DUONG'S MIRROR AFTER RIVER HUONG: TWO REFLECTIVE SURFACES

LITERARY CRITIQUES Phê bình và phân tích văn chương:

NOTE FROM THE BLOG: Below is An H. Tran's review of MIMI AND HER MIRROR from Amazon.com. Although many consumer-readers wrote appreciatively and insightfully of this novel, we are particularly interested in reviewers who bring the South Vietnamese perspective to the interpretation of characters and plot. But An H. Tran's does more. The reviewer went into other literary possibilities, seeing this novel as a potential thriller, with the turmoil of Mimi's complex inner life and her lover Brad....

DUONG'S MIRROR AFTER RIVER HUONG: TWO REFLECTIVE SURFACES, June 19, 2011
By an h. tran "antran" (paris france) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Mimi And Her Mirror (Paperback)
***
"Mimi and her Mirror" is the second novel of Duong's trilogy on Vietnamese immigrants in America."

I am taken again by Duong's symbolism and literary motifs. In River Huong, there are magnolia blooms, a haunted royal lacquer bed, the half-moon window of a kept woman, the singing voice handed down from generation to generation, the floating coffins on a hot and silent river, the old tree where a woman hung herself, later chopped down by the Revolution, etc. In Mimi, a teenager was almost killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time; a first-year college student silently shared a broken dream with an outspoken and disillusioned man and later mourned his death; a woman drove aimlessly on the highway to escape the tension of a high-level law practice; an antique mirror became the woman's confidante; a woman sat alone in a park to sketch chaotic lines that tied her to her childhood, and kept a diary that contained only 9 words. Mimi gives us a glimpse into the world of Harvard Law School and an international scandal that reminds us of the famous-infamous Enron -- the type of corruption and cover-up that should test the very establishment of U.S. corporate law.

If the love story of River Huong reminds me of the reversal of Nabokov's Lolita, then the introspective sex scenes in Mimi remind me of how authors use erotica to describe psychological complexity. I think Duong spelled the difference between her Mimi and Robert Olen Butler's male who listened to "[Them] Whisper" (i.e., "they/them" meaning those nameless women from a war-torn Vietnam who slept with an American serviceman). To me, those introspective scenes are about the intricacy of Mimi's psychic pain, her inability to detach herself from her past, the superficiality of today's modern relationships, as well as the complexity of how couples communicate (words and non-words in the nuances of the psyche). For example, at one point, Mimi thought she was raping her lover in order to silence him and to keep him away from her past, and Brad murmured that Mimi should not substitute sex for herself.

The entire relationship between Mimi and Brad was a potential psychological thriller in disguise. Brad was a complex character and a statement of moral ambivalence. Who was Brad? Did he represent America's post-war absorption of the Vietnamese experience--from a generation that barely knew Vietnam? Did he even exist? Could Mimi have imagined him? In all of the couple's scenes, it was just Mimi and Brad and no other witness, except the antique mirror. Again, the mirror -- reflection of the self - is Duong's symbolism. Mimi met Brad in a park, but nobody else saw them together. There was a scene where they were both seen at a lunch banquet by a devious character named Elizabeth. But, Brad and Mimi never interacted before Elizabeth. There was another scene when Brad and Mimi were together in a restaurant. But again, because the narrator was Mimi, she might have imagined the whole interaction. I wish that Duong had developed this `thriller" aspect even more. With the complexity of Mimi, the thriller left me hungry for more - a different angle of story-telling all together.
Gradually unraveled as Mimi might be, she was still the super-immigrant woman: a genius student who stunned her professors with her super IQ and other high test scores, the timid 1L who won the moot court by surprise on Harvard Yard, the hard-working lawyer who headed the international section of a high-powered law firm, and the resilient tough cookie who managed her threatening, condescending Texas rainmaker boss. She was the "First Lady" trainee of her grandmother's ghost, representing the failed dream for a revitalized monarchy as a symbol of the Vietnamese culture. I think Mimi herself is the symbol of the "noblesse oblige" instilled in the middle class of non-Communist Vietnam - those boys and girls, men and women trained to think that they must study abroad, return home to occupy public offices, and do their best to serve their country. At the fall of Saigon, as the U.S. ended its involvement, history also ended that spirit of "noblesse oblige" for those boy and girls, men and women. This was Mimi's bond to her "Crazy Man." He was dead from an unresolved assault, just like Mimi's spiritual death at the fall of Saigon -- the "noblesse oblige" was beaten, broken, and the nightmare began, when innocence, youth, grand dreams to serve a country, and a peaceful way homeward were all sacrificed into the cruel wheels of history.

The description of the fall of Saigon, to me, was one of the best I have ever read.

At the end, all puzzles in Mimi remain open, with the protagonist running on bare feet in the hallway of her law firm (the same way she had entered America by way of a cargo plane: on bare feet). She quietly slipped her letter of resignation under the door of the managing partner, seeing herself as a kite flying into the darkness of the night, her ancestors' "Face of Brutality."

Nor were puzzles resolved in Graham Greene's "The Quiet American," except for the romance: there, the older European man got the Vietnamese girl, and the tall dark and handsome American lover was murdered. Here, in Mimi, the Vietnamese would-be president was murdered, and the Vietnamese woman eventually walked away from her younger American boyfriend because she could not trust him, as she said "Bye" to her model-minority career in Texas. In Mimi, it was all about America, and there was no need for an older man who represented a cynical Europe. I don't see the ending in Mimi as Duong's deliberate paving-way for a sequel, but instead, the author's suggested vision for an unchartered course of hope.

About the trilogy, the Tran family has three children: the first born beautiful girl sold herself to save her father when injustice befell; the second daughter was "silent" and only "talked" to her mirror; the youngest brother has turned into an all-American product. Naturally, the third installment should be the voice of that Asian-turned-all-American brother, but that may be too predictable. I can't wait to find out.
I see Duong as potentially a great literary novelist, even a writer of thrillers and suspense. Her stream of consciousness writing and the psychological texture of her characters in this traumatic drama can be a challenge to some. Literary fiction is different from biographies because, as an art form, novels give us symbolism. Literary novels do not seek to please; they seek to symbolize, requiring thoughtful reading. I see Mimi's tremendous passion, her ability to love and her drive to live, but most of all, the consistent internal moral fabric of her being that served as the hope for the ethics of the law profession, as much as for the Vietnamese culture in exile.

Thanks, Amazon, for bringing me this writer's work. My only complaint is that I just hope Duong would stop doing other things to focus on writing alone. (I had the pleasure of seeing Duong in one of her public lectures: before a small audience; she reached people with a natural, passionate genuineness.). If she continues her creative writing that way, she will be among the most authentic voices in Vietnamese American literature. I give this book five stars.