LOAN

It has been a long time since I last read such an amazing book that I could not make myself stop reading (by long time, I mean a couple of days…)

It has been a long time since I last wrote such a long review just to show how amazed I feel (and by long time, I mean a couple of months…)

LOAN by Isabelle Muller.

From the title, I had a feeling that this might be a quite interesting book. It made me so curious when I first saw it in a book-store that I decided that I would bypass the online book-selling website and buy it directly from the store with less discount, in the hope that I would not be disappointed.

At first sight, I thought LOAN is the name of the main character and this book was written based on her life, just as any biography that I had read before. But I was wrong. Big time.

The main character’s name is Cuc, one of the most popular kinds of flowers in Vietnam. Loan is her first daughter’s name, also the name of the most mythical bird in history. Cuc asked people to call her Loan because her daughter had died from a very rare disease just a few months after birth. She wanted to be called Loan in order to not forget her daughter. Eternally.

In her childhood, she was not allowed to go to school because she was a girl. She had to steal one chicken from her neighbour and gave it to one of the boys, who usually hung out in front of her house, so he would teach her how to read and write. She called this a ‘bribe’.

She had two older brothers, two younger sisters and one younger brother. But she felt disgusted of her oldest brother to the bone that she had sworn over her dead body that she would never mention his name for the rest of her life. She had to run away from her own family only to escape from her brother’s violence. Only because she was a girl.

Growing up, she worked as a maid, then being kidnapped, she was sold to a hookers’ house, then she was rescued. Then she opened her own small drink shop, which sold alchohol to French military men, who were living in Vietnam at the moment because of the war. Her shop was burnt down. She escaped. Then she came back and did open another shop again…Just like a circle.

Reading ‘LOAN’, I cannot imagine such a small oriental woman could actually survive after no matter how hard and intense her life had been. I cannot visualize how a woman could actually stand up straight right after life had thrown her to the ground or squeezed her to the point where anyone had to scream out loud for help.

This story was told by the daughter that she had with a French military man, and all the details was so vivid that readers can actually link it to all the events that once happened in the past. Reading this book, readers can know about so many more traditional events and activities of Vietnam.

One hard life with so so many ups and downs, sometimes nearly dead, but still reborn…

One Anamite woman who was born in 1929 but her mind was so so forward and civilized that she dared to do the things that no one could ever thought of doing…

One Asia in France but still did not forget her roots, her land…

R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

LOAN.