The duckweed flower represents Hang’s disillusionment with her seemingly idyllic childhood. She recounts how, as a child, she would actively seek out the purple duckweed flowers because she admired their beauty. But as Hang grows up, she begins to notice not just the individual flowers dotting the landscape but also the ponds and the surrounding areas, which she describes as “oily bogs” and “miserable hovels.” This broader and more nuanced understanding of the landscape—that it contains both beautiful and ugly elements—parallels Hang’s thinking about her own life, as she progresses from a childhood that she views as a kind of “paradise” to an adulthood that is filled with pain, poverty, and suffering. While the beauty of her home hasn’t been fully eradicated, Hang also comes to recognize the stagnation and the hardships that so many people experience in Vietnam. Thus, by charting Hang’s pursuit of the duckweed flowers to her growing understanding of the landscape, Duong emphasizes the fact that growing up has made Hang reflect on her memories and surroundings in a more complicated and nuanced way, acknowledging both hardships and beauty.
Duckweed Flower Quotes in Paradise of the Blind
She too must have known this weariness, this despair. Like us, she must have had to reinvent hope and a yearning for life. The song crackled forth like the wing of a bird lost in the limitless blue of space, like a spark from an inferno.
I listened in silence. The evening’s repugnant scene flashed through my mind. The music had come from that bastard’s room. So this was life, this strange muddle, this flower plucked from a swamp.
Years later, whenever I traveled in the Vietnamese countryside again, I always stopped to contemplate these flowers: in real ponds, in real villages. Ponds just like we had near Hanoi: stagnant, oily bogs flecked with bubbles from rotting algae; murky pools surrounded by a clutter of miserable hovels, ramshackle gardens, and outhouses stinking in the summer sun […]
At the center of these stifling landscapes, on a green carpet of weed, those purple flowers always glistened, radiant in the middle of the filth: the atrocious ornament of a life snuffed out.
It had taken time to grow up, to leave this place, finally to understand this song, the refrains that had haunted our miserable little streets for as long as I could remember. This same voice, this same unchanging sadness. A life snuffed out, aborted, without a whisper of a dream. It was a life unlived, a vegetable existence suckled on rubbish heaps and water lilies, fed on the brackish surface of a bog. You survived life here, but you never really lived it.
Forgive me, my aunt: 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 past crimes.
[...] I sat down, cupping my chin in my hands, and dreamed of different worlds, of the cool shade of a university auditorium, of a distant port where a plane could land and take off…
Duckweed Flower Symbol Timeline in Paradise of the Blind
