Paradise of the Blind

Hang is a Vietnamese factory worker in Russia summoned to Moscow by her uncle — a Communist Party official — whose land reform ideology destroyed her family a generation earlier. Hương moves between present-day Moscow and the Vietnam of the 1950s land reform campaigns, the 1970s post-reunification hardship, the specific Vietnamese experience of a revolution that consumed its own people. Published in Vietnam in 1988, banned immediately, smuggled to France. The first Vietnamese novel to be translated into English. A dispatch about what happens when ideology decides it knows better than families.