Paradise of the Blind

“She must have suffered, seen her hopes snuffed out, her passions ground to ash. She too must have known this weariness, this despair. Like us, she must have had to reinvent hope and a yearning for life.”

After Hang is assaulted, her roommate plays a record to cheer her up. Hang feels sad, humiliated, and homesick (38). The music distracts her momentarily from these feelings, as the singer’s voice takes her thoughts to another place. Hang connects with the singer’s sense of hopelessness, weariness, and despair, but the singer becomes “one of the few pleasures” that ease her homesickness (35). When Hang hears the singer’s voice again years later on the train to Moscow, she realizes why she is drawn to it: “Like a call, it beckoned me to a kind of love-to revolt, the most essential force in human existence” (39).

“I felt, as I would never feel again, the weight of my fatherless fate.”

Hang grows up not knowing her father and deeply desires to learn about him, but her mother gently refuses Hang’s questions. Hang feels lost without a connection to her father. By phrasing it as fate, Hang implies the inevitability of the situation on her part. When she meets Aunt Tam, Hang begins to feel a connection to her father’s side of the family, and that connection grows as the novel progresses.

“We live in a materialist age. No one cares about all this ancestor worship. After death, there’s nothing.”

Uncle Chinh represents the new age of communism in Vietnam. He disregards traditional respect for his ancestors and instead looks forward to a revolution. Chinh is a character foil to Tam, who does care about ancestor worship and the continuance of family through lineage. These characters carry out their strikingly different values against the shared backdrop of a materialistic age.

“In our society, there are only two respectable types of people: the proletariat—the avant-garde of our society, the beacon of the revolution—and the peasantry, faithful ally of the proletariat in its struggle for the construction of socialism. The rest is nothing. The merchants, the petty tradespeople, they’re only exploiters.”

Chinh’s Communist ideology extends beyond breaking from ancestral traditions. Chinh identifies people within his own community as exploiters and therefore enemies of the state, dividing families and establishing an environment in which neighbors are suspicious of one another. He operates in extremes: loyal or dissident, right or wrong.

“I felt desolate. My mother, too, looked fragile, abandoned. I needed another presence, another shoulder to lean on in this life.”

Hang constantly feels the absence of her father, but especially when she’s at her most vulnerable and lost. On the trip to the village with her mother, Hang sees Que as being just as fragile as she feels herself. Seeing her own mother looking so frail leaves Hang feeling unprotected. Que’s inability to recognize and address the void Hang feels eventually pushes Hang into the sympathies of Aunt Tam, who steps in as a protective figure in the absence of Ton.

“And the past started to live and stir again inside him. He felt his heart race. Suddenly, the ease and tranquility of his life in the Muong village could no longer hold him.”

Hang’s father flees his village, leaving Hang’s mother behind. Despite the lavish life he creates for himself in a different village, he cannot deny the strength of his memories of Que. Ton is unable to fully escape the past, even when he’s in a much more comfortable situation. Like Communism, the promise of ease and tranquility—even the experience of ease and tranquility—is not enough to completely snuff out the human passion between two people.

“The sight of the house stirred something in me: a vision of a former life, my own, that of my parents, of my friends, of my country; a past to which each of us is linked, inextricably, by the ties of blood and race.”

Hang cannot escape the past that links her to her family. She also begins to understand that her past goes beyond her family to include her community and even her whole country. Her misfortunes and those of her parents are not unique to this era of Communist reform in Vietnam. This shared history links Hang to everyone in her country.

“Horrible deep, ugly furrows separated the soles of her feet into flaky layers. Time and back-breaking work in the fields had ravaged them. At the same time, they were dainty feet, thin and elegant. Rich now, she could afford to wear imported plastic sandals from Thailand, a luxury in this village. Still, they could never hide her past.”

Tam is both hard-working and elegant, a difficult balance to strike in her circumstances. She maintains her composure during even the hardest of times. Still, the long-term physical effects of her struggles are apparent; Tam cannot erase the scars of labor from her feet, just as Hang cannot erase the scars of her family’s conflicted history.

“I understood something, perhaps for the first time: In every life, there must come a moment when what is most sacred, most noble, in us evaporates into thin air. In a flash of lucidity, the values we have honored and cherished reveal themselves in all their poverty and vulgarity, as they had to this girl.”

When Hang witnesses a fellow student make an incorrect accusation of theft, the situation becomes awkward when the girl finds her belongings exactly where she had left them. Hang recognizes the feeling of disappointment at witnessing personal convictions unfold into unrealized outcomes. The flashback is also an example of the way in which Hang puzzles over her intricate past through her series of memories on the train. This flashback is not directly related to an experience Hang had with her own family, but the sentiment she recognizes in her fellow student is one that she’s experienced through her own family’s struggles. It captures the inevitable disappointment and self-reflection that come when deeply held values prove wrong.

“And you too, you’re going to have to travel all that way to the university. I’ll buy you a French Peugeot bicycle. If you succeed in going abroad to study, I’ll buy you a house in Hanoi.”

Aunt Tam lavishes attention and support on Hang, encouraging her to do well in school so that she can have a better life. Going abroad to study is viewed as an accomplishment and a way out of Communism, and Tam promises material rewards for such an accomplishment. Although she encourages Hang to aim for an international education abroad, she maintains that Hang should return to her ancestral roots, hence the promise of a house in Hanoi.

“God, he’s a real little tyrant, that brother of yours! And they call that revolutionary? My family is poor. Five brothers and sisters. But no one tries to boss anyone around. Whenever one of us has troubles, everyone pitches in [...] And there should be solidarity between brothers and sisters. But within reason, within the limits of human feeling!”

Neighbor Vi is a minor character in the novel, but hers is the voice of reason. Que becomes wrapped up in her family drama to a level that negatively impacts her own well-being and the well-being of Hang. She sacrifices more than others would in her situation, as Vi points out. Additionally, Vi points out that help between family members should not be one-sided, and brothers and sisters should help one another. Vi recognizes the extent to which Que makes sacrifices for Chinh, yet Chinh does not reciprocate and make sacrifices for Que in return. Vi’s assessment of the situation highlights the dysfunctionality of Hang’s family and highlights an alternative example of sibling support in this society.

“Nobody can fast the whole Year of the Pig in hopes of some sumptuous feast in the Year of the Dog.”

Vi points out the danger of Que constantly working herself to the bone all for the sake of Chinh’s comfort: Que cannot expect that all this work will reap rewards in the future. Chinh will continue to accept Que’s sacrifices but is uninterested and later unable to return the gestures. Hang also observes her mother living in this cycle of constant sacrifice with no reward in sight, and she decides to break from that cycle at the end of the story.

“Why did she love people who enslaved her?”

Hang recognizes that Que’s sacrifices for Chinh are one-sided. Que’s sacrifices grow increasingly frustrating to Hang because it directly means less for herself. On an emotional level, watching Que prostrate herself to someone as corrupt and incompetent as Chinh is shameful to Hang.

“I haven’t seen the fog for twelve years, but I feel like I live it every day, in my hair, in my mouth, under my skin. This morning, getting out of bed, I walked right into […] that gray chill.”

Hang’s artist friend cannot help but bring fog into his artwork because it’s such a deeply embedded part of his history and life experience. Even after being away from home for over a decade, the image of his home setting haunts him and makes its way into his art. Hang has similar difficulty separating herself from her ancestral setting. His words express the extent to which characters in the novel internalize their origins. 

“But I no longer felt the stab of sadness, the despair that had weighed me down as a child. All I heard now in this song was a vague pity in the middle of the chaos of life, a call for tenderness, protection, the desire to reach out for comfort.”

The village cripple is a minor character, but his song remains constant throughout the novel. Hang’s understanding of the lyrics changes with her own life experiences. As a child, Hang focuses on death and decay associated with autumn leaves. As an adult, Hang relates to the tenderness in the lyrics, signifying her own eventual shift from decay to hope at the end of the story.

“The past still stirred under all those ashes: this jumble of self-sacrifice, duties, generosity and blind obedience. Women like my mother were not terribly farsighted. They lived in the certainties of the moment.”

The blindness in the novel’s title connects to blind obedience here in the context of sacrifice. Like Eden’s Paradise, the inhabitants of this garden on earth are not farsighted. There are no certainties here, so they live from one moment to the next, following the cycle of sacrifice blindly. Hang breaks this repetition when she refuses to blindly follow Tam’s dying wish that she remain at her home.

“Only the first lie really costs us; after that, everything flows from the same wellspring.”

Once someone compromises their morals, it’s easy to continue down the path that’s opened. Hang is astonished to witness her mother lie to Aunt Tam, but she’s impressed that Que keeps the lies coming as she winds her story for Tam. Tam sees through it, though. Que’s dignity is already at stake for having sold Tam’s jewelry. Lying about it compounds the sin, increasing Que’s shame.

“In the end, everything comes to light in this world. The needle always emerges from the haystack. Do you think you can hide human actions, day in and day out, as they are revealed to others?”

Tam trusts in the eventual exposure of wrongs. Her reaction to Que’s confession that she has sold Tam’s jewelry demonstrates Tam’s composure. She remains calm as she recounts the wrongs leading to this moment. She knows what Que has done with the jewelry meant for Hang, and she wants Que to know that she sees through her lies. Que’s character slowly appears as the novel progresses, bringing us to question how honorable a woman she really is.

“You say our dances are decadent. But haven’t you done some dancing yourself? Invisible dances, infinitely more decadent than ours?”

The graduate student points out Chinh’s hypocrisy. Chinh asserts right and wrong and casts judgment on others who don’t strictly follow Communist ideology, but he is also involved in corruption. Chinh speaks as though he expects everyone to adhere to strict moral rules, yet he himself follows illegal pathways to gain wealth behind closed doors. The young graduate students are of a generation that doesn’t blindly respect strict Communist ideology the way Chinh does, and Chinh is no longer in a politically powerful position to command respect. The graduate student openly mocking and lecturing Chinh signifies the Revolution’s complete demise in the eyes of the people by the end of the novel.

“They’ve worn themselves out trying to recreate heaven on earth. But their intelligence wasn’t up to it. They don’t know what their heaven is made of, let alone how to get there.”

Hang’s Bohemian friend captures the essence of the constant struggle in Communism: People work themselves to the bone in hopes of creating a better life, but the entire system is severely mismanaged, and the results are opposite of what had been hoped for. As a result, people are trapped in the cycle of endless labor and increasing poverty, far from the heaven they thought they were creating on earth.

“Their intelligence, their perseverance—these are qualities we Asians have in no short supply. All this generation had was a bit of luck. Luck to have been born in peacetime, in a real house, in the right place, under a real roof […].”

Hang sees the Japanese as commanding a kind of respect that opens opportunity. In contrast, Hang looks at her fellow Vietnamese and sees fearful faces uncertain of any chance of opportunity. Hang compares Japanese tourists to the Vietnamese people she has known, wondering as to how people with shared Asian ancestry can live such different lives. To have been born during peacetime would have changed the trajectory of Hang’s life entirely. 

“You survived life here, but you never really lived it.”

The concept of surviving versus living draws attention to the constant struggle of life where Hang grows up. She repeats the idea that life is wasted in Vietnam throughout the novel. She doesn’t share Que’s sentiment that sacrifice for others is the meaning of life.

“I felt choked with anger, as if a wave of heat was burning through my chest, rising to my brain. It felt like a moment of madness. I wanted to scream, to smash something, to escape the stench of this wretched roof once and for all. But I only pretended to yawn.”

Hang demonstrates the calm demeanor she’s learned from Tam. Unlike Tam’s confrontation with Que, though, Hang refrains from engaging in the war between families, at least in this moment. She understands that her mother will never abandon Chinh, not even in speech, so sharing her own feelings about her uncle will not do anything to better these last moments between them before Hang leaves in the middle of the night. It’s easier for Hang to simply wait and disappear than it is for her to relive the same ideological arguments with her mother again.