3 ideas
After his wife leaves him for another man, the father Võ burns their house and takes his two children, Nương and Điền, to drift the Mekong fields with a duck flock, never settling. He seduces women in the villages they pass and then abandons them, using each as a proxy for the wife who betrayed him. His daughter narrates the story, and she ends up paying for his grief: the children grow up without a home, without schooling, and without permission to attach.
The family takes in Sương, a woman whom village wives had beaten as a husband-stealer. She attaches herself to them and tries to win the father's love and to mother the children. He stays cold, and she eventually leaves, which repeats the original abandonment in reverse. The episode shows how communities police women's sexuality through collective violence while the men involved go untouched.
In the novella, the family's drifting life leaves them without neighbors or a community nearby. When the father clashes with duck thieves, he is overpowered and Nương is raped in the open fields, with no one else there to intervene. The book presents isolation as one factor in her vulnerability, not the sole cause of the attack.