The novel’s setting in Vietnam is like a beautifully overgrown and chaotic garden, striking in color and vivid with sensory descriptions. Like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the people in this garden setting have collectively sinned, yet they are blind to the way out of the garden. Just as Adam and Eve are cast out of the Garden of Eden for their sin, Hang is eventually sent away from Vietnam to pay for the errors of her family.

Hang’s Bohemian friend draws the connection between the failures of Communism and the Garden of Eden. He declares that man tried to create heaven on earth but simply wasn’t intelligent enough to know how to do it. Adam and Eve didn’t fully grasp the rules of conduct in the Garden of Eden, and God expelled them from Paradise as a result. This novel depicts Vietnamese society in a similar predicament. With so many sweeping reforms at the emergence of Communist rule, no person could fully grasp the long-term impacts and effects to see that attempting to create heaven on earth was actually creating hell for those living in it. This version of Paradise becomes a prison, but the prison is also home, making it difficult for people to leave it behind.