Beauty, Disillusionment, and Coming of Age Theme Analysis

Paradise of the Blind is filled with rich imagery conveying the beauty of the villages and cities in which Hang spends her childhood. But because most of the book is told as a flashback while Hang is on a train to Moscow, these recollections take on both a sense of nostalgia and a feeling of disenchantment. In addition to recognizing the beauty in her childhood, Hang also understands how that beauty frequently masked the poverty and the stagnation of the society. Duong thus explores how coming of age can change a person’s memories as a person become more aware of the hardships and more disillusioned about the beautiful parts of their childhood.

Hang’s changing view of her homeland is encapsulated in the symbol of the duckweed flower, illustrating how, as an adult, she recognizes the poverty of which she had been ignorant as a child. When Hang is on the train to Moscow, she thinks of how she is “haunted” by the vision of a purple duckweed flower floating on swamp. When she was young, she loved looking at the duckweed flowers and would go out of her way to find them. But reflecting on the flower, she understands that it distracted her from the swamp itself: “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.” Duong illustrates how Hang’s coming of age led to this increased recognition: as a child, she was taken by the beauty of the flower, but now she sees that this simply masked the poverty and dinginess of her and her mother Que’s lives. Later in Hang’s recollections, she recounts the flowers once more as she thinks nostalgically about the villages outside of Hanoi. She describes how “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.” This metaphor illustrates that there is beauty in their lives that is worth trying to hold onto and foster, but it also deeply contrasts with the stagnation of the lives of many Vietnamese people and the inability to escape the poverty of the country.

One of Hang’s neighbors (whom Hang only refers to as “the cripple”) serves as another example of how Hang’s perspective changes as she grows up, recognizing how something that once had beauty for her actually masks a kind of tragedy. Every day, the cripple sings the same song about autumn leaves. The beauty of his “falsetto voice” makes Hang emotional, even as a child. Yet it is only when Hang returns to Vietnam following her time in Russia at the end of the book does she have a revelation about the song and the singer. She thinks, repeating the language she used about the duckweed, that it signifies “A life snuffed out, aborted, without a whisper of a dream.” She concludes, “You survived life here, but you never really lived it.” She recognizes that even though there is beauty in her world, the stagnation in some ways makes it an unrealized beauty because it has no hope of escaping the village.

Growing up also leads to an evolution in Hang’s thoughts on beauty itself. In contrast with the beauty of some of the sights and sounds in Vietnam, Hang sees how the Vietnamese people have lost their beauty as a result of this poverty and stagnation. Part of Hang’s coming-of-age process, then, is also recognizing her own desire to avoid becoming faded and ravaged like so many of the people that she has encountered, and understanding that true beauty is derived from happiness and liberation. Hang frequently observes that her mother, Que’s, teeth are beautiful and very white—the “last trace of her beauty,” she thinks. Later on in Hang’s memories, she recounts her worry that she would end up repeating the life of her mother. Seeing the toll that Que’s life has taken on her, Hang recognizes that she does not want to repeat the same fate. The beauty that her mother has lost is representative of the struggles and hardships that she has endured. This is one of the reasons that Hang chooses to abandon her family and pursue her own dreams, knowing that the stagnation and poverty of Vietnam threatens to deprive her of that same beauty and happiness. This relationship between beauty and poverty is reinforced at the end of the novel: when Hang returns from Moscow, she notices a group of young Japanese people who have “smooth, healthy skin, the glow of well-nourished people.” She thinks about them in contrast to Vietnamese people whom she describes as having faces “gnawed with worry, shattered faces, twisted, ravaged, sooty, frantic faces.” The contrast between them illustrates how Hang’s idea of beauty has shifted. Instead of finding beauty in sights and sounds, which frequently mask the hardships the Vietnamese people endure, Hang recognizes that true beauty is derived from the ability to be free from fear and poverty.

Even the title of Paradise of the Blind communicates this central idea: Hang viewed her childhood as a kind of paradise, in which she had a loving relationship with her mother and was deeply affected by the beauty around her. But the innocence of her youth resulted in a kind of blindness, wherein she could not fully appreciate how much the beauty masked the poverty and stagnation of where she lived. Only through coming of age and experiencing a degree of disillusionment does Hang understand that while she can still appreciate the beauty of where she grew up, she’s no longer ignorant of the pain and sorrow that so many people experience in her homeland. This recognition, then, is what allows her to try and break that cycle of stagnation.