Duong Thu Huong’s novel, ‘Paradise of the Blind’ creates a reflective, often bittersweet atmosphere through the narrator Hang’s expressive descriptions of the landscapes she remembers through her life. Huong’s protagonist emphasises the emotional effects these landscapes have on her, acknowledging, “many landscapes have left their mark on me.”
The contrast Huong provides between the reality of Hang’s impoverished life and the beauty of the scenery that she experiences, emphasise the powerful effect the landscape has on her. When describing the first snowfall she ever observed, Hang noticed that the snowflakes “flood[ed] the earth with their icy whiteness,” this observation “pierc[ing her] soul like sorrow.” The scenery had such a moving effect on Hang, perhaps because she longed for the familiar sight of a Vietnamese landscape. Then recalling a time when her mother took her to a beach, the exquisiteness of the scene at dawn was equally emotionally poignant to Hang, not because she wished for a recognisable sight, but because it was such an extreme difference from the slum in Hanoi where she grew up. The sensory details of her childhood remain with Hang even years later, acting as a reminder of her humble beginnings even as she advances in life. The stench of “rancid urine” that permeated the walls of the slum and the hut where she and her mother lived, with its persistently leaky roof “patched together out of…rusty sheet metal” ; build a vivid picture of poverty. To then be exposed to the breathtaking vista of a natural landscape, having experienced the scarceness of beauty in the slums that is her home, causes distress in Hang.
Huong’s protagonist regards life as difficult and at times depressing, the positive aspects ofte...
... middle of paper ...
...the landscape reveals to Hang that despite facing hardship, there is always hope to recover, and the steady presence of the land to assist in returning to the way things were.
From the contrast of the slums of Hanoi and the breathtaking beauty of a natural vista, Huong has revealed the impact of this disparity on her protagonist. The author utilises the connection between the land and the villagers of Que’s birthplace to emphasise the steadiness and support the landscape gives, in times of upheaval, illuminating that it is possible to recover from disaster. Despite Huong’s criticism of Vietnam, she emphasises the resilience of the people of Vietnam and the ability for beauty and hope to flourish through oppression.
Works Cited
Paradise of the Blind by Doung Thu Huong. Translated from Vietnamese by Phan Huy Duong and Nina McPherson. New York: Perennial, 2002.
In the novel Paradise of the Blind, Doung Thu Huong explores the effect the Communist regime has had upon Vietnamese cultural gender roles. During the rule of the Communist Viet Minh, a paradigm shift occurred within which many of the old Vietnamese traditions were dismantled or altered. Dounh Thu Huong uses the three prominent female characters – Hang, Que and Aunt Tam – to represent the changing responsibilities of women in Vietnamese culture. Que, Hang’s mother, represents a conservative, orthodox Vietnamese woman, who has a proverb-driven commitment to sustaining her manipulative brother, Chinh. Aunt Tam embodies a capitalistic
Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral” opens with a narrator whose wife has invited a blind friend to spend the night. The narrator depersonalizes the man right off the bat and repeatedly throughout the story by referring to him, not by name, but as “the blind man” (Carver 513). He admits that hi...
Hayslip, Le Ly, and Jay Wurts. When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman's Journey from War to Peace. New York: Plume, 1990. Print.
Yang makes her topic of the treacherous history of the Hmong people an appealing one with the story of her parents. She brings emotion into her writing that makes her readers feel as if they are there in the jungle, experiencing the fear and love these two lovers felt. Yang makes us aware of how hard it was for a young Hmong couple to survive in this trying time. Fate and destruction brought Yang’s parents together, and like other Hmong people, love kept them moving forward.
All the poems in Kettle Bottom display a powerful message. Some of the poems messages are happy while are extremely upsetting. The readers of these poems are able to learn about the horrific conditions that people in poverty were forced to live in but also about how they made the best of those situations whenever possible. The dangerous work conditions and the inhumane treat of people living in poverty is extremely disturbing and tragic. These poems are able to show first hand examples and experiences of people involved in these situations. Despite all the dark and deaths that the poor experience they still are able to find some light in it all with the birth of new things.
This novel offers an intriguing viewpoint that is not often explored when discussing a war. Le Ly Hayslip, through her account, allows readers to experience the Viet Nam War from a Vietnamese point of view. And not only to we get the unique view of a Vietnamese person but she is also a woman, and that in itself crosses many barriers. Most war accounts come from men that fought in a particular war; however, Le Ly was a civilian woman. When Heaven and Earth Changed Places shows, through her memories, how she struggled to survive and find peace, in spite of the tragic events that surrounded her. She is a strong woman and her strives to help her country have made drastic changes in the quality of life for many Vietnamese.
Carver designed the husband’s background through his unknown blindness of the modern world. The husband sees his wife’s blind friend as disabled and not as a person. The narrator is not happy about the blind mans stay because it makes him feel awkward. “and his being blind bothered me. My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movie the blind move slowly and never laughed. Sometimes they were led by seeing-eye dogs. The blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to”(4). This way Carver shows how blindness can hold back people in the world today. Spiritual blind people on the other hand can’t see beyond there own physical site.
cold, harsh, wintry days, when my brothers and sister and I trudged home from school burdened down by the silence and frigidity of our long trek from the main road, down the hill to our shabby-looking house. More rundown than any of our classmates’ houses. In winter my mother’s riotous flowers would be absent, and the shack stood revealed for what it was. A gray, decaying...
Don’t judge a book by its cover. We have all heard this cliché at least once in our lifetime. But how many times have we ever followed through with this expression? The author Raymond Carver writes about an experience where a couple is visited by the wife’s acquaintance Robert, whose wife has recently passed. The fact that Robert is blind belittles him in the eyes of the narrator, causing tension and misjudgment. In “Cathedral”, Carver uses irony, point of view, and symbolism to show the difference between looking and truly seeing.
“Wake up, wake up, son. We must leave now.” He opened his eyes and looked outside; it was still very dark and rainy. “Where are we going, Mom?” he asked while crawling out of bed sleepily. When they left the house for the train station, it was only four o’ clock in the morning, and the boy thought that his family was going to visit their grandparents whom he had not seen for ten years. The next morning, they arrived in Nha Trang, a coastal city in Central Vietnam, where his father told him that they would stay for a while before going to the next destination. They went to live in the house of an acquaintance near the fish market. Every day they would stay inside the house and would go out only when it was absolutely necessary, especially the kids who now had to learn how to be quiet. They learned how to walk tip-toe and to talk by finger pointing; few sounds were made. Every sound was kept to the minimum so the neighbors and the secret police would not be aware that there were new people in town.
Charles Taylor, a Canadian philosopher, argues that cultural survival is valuable and is a definitive good. He believes that it is in the proper domain of state action to define collective substantive goals for cultures, that can answer ‘what is ultimately valuable in life’, in order to protect the dialogical being. If we accept the argument that people are dialogical beings then deaf people should be allowed to live within their Deaf culture and produce deaf children as the please. By immersing themselves into a culture that surrounds them with others like them, they avoid the harms of misrecognition and it further gives them a sense of belonging.
...eased soldier, Tung, whom Kien has forgotten. “ ‘Maybe it was Tung. What do you think, Kien?’ ‘Tung who?’ asked Kien. ‘Crazy Tung. The guardsman, don’t you remember?’” (Ninh, 97). Yet, after the war, Kien cannot quit remembering all that died. “He mistook her first for a jungle girl named Hoa…Then, horribly, for a naked girl at Saigon airport on 30 April 1975.” (Ninh, 113). Kien returned to his pre-war culture of remembering the dead.
The dry, emotionally and spiritually barren village, and the villagers as an extension of the village, then encountered inexorable changes. A poetic sense slowly stepped into...
The story focuses on her great-grandfather, who was in disapproval of the French occupation of Vietnam, but still excelled at his job as a Mandarin under the puppet imperial court, fearing persecution of his family if he were to resign. In this section, the author also mentions more about the how the values of confusion had influenced the Vietnamese people in attempts to justify her great grandfather’s
In the short story, “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver, our gloomy and negative narrator has been stuck in a rut for a while, but his wife’s blind friend is about to put a spark back in our narrator. Robert, the blind man, recently lost his wife. This helped form a great friendship and sometimes intimate relationship with him and the narrator’s wife. This makes the narrator irritated, jealous, and unhappy. The narrator’s wife invites Robert over for dinner and this is where the narrator undergoes his change. In “Cathedral”, the trapped, disapproving, and depressed narrator changes into an inspired and hopeful fellow when Robert teaches him how to see.