Hang, a Vietnamese woman, came of age in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Hang never knew her father, a teacher driven into exile during the land reform era by a local Communist party leader who was also his brother-in-law. Hang’s Aunt Tam, her father’s sister, lavishes affection on her young niece as the sole member of her generation to carry on the family line. Hang’s mother increasingly devotes her meager resources to support her party member brother and his family. Hang embodies the tension between the two sides of her family.

This novel depicts a beautiful but broken country. A great loneliness permeates the novel. Hang’s mother and her Aunt Tam pull her in different directions, trying to force her to choose between the two sides of her family. As she tries to do her duty to both families, Hang’s isolation grows, yet she is still young enough to dream of a different future. ( )

The Communist party of North Vietnam in the 20th century destroyed families and disrupted whole communities. In the 1950s, anybody who had a house, any land, the smallest noodle shack, was denounced and forced to give up all their possessions, and shunned and shamed. Madame Que, the protagonist's mother, us married to a teacher, who is denounced. Hang's father leaves the village, and we never see him again. In fact, you will miss Hang's conception if you're not paying attention. Hang's Aunt Tam, her father's sister, maintains a lifelong love, defence, and reverence for him, and hates Madame Que for not keeping his memory alive for Hang. Madame Que, on the other hand, reveres her brother, a minor official in the Communist party, and the instigator of the denouncements of Hang's father and sister, and the consequent destruction of their lives. But Aunt Tam, really the central character, works her fingers to the Bone and rebuilds her life, while the petty Communist official lives a life of deprivation and hypocrisy. Hang is denied a father, and has a troubled relationship with her mother, which eventually totally crumbles. This book is a chronicle of what beauty, energy, spirit, and inspiration lies in the Earth, and how Humans can miss the whole beauty and happiness this life offers them, believing that happiness lies in material success, the esteem of whatever group is currently in power, and false pride.

Vegans will be grossed out by many parts of this book:
Page 139
"She had made one of my favorite soups: a mixture of lily buds, puree of a crab, and crab eggs. The eggs floated like clouds of spun gold in the middle of the lily buds, translucent from the cooking."
P.140
" 'Perfect. The women can start cutting up the scallions and the parsley. We're going to make an unforgettable tripe stew out of this,' another man chimed in. 'Oh, yeah, like the last time, for old Toan's memorial service. It's still stank of excrement,' someone shot back. The father spoke now. 'You are bitter, aren't you? I told you: I was drunk, and so I let the Cuu Brothers help me. That was fatal. Everyone knows they'll eat just about anything.' "
P.141
"Next to the kitchen door, a young man was shaving the butchered pig. His razor glinted in the beam of the lamp. Another young man with just the shadow of a mustache--he couldn't have been more than 17 or 18--Doused the pig with buckets of boiling water, dumping them over it at regular intervals. The blade of the first man's razor followed the rhythm of each Cascade of water and the pig's black bristles sheared off to reveal the naked whiteness of its skin."
P.176-177
"I obeyed, taking the plate of blood custard from him and putting it down on the tray. The dish looked good: the blood had congealed into a thick gelatin; there wasn't a trace of liquid at The rim; and the surface was sprinkled with fine strips of duck liver, crushed garlic, and peanuts grilled to a perfect golden brown."

Aunt Tam scolding Madame Que for starving Hang to buy medicine for her diabetic brother:
P.187
"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? Even from my village, I know about your life, see the price you pay. I don't reproach you. We all turn to family. After all, blood runs thick. And this love I feel for my brother, how could I deny it to others? But I want you to understand something clearly: your brother is my family's mortal enemy. He killed my brother. I forbid you to use my money to feed him."

Hang's despair over her mother's love for her brother, at the expense of love for her, and her trying to make sense of human life:
P.190
"I saw my mother, at that moment, grasping her knees to her chest in the middle of an empty house. I felt the tears trickled down my cheeks, one by one. That's the way it is. There's no dignity on this Earth for those who live and breathe in misery. I hadn't lost again."
P.199
"He shook my hand, kissed my head, and quickly crossed the street. Never look back, I thought, even for a second. No happiness can hold; every life, every dream, has its unraveling."
P.202-203
"There was something sinister about this tranquility, and order of this existence. It was the peace of a swamp, a far cry from our storms and squalls. Russian culture had bred too many broken dreams, all that was left was the pure, thin air of ideals, too poor to sustain human life, or its need for creativity and fulfillment. These calm, resigned faces seem engraved with no more than the memory of a culture that had once contributed milestones to the history of civilization."

( )

You know the kind of book you buy because you know it will be good, but then you side-eye it on your shelves because you also know it will be devastating, and you are just so seldom in the mood for devastating? Yeah, that was this book. I finally took it off the shelves and read it because it was from this month's region for the Read the World 21 challenge, which I am grateful for. I ended up really loving this book, even as I spent most of it wanting to strangle one of the main characters.

Summoned by telegram to help her ailing uncle, Hang spends most of her time on the train reminiscing over her childhood. Now a textile worker in Russia, Hang grew up without a father in the slums of Hanoi, Vietnam. But she remains connected to her mother's rural home village by her Aunt Tam, who has attached herself to Hang as the only continuation of her family line.

Hang's entire life is shaped by something that happened years before she was born. Her mother's brother, Uncle Chinh, came back from war as an official in charge of land reform. Hang's mother has married someone in the landowner class, and in the upheaval of land reform her father is exiled, Aunt Tam loses everything, and Hang's mother eventually flees to Hanoi. While Hang's father dies in exile (after a brief reappearance during which he fathers Hang), Hang, her mother, Aunt Tam, and Uncle Chinh remain both bound together and torn apart by their shared history, their dedication to shar4ed blood, and the failures of Vietnam's experiments in Communism.

By turns beautiful and heartbreaking. So glad I finally read it. ( )

Ugh. No. Boring. I can't.

I thought this was going to be really good. It was the first novel translated from Vietnamese to English even though it was only published in 1988. That says a huge amount about many things, most of it supposition.

The plot follows the life of Hang, a young woman, in a series of flashbacks and contemporary reflections. We follow her as she studies in Moscow and visiting her ageing uncle there.

As she grows, she discovers what has caused the tensions between her, her mother, her aunt and her uncle, and she fights to keep in play multiple loyalties.

Her childhood has been difficult with an absent father and a mother who has sacrificed everything for her. There’s a whole ton of emotional baggage buried beneath the surface, as you’d expect from Vietnam in the 1980s, but while I really wanted an insight into Vietnamese culture and particularly the political issues, I didn’t really get it in the form I was expecting.

I guess I was after docudrama and what I got was the story of one family from the point of view of a active critic of the Communist government.

The fact that Vietnam has banned the book for its political stance surprises me on the one hand because it doesn’t have outright criticism in its pages. But when you’ve lived all your life serving a Communist leadership, you learn, I suppose, to make your case with more subtlety.

This makes the criticism harder to spot in a novel that places what we’re having for dinner and a description of a moonlit night on the same par as what the local communist cadre is up to.

And maybe that’s the point, that the Party isn’t front and centre, that daily life is more important than political ideology. If so, the novel works a charm.

The storytelling is very fragmented and the characters aren’t developed too much. While this may be frustrating for western readers, it definitely romanticises the beauty of Vietnam and cultural essentials like its food and so, for Vietnamese, I can see how would strike a very melodic chord. ( )