Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Paradise of the Blind, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Traditional Values and Sacrifice
Communism, Hypocrisy, and Corruption
Love and Wealth
Beauty, Disillusionment, and Coming of Age
Summary
Analysis
On the train to Moscow, Hang wakes up to realize that she had fallen asleep on her traveling companion’s shoulder. Embarrassed, she takes out Madame Vera’s shawl and burrows in it to warm herself. She looks out the window but can see only fog. She recalls an English painter she once met who told her that he spent his life trying to get farther and farther away from his homeland. But the farther he traveled, the more that fog seemed to invade his paintings.
Even though Hang’s interactions with her traveling companion are brief, they develop a deep bond over the course of their journey. Hang’s connection with the older man stands in counterpoint to many of the characters’ statements that family are the only people a person can rely on. Instead, Hang starts to realize the value in having other people who can support her.
Themes
Hang thinks that the fog in the Englishman’s paintings reminds her of a pond filled with duckweed in a struggling village, a place where women are essentially enslaved to their husbands and where trains and cars are exotic. Hang thinks back to a time when she was a child, when Que had taken her to a pond with purple duckweed flowers where a woman was washing laundry. Hang had been captivated by the flowers, and Que explained to the woman that Hang loved them. The woman shrugged, wondering what was special about the flowers.
Duong establishes the duckweed flower as a central metaphor for Hang’s coming of age. Duong establishes Hang’s fascination with the flowers as a child in contrast to how Hang views the flowers in the present. Whereas before she saw only the flowers, she now recognizes the surrounding poverty as well. It is also notable that Hang’s fascination contrasts with the woman’s indifference, reinforcing how a young girl might still be optimistic and notice the positive aspects of life, while an older woman is disillusioned and embittered by years of suffering.
Themes
Hang remembers how years later, she always stopped to look at the duckweed. But she also started to notice the stagnant ponds, full of rotting algae, that were surrounded by dilapidated shacks. She thinks that at the center of these ponds were the purple flowers, a source of beauty amid filth that represented a loss of life. The purple flowers had been an obsession for her. She relays that in her memory, the flowers are both comforting and poisonous.
Here Hang recounts the change in her own views after coming of age. She, too, can look past the beauty of the flowers in order to see the poverty and decay inherent in the landscapes and the towns. With this change, Duong illustrates how a person’s view of their memories can shift as they grow up: they go from seeing the idealized version of their childhood to recognizing the more miserable aspects of it.
Themes
