Paradise of the Blind

Duong Thu Huong, in the novel Paradise of the Blind, tells the story of Hang, a young Vietnamese woman who is forced to go to the Soviet Union to work because of dire economic circumstances in her native land. She is also forced to cut short her education. Hang travels to the Soviet Union by train, and on the way the young woman's memories form the bulk of the book, and they are highly critical of the conditions of life in Vietnam. There is no area of life in that land that escapes her criticism

---women's rights, communism, health care, hunger, the bureaucracy, land reform, Confucianism, patriarchy, poverty, and so on. At the same time, it is clear that she loves her homeland, a fact which is reflected in her glowing descriptions of the country and the people. In novel form, the book is a history of the nation over the last three decades.

For the most part, Hang is a victim of forces beyond her control in Vietnamese society. The telling of her story is a step toward taking charge of her own destiny. It is also a step toward moving away from the memories which have formed her novel. It seems that she is ready and willing to let go of those memories, now that she has given them form in her story, but it is not certain what she sees in terms of the future:

I'm going to sell this house and leave all this behind. We can honor the wishes of the dead with a few flowers on a grave somewhere. I can't squander my life tending these faded flowers, these shadows, the legacy of the

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ng is determined not to meet the same fate. Whether Hang stays in Vietnam or leaves, it is clear that she will not live on dreams of the past, dreams of a "paradise of the blind," but will seek truth and liberation instead. Bibliography Huong, Duong Thu. Paradise of the Blind. New York: William Morrow, 1988. The plot of Yasunari Kawabata's House of the Sleeping Beauties is deceptively simple. Eguchi, a 67-year-old man, apparently beyond or almost beyond his years of sexual potency, is told by a friend about a house where old men pay to spend the night with naked young women who are drugged into a sleep from which they cannot be awakened. Although the old men cannot have sexual intercourse with the young women, the extent of what they are allowed to do beyond that is left vague. At one point, the woman who runs the house tells the old man that "He was not to do anything in bad taste. . . . He was not to put his finger into the mouth of the sleeping girl, or try anything else of that sort" (13). And yet later, when the old man suggests to the woman that a man might kill one of the girls and then kill himself if he didn't want to die alone, the woman says, "Please do, if you feel lonely about doing it by yourself" (73). I

Category: Literature - P