able to find dignity ?? and a future.
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A banned book is a must-reed-book, November 4, 2007 -  |
Paradise of the Blind: A Novel Review |
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The book grabbed me from the very first page. So well written, so full of sadness. However, this would not be the reason to put it in my top-10-list. This is the first book I read about Vietnam, and it creates a vivid image about the life. Looks like the communism in Vietnam is very different than in the EU countries. Vietnam is widely rural country, where people live around food, trade, and celebrations. This is so important, because trade, money and private property -the worst enemies of communism- could not be eradicated. Another important reason for the failed collectivization maybe in the fact that Vitanam lacked those "ultra-rich" bourgeoisie people, the "kullaks", the "enemy of the proletariat". Collective farms in EU or Russia were successful, when they were built with the wealth of the stolen "expropriated" properties of the "kulaks".
After the "Committee for correction of mistakes", looks like the village people returned to their lives without much of a change: hard work, trade and food. In addition, the communism failed to provide for basic living environment, like housing, streets, sewer etc, even in big places like Hanoi. Despite the fact, they had a nation of hard-working people. Ironically, it was the communist activists who suffered most: by creating their own hell, by spying, backstabbing each other, and creating a system of corruption, and brown-nosing; by starving instead of working. Communism is a system that cannot exist, it simply self-devours, and collapses, through corruption, miss-management and waste. By rewarding the loyals over the professionals. Similarly as in Europe, the communists gave power to the laziest, most arrogant and most stupid of the society, the "lumpen-proletariats", and declared them "working class heroes". The book studies the family relationships and points out a curious phenomenon: the idea of self-sacrifice in the name of family, sometimes hard to understand. The only way I can understand, why the mother was starving her daughter and fattening her brother's family, is by an obsession. She must have been mentally ill, to do so, I think. Mental problem could be triggered by the tragedies in her life, depression, sadness, isolation, combined with hard work and insufficient sleep and rest. The most important moment of the book, I think, is the conversation between uncle Chinh and his comrades in the Khoa's apartment in Moscow. I do not believe such conversation actually took place. This is the center of the accusations of the author against the system, and this is why she went to jail. The book is quite fragmented, but I see no problems with this. Have no problems with the explicit and long descriptions of the foods. Looks like, the life there literally revolves around food. I learned about the local cuisine. Would be nice, however, to have a time table and a map. When was Hang born? 1970, so that uncle Chinh would have time to come back AFTER the war. (and which war: with France or USA?) But this does not give time for her to grow up and go to USSR in early - mid 1980. It would help to have a map to see where the action takes place, and what are the distances between places. (Please see the wonderful book "Persian mirrors") A couple of small corrections: The name of the Russian pop-singer is Alla PugaTCHova, not Pugatnova. The underground fare in 1980-s was 15 "kopeiki" (cents), not 5 rubbles. |
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Full of atmosphere, with a taste of the sacred -  |
Paradise of the Blind: A Novel Review |
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a very good book, worth reading for anyone, but especially if you're interested in Vietnam, Vietnamese culture, communism, or southeast asian cuisine. |
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Fragrant Herbs and Bitter Truths - |
Paradise of the Blind: A Novel Review |
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This is a fine novel in many ways, at once probing the fissures and scars of life in modern Vietnam in an uncompromising manner while telling a tragic tale of family conflict and broken dreams. The descriptions of everyday life are rich and detailed in ways that move the story along, and the author has framed the story well by presenting much of it as flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks, which enables her to compellingly uncover the complex snarl of events and episodes entangled with Vietnam's troubled history as all of this affects the present.
In terms of pages this is a novel of modest length, but so much is going on. There is a definite political edge to it, a sharp critique of the absurdities, deprivations, and hypocrisies of life under a Communist regime by a former true believer. But that's only the beginning. The polarization of urban and rural life is also a major theme, as is the complicated links and disjunctures between generations. Even geopolitics as it affects individuals comes into play, and all of this in a way that seems perfectly natural in this well-told tale. Still, the characters, while generally convincing, are sometimes just short of three-dimensional. Hang's Uncle Chinh is always despicable, her Aunt Tam is always strong and vengeful, and so on. Not quite caricatures, but a bit too close nevertheless. And while the role of food is important in this novel in many interesting ways, signifying bounty and comfort but also manipulation and power, still sometimes the grocery list gets a bit long. All of which just means that the novel is excellent but not perfect. The translators have also provided an introduction, a glossary, and a note on the author that helpfully and unobtrusively give the reader the right amount of context to appreciate this fine work. |
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An Uncomprising Critique of "Revolutionary" Vietnam - |
Paradise of the Blind: A Novel Review |
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A short response to any book by Duong Thu Huong is a good deal like a short response to the Bible--it will be lacking. This is especially the case with Huong's 1988 work Paradise of the Blind, the story of a young Hanoi woman, Hang, forced to give up her university studies and work in the Soviet Union in order to support her mother. This is only half the story though. Hang reached adulthood after the heroic period of the twentieth century in Vietnam, namely the wars for independence and reunification, as well as the revolution. These events led to colossally momentous experiences in the lives of Hang's family--her mother and aunt whom she loves and the uncle she hates--so profoundly shaping were the experiences of these times that there consequences for Hang's family have nearly as deep consequences for her own life. Ultimately the only way that Hang is able to escape the chains bind her family members to the past is by abandoning her connection to the it.
Hang's troubles actually began a decade before she was born when Uncle Chinh returned triumphant from the war against the French to introduce land redistribution to his own and her mother's village in the middle 1950's. The approach Chinh took to land reform essentially ensured that he was going to be less than beloved by any person in the village--finding the most depraved and degraded of the village's lumpen proletariat and elevating them to the status of rural working class heroes. The paternal side of Hang's family has their property ruthlessly expropriated and her father is forced into internal exile. Chinh does not just acquiesce to their impoverishment and humiliation, but his own belief in the socialist millennium being just around the corner impels him, quite happily, to fanatically push for it and treat his sister harshly for continuing to even care about dispossessed husband and in laws. Chinh thus violates loyalty to kin in order to serve his own ideological pretensions and a poorly articulated form of class solidarity. At the novel's close when we see him waiting hand and foot on smugglers half of his age in order to better his material circumstances, it is truly pitiful, but is justice through history's cunning--one that was not likely to have been lost on the government authority that decided to withdraw the book from circulation. Considering the pain he has caused, Chinh is not worthy of pity, but it is hard to argue that his situation is not pitiful. Hang's Aunt Tam is the surviving victim of Chinh's fanaticism, but she is not a character that could easily be described as pitiful, though she is worthy of pity in a way Chinh simply is not capable of being. Kept warm at night by the hate she has for Chinh and the contempt she holds all Communists in, this fanatically hardworking capitalist has grown absurdly rich by Vietnamese standards, without having to employ another person; thus making her a walking and talking reminder that not every rich person is rich by dint of exploiting the labor of the poor. Where Chinh is a fanatic who ultimately gives in to the system's endemic corruption, making a hypocrite out of himself, Tam is perfectly willing to use her money to subvert the system when it is convenient to do so and she makes no bones about where her power and influence come from and where her loyalties lie. Her riches and the influence that she wields are the product of an absolutely implacable sense of indignation at the injustices her own family suffered at the hands of the Communists in general and Chinh in particular. Once Hang is old enough to form an opinion of her Uncle it is overwhelmingly negative and overtly hostile, though she is not capable of despising her uncle with the intensity that her Aunt--a Herculean task even without trying to grow richer with every passing day purely through hard labor. Que, Hang's mother, would seem to have as much justification to despise Chinh as Tam, because he certainly ruined her marriage through his ideological pretensions and career considerations. Instead she slavishly and thanklessly provides for his and his family's needs to her own and Hang's physical detriments. Que's dedication to Chinh's well being is repellant to Hang for the same reasons that it is repellant to most American readers; is a moral weakling incapable of admitting he performed a massive injustice. What makes it truly disgraceful, in Hang's eyes, is that Que's work is an attempt to maintain a link to a past that did nothing but bring pain to herself, her aunt, and Hang during her childhood where she was deprived of a father. Familial piety is an honorable and comprehensible value to Hang, one which she is filled with enough of to send her abroad to support her mother after she is crippled, and indefinitely put her own ambitions on hold; but it is so distorted and so pathetic in Que, that it invites at best pity and at worst contempt. The fanaticisms of ideology, wealth and revenge, and continuity with a bucolic past that is a part of the three adults who had the greatest influence Hang could have consumed her had she not decisively broken with that past. Hang's own liberation will come only with that unforgiving war of attrition that finally kills all passions of memory and replaces it with largely dispassionate and impersonal history. The difficulties and Hang's life were almost wholly the cause of her kin living life's passions at extremes that could do nothing but cause her further distress were she to try to honor any of the values that they found to be so important--even gave their lives meaning. All of their lives have tragic elements to them, and it is precisely for that reason that Hang refuses to be imprisoned by their collective pasts. That past has to be down graded in importance if she is to be free to make a future for herself. |
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Universal and specific - |
Paradise of the Blind: A Novel Review |
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I bought this book after hearing an interview with the author on National Public Radio. She has an antagonistic attitude toward the regime, which, for reasons of its own, tolerates her. Duong expresses negativity toward Vietnamese communism mainly through her depiction of the narrator's uncle, a petty, dogmatic, narrow-minded cadre who brutalizes the narrator's angelic father. The preferability of capitalism is epitomized by the narrator's aunt, a wise, conscientious small landholder who overcomes adversity. The young female narrator would earn the sympathy of anybody under any system that shatters dreams and stifles opportunity. A good read, but be wary of the author's agenda. |
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