"Dumb Luck" by Vu Trong Phung
“Dumb Luck” by Vu Trong Phung is the novel Vietnamese most often tell me to read when the subject comes up, so I did.
It is about a guy named Xuan who stumbles into fame and fortune by repeatedly being in the right place at the right time. He just happens to be there when someone needs a likely body to fill a space in their life, from hawking STD cures on the street to helping a rich, young woman, Miss Snow, break an arranged marriage by pretending to be her lover. When her parents become convinced of the story, they force Xuan to marry her, which is certainly no hardship for either of them. Even the skills he does have come from jobs he lucked into.
It’s often a funny story about many problems in French colonial Vietnam, from police desperate to make their ticket quotas to a man who owns both a brothel and a STD clinic, but he spends most of his time on the overlap between feminism, capitalism, and westernization. Vu Trong gives the impression that the only men who promote feminism are those trying to have pre-marital sex or trying to sell women endless new fashions, but those men certainly don’t want the women in their own families to be modern. The women in the novel mostly come across as confused, bouncing between the contradictions of a man’s world like the ball in a pinball machine, but Miss Snow comes across as crafty enough to get what she wants, using Xuan since his reliance upon luck for success makes him the weaker partner when they disagree.
It is about a guy named Xuan who stumbles into fame and fortune by repeatedly being in the right place at the right time. He just happens to be there when someone needs a likely body to fill a space in their life, from hawking STD cures on the street to helping a rich, young woman, Miss Snow, break an arranged marriage by pretending to be her lover. When her parents become convinced of the story, they force Xuan to marry her, which is certainly no hardship for either of them. Even the skills he does have come from jobs he lucked into.
It’s often a funny story about many problems in French colonial Vietnam, from police desperate to make their ticket quotas to a man who owns both a brothel and a STD clinic, but he spends most of his time on the overlap between feminism, capitalism, and westernization. Vu Trong gives the impression that the only men who promote feminism are those trying to have pre-marital sex or trying to sell women endless new fashions, but those men certainly don’t want the women in their own families to be modern. The women in the novel mostly come across as confused, bouncing between the contradictions of a man’s world like the ball in a pinball machine, but Miss Snow comes across as crafty enough to get what she wants, using Xuan since his reliance upon luck for success makes him the weaker partner when they disagree.