The Renovation (iv)
from Do Hoang Ngoc Anh and đổi mới
When her father arrives home for the new year she shows off the piglet mom plans to feed and sell next year. Dad summons the chair of the housing project and forces him to report his wife and take the pig away.
We don’t see the Army officer again as far as I have read. Over a handful of short chapters the mother falls ill and the girl cares for her while her school friend and all the households shun the family.
When I stopped reading, mom was in hospital through the pity of a doctor who had heard the story of the pig and did not demand permission from the patient’s collective, even though she was
dying from what he could treat the whole country for, malnutrition and overwork and worry. I felt l saw every step through all the halls and rooms, every expression on a face.
This is the story of Ha Noi in 1985 when so many of my later friends were just the age of the girl, with an absent father and an overwhelmed mother, as we also have had in other countries at other times,
when that very year my friend Duong Thu Huong, the age of the father in this story, was writing the first of one angry novel after another about the destruction of family and spirit in their revolution and wars
about moving on nonetheless with courage and heart through a future that is just as grim. Huong once sang louder than the bombs to encourage the troops facing B-52 strikes and now she is herself the voice of high explosive and incendiary.
Chapter 13 of Do Hoang Ngoc Anh’s novel The Renovation ends rather with this human exchange between the girl and the cyclo man who pedals her from the outskirts into town to see her mom.
She offers him all her cash. He takes the smallest bill. “You don’t owe me, I don’t work for free.”
This was the fourth of 10 Viet Nam letters so far about The Renovation by Do Ngoc Hoang Anh. The first appeared on February 16, 2022, the second on February 23, 2022, the third on March 12, 2022, then the fifth on May 2, 2022.
The sixth appeared on June 4, 2022, the seventh on July 16, 2022, the eighth on September 10, 2022, and the ninth on September 14, 2022.
The tenth, on May 29, 2023, was also the first and only Viet Nam letter so far about Đổi Mới by Đô Hoàng Ngọc Ánh.
Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.