4 ideas
Nguyễn Thuấn, a general who spent decades at the front, retires at seventy to his son's household in a northern village. He learns that his daughter-in-law Thủy, a maternity-hospital doctor, brings home aborted foetuses to cook as feed for the animals the family raises for sale.
The story's worst act is not done out of cruelty. It is a thrifty professional turning institutional waste into a free input for a profit-making sideline. Moral collapse spreads most easily when it looks like rational resource management, because no one feels they are doing anything but being practical.
Treat the returning hero's courage, loyalty and moral certainty as a currency issued by one regime of value that becomes worthless when the regime changes. The general's authority does not fail because he is wrong. It fails because the peacetime market household no longer recognizes the standard his standing was measured in, so he is honoured in form and ignored in fact.
The son narrates the foetuses, the family's pettiness and his father's death in the same affectless tone he uses for meals and chores. That gap between the reader's reaction and the characters' calm becomes the measure of how numb the society has grown.