Khanh Ha has written a remarkable novel of harsh realism of the aftermath of the Vietnam War. There are always consequences for the losing side, the magnitude of which is imposed by the mercy or lack thereof of the winning side. The Vietnamese Civil War and western interventions, great loss of life and wealth resulted in a demonic discipline of the losing side, no matter the position a person held. Families were torn apart, thousands imprisoned over decades, dehumanization common. It is the dehumanization that links the re-education camps and prisons of Vietnam after the unification to the gulags of China, Russia and North Korea and the holocaust in Germany. We are actually seeing a dehumanization effort currently in the United States in the treatment of migrants, immigrants and at times citizens. Devaluation of human life in any manner points to a society in decline that may not be salvageable.
The reader is immediately confronted with the barbarism of the camps in the opening line of the novel.