Paradise of the Blind

Hang’s train arrives in Moscow, bringing the narrative back to her current trip to visit Chinh. The gentleman who has been sitting beside her along the ride escorts her out of the train station, wishing her well as they depart. Hang makes her way through subway connections to the suburbs, where she learns that Chinh has already left the hospital. She tracks him down at the university, knowing by now that he invented the story of being ill for the sake of bringing her to Moscow to help with his import-export business. She finds Chinh working for a group of graduate students, preparing their meals and serving as their housekeeper as part of his role in their import-export scheme. The graduate students treat Chinh disrespectfully, mocking his Communist ideology. Hang recognizes one of the graduate students involved in the scheme, but she struggles to place where it is that she knows him from, so she resigns to referring to him as her Bohemian.

Hang is exhausted from her travels and falls into a deep sleep after drinking beer with her uncle and his business partners. She awakens to hear the men balancing their accounts and overhears the graduate students gossiping about Chinh’s work: he’s known to be lazy at the university but “full of energy when it comes to stockpiling expensive goods to sell later” (212).