Making a Whore

Description

From the highly controversial and undeniably influential Vietnamese writer, reporter, and satirist Vũ Trọng Phụng, Making a Whore is an exposé of the so-called progressive “Westernized” ideals of sexuality in the 1930s. A meticulous and daring memoir, the novel follows the life of Huyền—a young lady born into an upper-class family in Hanoi, with the expectations of character it entails. The first derailment, however, begins the day when eight-year-old Huyền finds herself wondering about her mother’s pregnancy only to receive the murky non-answer, “You’ll find out when you get married”. The more society keeps Huyền in the dark, the more she is tormented by her sexuality with no appropriate release. Huyền thus enters her adolescence and subsequently adulthood with a fundamental lack of sex education that eventually leads her to spiral into a life of debauchery she cannot turn back.