Understanding The Drama In Life

Being a country once dominated by the colonial powers, Dutch and Japanese respectively, literary and cultural development in Indonesia come hand in hand with nationalism. There was a degree of captivation and interest of the native population, the Western-educated native aristocracy in particular, to Western institutions, cultural styles, and political ideas. Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s “This Earth of Mankind” highlights the reality of Dutch colonial government in Indonesia, which was driven with contradictions between the desire to control the locals and the desire to bring them progress, as well as the portrayal of women in the society through the lives of Minke and Nyai Ontosoroh. Minke is a young intelligent man who struggles to seek his identity in his own land that places his native people at the bottom of the social hierarchy in the Dutch East Indies. He believes that he belongs to his people when he utters, “I had no European blood in my body.” (Toer: 20) However, he who had rec...

“Paradise of the Blind” is a wonderful tale of three Vietnamese women struggling to survive in a society where the women are expected to offer highly respect towards the men and Communist corruption crushes every dream. Through the eyes of Hang, a young woman in her twenties who has grown up amidst the slums and intermittent beauty of Hanoi, the tragedy of her family is revealed as land reform rips apart their village. When her uncle Chinh's political loyalties replace family devotion, Hang is torn between her mother's appalling self–sacrifice and the bitterness of her aunt who can avenge but not forgive. Only by freeing herself from the past will Hang be able to find dignity –– and a future. The story begins in Russia in the 1980s, as Hang, a young Vietnamese woman, travels by train to Moscow to visit her uncle. As she travels, she recalls incidents from her childhood and adolescence in Hanoi and also tells of life in her mother's village during the communists' disastr...