Huong uses Chinh and his family at Residence K to illustrate her negative attitude towards the communist regime. In Chinh’s greedy, ignorant character, Huong represents the nature of the communist culture. In the same way that Chinh barged into Que’s little village, selfishly breaking up her family and cursing her future, so did the communist regime invade the lives of the Vietnamese people, imposing its own doctrine without thought to their own way of life.
Huong uses irony very effectively to illustrate the downfalls of both the communist and traditional cultures. Where Chinh is forced to resort, in the end, to the life of “petty tradespeople”(50) and “exploiters”(50) that he had so condemned, the reader is painted a picture of the total failure of the communist regime. There is also irony present in how Aunt Tam and Que are so selfish in giving up everything for those that they love.
The presentation of social status in relation to occupation is used to highlight the injustice of the communist regime in Vietnam, where the ignorant an narrow-minded are rewarded, and the hardworking are punished.
In the village, before the communist invasion, people’s statuses were dependent on their merit, or their contribution to society. However afterwards, people like Aunt Tam, who worked tirelessly and “cherished their rice paddies like their own flesh”(25), were condemned as criminals and subject to humiliation, while those who were lazy and selfish, a “good-for-nothing”(25) and a fat woman who “pilfered from her own household and her neighbours’ alike,”(27) were elevated to the status of “pillars of the land reform”.
In the communist regime, people were rewarded according to their allegiance with the party. Those who more active in the party, and had jobs that helped to further the party’s goals, attained higher status than those who held jobs that did not involve the embitterment of the party. Since Chinh worked as “chief of the village Land Reform Section”(31), he held a high status, but because his sister, Que, was not a labouring peasant or proletariat, “it reflects badly on him.”(95)
In Russia, those who worked more, as “exported workers”(36) and labourers, had a lower status than those who did not. The reader sees this when Hang bumps into a wealthy lady on her way to Russia. Huong raises a contrast between the two in health, confidence, and wealth, demonstrating the difference in their status. It is obvious that the wealthy lady is not a manual labourer.
The purpose of Huong’s comparison of status in relation to occupation is to illustrate the injustice present in the communist invasion of Vietnam, where people’s status was not dependent on their merit or effort, but in their alliance to the party, resulting in a backwards society where those who worked more were afforded less.
