Throughout her short married life, Linh idolized her husband Nguyen as the embodiment of the highest ideals. She had believed that his rock-solid integrity in his work as a journalist and his commitment to higher principles had been rewarded with the comfortable material life their young family enjoyed. Then Linh discovered the truth.
Nguyen had been shamelessly pandering to his cadre editors, whitewashing disasters caused by ill-conceived Communist Party planning, and writing them up as yet another grand success in Vietnam's heroic march toward communism.
He was a willing and enthusiastic lackey pitied and scorned by his colleagues. Now that Nguyen was torn from his pedestal in her mind, she could no longer respect this man, much less love him. But then now what?
Duong Thu Huong, Vietnam's most prominent dissident author, begins her newly translated novel Beyond Illusions with this painful predicament, before dragging readers through the wrenching breakdown of the couple's marriage.
As young lovers, Linh and Nguyen's bond was based on a mutual rejection of materialism for a spiritually fulfilling existence, a kind of starry-eyed idealism that distinguished the two from the greedy and depraved masses. But the practical realities of life and the pressure on men to provide for wife and family unsurprisingly pushed Nguyen to bend his principles for their sake.
In this light, it's easy to sympathize with Nguyen's weakness of character since the alternative would probably mean living in grinding poverty. However, Linh makes it clear she never desired nor asked for material comfort and her only flaw, if it can be called such, is that she so stubbornly stands by her lofty principles.
What we the readers get is a front-row seat to the messy process of Linh's severing of ties with Nguyen and starting a new life in a society that frowns upon divorce and in a political system that creeps into every aspect of people's lives.
Huong is brilliant at conveying the guilt, anger, shame and confusion that are the context for Linh and Nguyen's short-lived rebound affairs -- Linh with a celebrity who is every bit as phony as her husband and Nguyen with a sexually liberated fellow journalist -- and holding out the faint possibility that the two will eventually come around and fall back in love. But very little in this book gives reason for hope or laughs.
Even Linh, who loudly proclaims to stand for truth and to revile artifice, becomes so completely smitten of her famous music composer lover Tran Phuong that she manages to rationalize his philandering and hypocrisy. On top of this, the man who most clearly fits her description of a moral and worthy man, a vagabond artist, lingers in the background of the story without ever grabbing her attention. It all makes her abandonment of Nguyen and her family seem heartless.
The confusion that Huong creates in Linh's mind is ultimately an affirmation of the power of the heart to lead the mind astray and of the struggle not to be overwhelmed by the heart. In this fight, Linh comes out the hero.
As a dissident writer, Huong is also taking shots at Vietnam's political establishment throughout the novel so that it's easy to see why the country's famously thin-skinned and insecure officials saw it necessary to throw her in jail for almost a year in 1991.
What disgusts Linh so thoroughly is that Nguyen has sold out to the communist system, which after liberation quickly rotted through to the core. He adapted with zeal to the system in which good old fashioned ass-kissing is the surest ticket to advancement, but in the process he debased himself and undermined the foundations of his relationship with Linh. For this, his wife could not forgive him, no matter what comforts it provided.
Beyond Illusions can also be seen as an allegory of Huong's place in Vietnamese society, with the author as Linh. The country's revolutionary generation became bureaucrats grabbing for the spoils of their newly gained power, while the rest of the population simply tried to stay under the radar and eke out a decent material life. Just as Linh wanted no association with Nguyen or all the other busybody, conniving cadres, Huong likewise withdrew from the Communist Party and has been a vocal critic of the conspicuous consumption of the new generation as much as of the Vietnamese leadership.
This book is the first of three novels written in the 1980s before Huong's arrest, which begs the question why English readers had to wait so long for the translation, which was beautifully done by Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Duong. Huong is an underground literary star in Vietnam and a modest celebrity in France. This translation of Beyond Illusions may lend her celebrity in the English-speaking world.
April 14 to April 20 In March 1947, Sising Katadrepan urged the government to drop the “high mountain people” (高山族) designation for Indigenous Taiwanese and refer to them as “Taiwan people” (台灣族). He considered the term derogatory, arguing that it made them sound like animals. The Taiwan Provincial Government agreed to stop using the term, stating that Indigenous Taiwanese suffered all sorts of discrimination and oppression under the Japanese and were forced to live in the mountains as outsiders to society. Now, under the new regime, they would be seen as equals, thus they should be henceforth
Last week, the the National Immigration Agency (NIA) told the legislature that more than 10,000 naturalized Taiwanese citizens from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) risked having their citizenship revoked if they failed to provide proof that they had renounced their Chinese household registration within the next three months. Renunciation is required under the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), as amended in 2004, though it was only a legal requirement after 2000. Prior to that, it had been only an administrative requirement since the Nationality Act (國籍法) was established in
With over 80 works on display, this is Louise Bourgeois’ first solo show in Taiwan. Visitors are invited to traverse her world of love and hate, vengeance and acceptance, trauma and reconciliation. Dominating the entrance, the nine-foot-tall Crouching Spider (2003) greets visitors. The creature looms behind the glass facade, symbolic protector and gatekeeper to the intimate journey ahead. Bourgeois, best known for her giant spider sculptures, is one of the most influential artist of the twentieth century. Blending vulnerability and defiance through themes of sexuality, trauma and identity, her work reshaped the landscape of contemporary art with fearless honesty. “People are influenced by
Three big changes have transformed the landscape of Taiwan’s local patronage factions: Increasing Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) involvement, rising new factions and the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) significantly weakened control. GREEN FACTIONS It is said that “south of the Zhuoshui River (濁水溪), there is no blue-green divide,” meaning that from Yunlin County south there is no difference between KMT and DPP politicians. This is not always true, but there is more than a grain of truth to it. Traditionally, DPP factions are viewed as national entities, with their primary function to secure plum positions in the party and government. This is not unusual
RSS