Paradise of the Blind by Duong Thu Huong - Book Report/Review Example

Paradise of the Blind Literature can reveal a great deal of information about a culture because of the way in which the main characters grow and develop through the course of the story. This is particularly true when one is reading a story about a primary character’s development as they grow older. These coming-of-age stories reveal the examples set forward for the child as they are growing as well as the external and internal changes that they experience that cause them to either follow in their parents’ footsteps or attempt to forge a new path. This is true whether dealing with developed countries like the United States or England or with developing countries such as Vietnam. However, in discussing the changes occurring in developing countries, the character often has a much more difficult struggle to face as they must attempt to behave in keeping with family expectations while still attempting to secure their own personal welfare and live in accordance with the internal moral code each person develops as they age. This internal code is a unique combination of thoughts and beliefs that are the result of environment, family and individual understandings. For these characters, the struggle between the traditional way of life and the need to consider the modern or developed way of life is profound. In the novel Paradise of the Blind, author Duong Thu Huong explores the development of a Vietnamese girl’s formation of identity and self-realization as she grows up in the traditional countryside and social progression as she moves into the future and embraces modern ideals. Paradise of the Blind traces the story of Hang, a young Vietnamese girl who must make a choice between honoring the expectations of her complicated family or giving that family the only chance at escape it will have even though it would mean turning her back on these same expectations. The story begins with Hang receiving a telegram from her uncle telling her that he’s very sick and needs her to come to him immediately. He is staying at a place in Moscow, Russia while she works at a textile factory somewhere else in Russia. The name of this place is never given, but the description of the train journey indicates it is a long way away as it takes Hang at least a day and a half to travel the distance. As she rides the train, she remembers her life story from the time she was very small up to the incident that forced her to quit college and take the job in Russia. The flashback story she tells is a tragedy as she remembers the poor home she and her mother occupied in Hanoi and the various ways her mother had sold food as a means of supporting her daughter after her marriage had been violently broken apart and her husband had eventually died of the shame that had been forced upon him by his exile. The closeness between mother and daughter is described in beautiful terms as if they needed nothing but each other, but this relationship becomes distant as soon as they make contact with Hang’s paternal aunt. Aunt Tam has become very bitter about the way her family was treated during the political upheavals that caused her brother to be exiled and her mother to die. Everything she has done since her brother’s death has been to earn a fortune that she could use to bring Hang out of the poor life she lives with her mother in the city and into the more secure life of a modern country woman. Hang’s mother resents this and a break is introduced between mother and daughter that proves difficult to break. In the meantime, Hang’s mother Que discovers that her brother Chinh, the man who caused her marriage to end, is having difficulty obtaining enough food through the communist government that he works for to keep his own children fed. In much the same way that Aunt Tam has seen to Hang’s welfare, Que now lives to support her nephews, causing Hang to feel even more resentment because Uncle Chinh does not respect Que or appreciate any of the things she does for him. Things keep getting worse between these family members even after Hang starts attending college, eventually leading to Que kicking Hang out of their house. But when Que is involved in an accident and one of her legs is amputated, she can no longer run her old business and is reduced to relying on her neighbor’s support. This is the situation that forces Hang to give up her educational dreams and go to work in Russia. This flashback story is important in helping the reader understand the development of Hang’s identity and the factors that have made her who she is. The idea that individual identity is intimately linked to our external influences emerged as early as Plato. In his argument against poetry, a term today understood to have been applied to all forms of available public communication, “He [Plato] is asserting, though without filling out the psychological mechanisms in the detail for which one would wish, that from childhood up, mimesis shapes our images and our fantasies, our unconscious or semi-conscious pictures and feelings, and thereby shapes our characters, especially that part of our nature prone to what he thinks of as irrational or non-rational” (Griswold, 2003). In other words, the examples we are given in life in the form of the pictures we see or the stories we hear help us to form our understanding of what society is supposed to look like, what our role in that society is supposed to be and encourage us to model our behavior off of these examples. Although Plato is attempting to illustrate how the various forms of literature available in his time period could affect the development of the individual identity, he also suggests he is aware of the impact of the other external elements that contribute to the formation of identity. The organization of the living environment, the understandings of the greater cultural sphere, the myths and stories of the individual family and the expectations of the greater society were all mentioned at some point by Plato as contributing factors to the development of a citizen. It is through her experiences with the other people in her life that Hang is forced to come to a few self-realizations regarding the truth of her traditions versus the modern world. As she witnesses the way that Uncle Chinh is using her mother as a means of supporting him even though he should be helping Que because it was he who destroyed her life so long ago, and Hang’s life along with it, Hang begins to question the traditional values that drive the older women of her family. Aunt Chinh behaves very much like her uncle in that she is only friendly and helpful when she can expect something for nothing. She is greedy and grasping and not very gracious in sharing what she has with others. Even after all the help Que has given to her family, when Que has her accident, Aunt Chinh is scornful about helping: “The Saratov is mine. I paid for that refrigerator with my study-grant money while I was in the Soviet Union. In this house, only the television is yours. Sell it if you like. But try and explain that to the boys” (Duong 223). Que continues to struggle and sacrifice for her nephews’ sake because the new generation is the only way that she can try to win some pride back for her family name. She had once lavished this attention on Hang, but once Aunt Tam claimed her as the only way she could honor the memory of her brother, Que had to devote her attentions elsewhere for her own sake. Both Aunt Tam and Que work out their bitterness toward life and the problems they’ve dealt with by pouring all of their hopes and expectations into the idea that the young people of the family will carry on the traditional values and regain honor in the next generation. For Hang, these realizations force her to begin considering her own identity more closely, to understand why she feels she must humiliate herself on her uncle’s selfish demands or sacrifice her own dreams and desires to fulfill her aunt’s hopes. The beginnings of our modern understanding regarding the concept of identity can perhaps be said to have originated with scholars like Sigmund Freud at the beginning of the 20th century. Freud’s ideas changed the perspective of how individuals understood themselves through his introduction of psychoanalysis, a system of theories relating to the ways and methods in which a human mind is developed and operates. Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis deals with the fundamentals of how the mind works, introducing the concepts of the id, the ego and the superego into the world’s vocabulary. The id represents that part of the brain that operates on an almost instinctual level and governs all those aspects of our makeup that involve raw emotion. These are the impulses and instincts that Hang has to simply do whatever it is that her elders tell her to do without really questioning it. The ego centers upon the conscious person, the everyday thoughts and actions that people experience. This is the part of Hang that questions her family’s values, their way of getting things done and their seeming misplaced sense of honor and duty. Finally, the superego represents the higher portion of our being, the spiritual, highly moralistic side of us that is analogous to the voice of the parent (Freud, 1940). These concepts suggested the possibility that a person could be constantly pulled in two or more directions at once – between the strong raw emotions and pleasure center of the id and the conscious ego that wants to present an acceptable face to the world and the morality or ethics of the superego which shapes its concepts of right and wrong, good and bad, from the environment in which it developed. It is the superego, finally, that must work out a satisfactory middle ground for these two warring sides of Hang and find an appropriate solution – she will sell her aunt’s property instead of taking up residence, go back to school and make a better life for herself. Philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre have contributed to our understanding of identity by referring to the interactive nature of individual development and sociological environment. Sartre is generally hailed as the leader of the Existentialist movement which argues that everything that makes up an individual is contained within that individual and the relationships he has with the world around him. Essentially, existentialism is the study of the effect of these external and internal elements working individually and collectively upon the conscious presence of the individual. “This philosophy is concerned with what man is. It is a study of concrete living man. Sartre propounds that human existence is its own value. It creates its own values. It is not a means … of discovering transcendental values. The Existentialist believes that man is free, and that this total freedom, which at first is inseparable from the experience of anguish, is the basis of man’s reconciliation with self” (Fowlie, 1965). Existentialism places the personal experience at the center of the equation, insisting that it is through personal commitment to something outside of the self that shapes and defines what man is. These ideas are finally expressed in the novel as Hang looks out over her aunt’s property and comes to the conclusion that she has to follow her own dreams now that she has the opportunity in front of her. It is only when she finds herself free of the demands of her family that she is finally able to consider what would actually be best for them. She can do nothing to help Aunt Tam anymore except honor her memory, which she can do from anywhere. She will do nothing to help Uncle Chinh because he is nothing more than a drain upon whatever resource willingly puts itself in his way. She has been doing all she can to help her mother and it is still not enough. Uncle Chinh’s position in life has proven to her that it will never be enough. Only by going back to school, to “a distant port where a plane could land and take off” (Duong 258) would she have the opportunity to do something more than be a food vender living under a tar paper and tin roof in a squalid section of Hanoi. Works Cited Duong, Thu Huong. Paradise of the Blind. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1988. Fowlie, Wallace. “Introduction.” What is Literature? Jean-Paul Sartre. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Freud, Sigmund. An Outline of Psychoanalysis. New York: W.W. Norton, 1940. Griswold, Charles. “Plato on Rhetoric and Poetry.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (December 22, 2003). March 11, 2010 Read More