One stylistic choice that Huong uses in her effort to mock the actions of the communist authorities and demonstrate their lack of leadership in Vietnam is through her use of irony. For example, it is indicated that Hang's, the narrators, father’s family owned a little land, and her father had to flee away from his town to escape the raving communist authorities that confiscated his family’s rights and ridiculed them in the process and the narrator says, “Among these so-called ‘exploiters’ were many well-to-do villagers, people who owned just a bit of land, who cherished their rice paddies like their own flesh,” (Huong 25). It is mentioned that Hang’s father and his family had been accused of being “landowners” and “exploiting the working class”…show more content… Furthermore, the author emphasizes the situation of Hang’s fathers family a little more and says, “No one understood why my (Hang’s) grandma Nhieu had suddenly become ‘an enemy of the people’… just because she had inherited a few acres of rice paddy” (23). The villagers, including the peasants did not understand why Hang’s grandmother, “become an enemy of the people” because even to the villagers, the communist’s ideology was…show more content… Huong shows the reader that communist authorities lack leadership as they gave an uneducated peasant authority to rule in which he behaves poorly to the peasants while the communists blame the landowners to be exploiting the peasant. Ironically, communists caused chaos to the peasants and not the landowners. The reader is able to infer that the author is implying that the outcomes of the uprising of the communist regime has not been pleasant. Lastly, Hang goes to Moscow to see her uncle Chinh, and learns that her uncle had begun illegal smuggling and says, “They all seemed on edge… They were probably busy thinking of the goods they had smuggled in and had to sell off, or those that they needed to acquire” (170). Huong uses phrases such as “smuggled” meaning trafficked “good[s]” products that “they needed to acquire” in order to manipulate the reader into thinking badly about Chinh, and links his abilities as a leader to the communist governments lack of leadership. Ironically, Chinh was a communist leader pretending to promote equality between landowners and peasants so that one did not have more than the other, but he started to illegally trade, to gain more money to obtain his
