Summary

Chapter 7. This is the shortest chapter in the book, at just over three pages. Hang is still on the train. She is sharing the car with an older Vietnamese man. He has shown kindness to her by offering her food and something warm to cover herself with. As she watches the countryside pass the train window, Hang recalls an English painter she used to know. More than anything he wanted out of England and he succeeded by traveling and painting all over the world. But, his paintings of landscapes always have a fog in them, even though fog wouldn’t be something that would exist in these new and exotic landscapes. Hang likens this to her being haunted by the purple flowers in the ponds of her mother’s home village—the flowers were at once beautiful and decadent and an image that haunts her...