Word: hanged
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...spend a lot of time outside of the House itself. The initial problem as I see it was that it did not seem like some of the tutors really liked being in the House. Students noted and commented upon the fact that a specific group of tutors seemed to hang out together all of the time. They would sit together, excluding students, when they were in the dining hall and they didn't seem interested in getting to know many students. This issue was brought up with the masters and some of the tutors, and I remember saying that...
...novel is narrated by Hang, a young woman whose past has predetermined the course of her life. Her past reaches back to the fanatical time of land reform in North Vietnam from 1953 to 1956, when her uncle, Chinh, denounced her father as a "filthy landlord." The sorrowful tale of her parent's separation and family division is one that eludes Hang for most of her childhood; she does not fully understand why she is constantly made to feel ashamed. At one point, Hang cries, "I didn't dare ask [my mother] if, in another ten years, I would live...
...Hang's search for meaning and love trace a path of joy and tragedy, success and rejection. Her self-discovery is at once unnerving and beautiful, taking the reader to "a pond lost in some godforsaken village, in a place where the honking of cars and the whistling of trains is something mysterious, exotic.... A place where a man whips his wife with a flail if she dares lend a few baskets of grain or a few bricks to relatives in need. A strip of land somewhere in [her] country, in the 1980s...
Because so much of Hang's story is in her past, Duong interweaves flashbacks with the present time. The reader must visualize the story as the grown Hang travels on a train to Moscow to visit Uncle Chinh. The technique becomes annoying in the almost immediate realization that the past is much more interesting than the present. When Hang recalls the past, she seems to do so in graphic color; the present appears bleak and bland in contrast. Perhaps Duong uses this pattern intentionally, for it correlates to her own life, in which once hopeful and passionate support of communism...
...most intriguing and powerful character in the story is not Hang, but her father's sister, Aunt Tam. To Hang, Aunt Tam is generous and caring, yet frightening and overbearing; her presence further complicates Hang's short adolescence. The peculiar relationship between Tam and Hang's mother escalates into a rivalry to perpetuate the separate family lines. In Aunt Tam's character, the author manages to capture the essence of bitterness and hope in survival...