All the Lotus Blooming

In “All the Lotus Blooming,” Kieu Bich Hau dramatizes a modern Vietnam where accelerating urbanization ruins lush nature and unsettles human spaces. The story portrays Da Lien – the female protagonist whose sensitive and fiery soul plunges her into turmoil. Defying a marriage prearranged by her mother, Da Lien relishes her solitude as lotus blooms in the moonlight, playing moon lute alone in a hut by the swamp redolent with lotus scent. Da Lien’s daring and fierce existence resists the sizzling life of urbanization and modernity in contemporary Vietnam that jolts humans out of their serenity. In telling such an exuberant story, Kieu Bich Hau unfurls beauty and fragility of nature in the face of reckless industrialization that leaves Vietnamese people in precarity.