The Renovation (v)

from Do Hoang Ngoc Anh and đổi mới

Yesterday I lay down and read a dozen and more chapters as I have longed to do, to read this novel like a dream. It is a dream I have had before, told by an older friend of mine, the novelist Duong Thu Huong,

in her Paradise of the Blind, translated into French by my friend Phan Huy Duong and English by my college contemporary Nina McPherson,

about the memory an entire nation has of a year, 1986, that also was rough for me on another continent, the one when my father died stricken by a wasting disease. 8 years later I reviewed Nina's translation for the Nation,

when another college chum published it at Morrow. That review brought me via the Ford Foundation to Ha Noi where I met the novelist and ran around town with her and a student born the same year as Do Hoang Ngoc Anh's narrator whom I married.

The dream of this book seems more real than whole years of my waking life have been. In the dozen chapters I read for an hour in the afternoon, the mother can't cope, as in Huong's novel,

but the daughter cooks for her and feeds her cleverly, valiantly. The grandmother, as in Huong's novel, arrives at the sick bed with food, the resourceful peasant.

The father arrives from the Army to express horror at the privileged medical care his wife enjoys, at the very moment she dies. He is an absent and weak father, as in Huong, and also a cadre like a ghost choking life out of the family, as in her Party villains.

What is more he turns out to be barking, crackers, mad as a hatter, a soldier who builds a sand table in the apartment to figure out his next move. I love that.

The narrator goes to live with her grandmother in the countryside where she learns to gather and store food in secret, survival skills among thieves. This contrasts with Huong's narrator who depends weakly on her overbearing granny.

Then she goes off to a competitive school in the city, arranged by her father, studying as her mother, a reader of novels, never got to. They demand she study ridiculous bullshit but they do demand she learn.

By contrast, Huong's narrator goes to the Soviet Union to work in a wretched factory while hungry and sick, her ghastly Party uncle sucking the life from her to help in his black market trading.

Ngoc Anh's young girl is more robust. 125 pages in, of 280, Renovation is already happier story than Paradise of the Blind, no matter how it ends. Everyone who meets the novelist Huong loves her but no one ever said she was pleased with life.

I may or may not know the novelist Ngoc Anh personally. I think not. I could swear that I have met the very people in the very rooms the novelist describes but you and millions of others might say the same thing.

The book conveys hope, the thing with feathers, life's certainty. In chapter 19, The Rice Field, on page 95, I found this passage which sheds light on the lovely cover:

"They said the rice now was just like the girl in the prime of youth, the body transformed from a kid to a woman, all vessels, muscles, skin were changing, developing, full of vitality. The young and fresh rice spread up to the horizon."

This was the fifth 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, and the fourth on April 2, 2022.

After this fifth, the sixth appeared on June 4, 2022. The seventh came 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.