The Renovation (vii)

from Do Hoang Ngoc Anh and đổi mới

When the franchise promotes a sale she preps chicken before the customers line out the door so she may then serve them without delay. Her boss warns her then fires her because she is multiplying the loss leader.

The other workers arrive at her doorstep with a party to see how she is doing. She has never socialized with them before on or off the job. One of them delays her marriage 6 months to share a cheap apartment and show her the ropes of living in the new economy.

She hadn’t known how to hang out with friends any more than than she could work slow. She keeps getting work because she is a worker then losing the job because there is no profitable work. All the while she is learning the new ways to behave among her kind.

She gets a job greeting at a real estate development where she must smile so wide her lipstick will not stain a stick across her mouth. She learns to buy a dress and attend her room-mate’s wedding. She has never met the groom and you don’t get a sense there is much to that marriage.

Then a hurricane blows her job away, flooding the seaside villas and washing the new beach out to sea. Đổi mới, one gathers, the renovation and opening of her nation, has proved tidal, a matter of ebb and flow.

Why have I so enjoyed this tale? It is easy enough to say here comes the new boss same as the old boss. Capital makes arbitrary demands on the person and social relations just as the Communists did, and like them fails to deliver meaning and sustenance.

We all knew that already although like her we each had to learn it. The sweetness of this story is the young woman soldiering on and the humanity for instance of her colleagues after she got fired. None of it familiar to me in its Saigon flavor, all of it feeling real and true, human and Vietnamese.

But where to go from a natural and social disaster? I don’t know. Indeed the story stops at 230 pages out of 279, after 60 chapters out of 75, in the wreckage of the hurricane. At page 280, chapter 41 returns abruptly to her collective housing in Ha Noi then, from a glance ahead, into her mad father’s hard war.

She isn’t there at all. What in the world, I asked myself. Did I get a bad file in my print on demand copy? Is there a sequel? I looked the book up where I bought it on Amazon and the whole book isn’t there. Never happened.

I ask the search engine about Do Hoang Ngoc Anh and The Renovation. The only direct matches returned are 2 of my posts. The back of the book refers me to his bafocus.com. At the consultancy’s FaceBook page I find this lecture from 2015.

What a sweet man. He “promotes technology and progress.” I could listen to his Vietnamese all day long, as I have enjoyed his English. Next time I will finish his book and do my best to make as much sense of it as he did.

This was the seventh 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, the fourth on April 2, 2022, the fifth on May 2, 2022, the sixth on June 4, 2022,

then the eighth on September 10, 2022 and the ninth on September 14, 2022. The tenth, also first and only Viet Nam letter so far about Đổi Mới by Đô Hoàng Ngọc Ánh appeared May 29, 2023.

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.