Hang is the narrator and protagonist of the story. She grows up in poverty in Hanoi with her mother. She never knows her father, although she’s told she resembles him, and this absence of a protective parental figure in her life leaves Hang feeling lost and outcast throughout the novel. Hang also feels torn between loyalties on competing sides of her family: Her mother’s brother ruined the lives and livelihood of her father’s family during state-run land reform campaigns. Hang is in her twenties and lives in Russia as an exported worker at the opening of the story. When she boards the train to Moscow, she is “a pale young woman with a lost, worried expression, stooped shoulders, and cheap maroon suit. A frightened human being of about eighty-two pounds” (16). Still a young adult, Hang has already worked herself to the bone in sacrifice for others, like her own mother and aunt.

Hang eventually finds her place between tradition and modernity as she performs the funeral rites for Aunt Tam at the end of the novel: “I was indifferent to the sacred in all this, and I still don’t believe in the cults and rites. But the affection between two human beings is something I will always hold sacred” (250).