“When she smiled, I always noticed the sparkling whiteness of her teeth, aligned in perfect rows, and it made me sad. This was the last trace of her beauty, her youth, of a whole life lived for nothing, no one.”

The paradox between simultaneous beauty and sadness occurs frequently throughout the novel. When Hang reflects on her mother’s smile, she acknowledges the beauty of Que’s teeth but also recognizes this is the last of her fading beauty and youth. Hang thinks Que’s life has been an endless series of misfortunes and sacrifice with nothing to show for it. Que, though, finds her own purpose by filling the role of subservient sister to Chinh. Her youth and beauty may be fading, but to Que, her sacrifices have been for a purpose: her family.

“She must have suffered, seen her hopes snuffed out, her passions ground to ash. She too must have known this weariness, this despair. Like us, she must have had to reinvent hope and a yearning for life.”

After Hang is assaulted, her roommate plays a record to cheer her up. Hang feels sad, humiliated, and homesick (38). The music distracts her momentarily from these feelings, as the singer’s voice takes her thoughts to another place. Hang connects with the singer’s sense of hopelessness, weariness, and despair, but the singer becomes “one of the few pleasures” that ease her homesickness (35). When Hang hears the singer’s voice again years later on the train to Moscow, she realizes why she is drawn to it: “Like a call, it beckoned me to a kind of love-to revolt, the most essential force in human existence” (39).