Similar to the duckweed flower, the cripple’s song symbolizes the evolution in Hang’s understanding of the suffering and pain in her society. As Hang is growing up, her neighbor (whom she calls the cripple) sings every day. Hang relays the first two lyrics, which are “Hail autumn and its procession of dead leaves, the rows of barren poplars stand silent on the hillside.” The cripple’s falsetto voice rings out, and even though the song is sad, Hang appreciates the beauty and the constancy of his song. But after she leaves for Moscow and then returns to Vietnam at the end of the novel, she remarks on her newfound understanding of what the song means: to her, it represents a “life snuffed out.” The leaves in the song signify the unrealized dreams of someone like the cripple, who might want to find better opportunity but cannot find a means of escaping their current situation. The fact that Hang only appreciates this meaning once she has grown up also serves as another example of how coming of age can alter the meaning of one’s memories, as she sees how she used to recognize only the beauty of the song but now recognizes the pain and sadness from which it is derived.
The Cripple’s Song Quotes in Paradise of the Blind
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.
The Cripple’s Song Symbol Timeline in Paradise of the Blind
