Communism and materialism - in The Beauty of Humanity Movement

Just taking a few moments here to backtrack over the plot of Camilla Gibb's The Beauty of Humanity Movement: central character is the pho chef, Hung, who is born 9th child in rural poverty sent off to city, Hanoi, to make some kind of life and learns from a master how to prepare the basic Vietnamese dish pho; lives in great poverty in a shanty hand built by a stagnant pond, subsists during hard times on noodle he makes from pond weeds, has a fatherly relation to beautiful teenage granddaughter of woman in shanty next to his, he reads her poetry aloud, eventually proposes to her, sort of, but the marriage never happens; we learn later in novel that she still lives next door to him and they have not spoken in 40 years - not clear yet what happened but suspect she betrayed him to authorities, who raided his shanty and destroyed many artworks, magazines, and mss from the eponymous radical group whom Hung had gotten to know because they came to his shop for breakfast; members of the group focus on two in particular, Dao, the leader and a writer - the grandfather figure to Hung - who was taken away during first years of Vietnamese independence to one of Ho's re-education camps. Dao's son, Bienh, and grandson, Tu, now treat Hung as their ancestor as well, in gratitude for his support of Dao - they spend a lot of time helping him, etc. Plot itself begins when Vietnamese-American woman, museum and art curator, Maggie, arrives seeking out Hung for info about her father, Ly?, who was an artist and a member of this radical group, who'd been taken away for re-education and had his hands broken so he could no longer paint; apparently he never left Vietnam - she left w/ her mother for Minneapolis. Now she's very Americanized, and is in Hanoi to buy artworks for major collectors. She hires Tu (and his friend, Biennpho?) as her guide and driver, but Tu resigns, angry about the type of art he's forced to see and about the incredible prices collectors pay for the art while he and others live in poverty. Tu, however, at a coffee shop, finds some artworks by Ly and tries to get Maggie there to buy them and to learn more about her father - but the shop owner mysterious spirits the artworks away, claims to have sold them to a dealer. That's about where I am, 2/3rd+ through with the novel. It's not especially plot-driven and the characters are types rather than people - yet there is something sadly compelling about this novel, about the suffering and poverty so many seem to endure, even in this supposedly egalitarian state; about the betrayal of revolutionary values in Vietnam - so sadly typical of many Asian regimes, obviously reminds us of the Cultural Revolution and the Killing Fields; and finally the sadness and inequities of the tremendous influx of western money and values that changes the cities but doesn't do much to lift the standard of living of most Vietnamese, just makes the inequalities more evident - as in Russia, for ex. Not sure how accurate all this is as history, and I suspect quite a bit of anti-Communist bias, but a vivd portrait of a society in flux.