85 pages • 2 hours read
Camron WrightThe Rent Collector
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 29-30Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 29 Summary
With help from the real Sopeap Sin’s family, Sang is able to locate her beloved teacher. Sopeap has returned to the home in which the Khmer Rouge brutally murdered her husband, her child, and her brave housekeeper. The current homeowner, Heng Rangsey, has allowed Sopeap to stay with him because the Khmer Rouge murdered his own father, also a teacher.
Sopeap is still alive, but barely. Sang then introduces her to the real Sopeap Sin’s family, who tell her of all the good that they were able to do with the money she sent them. They also assure her that they do not blame her for Sopeap’s death. As they leave, Sang tells Sopeap that their stories are the real lesson, “and there is no other that is more important” (256).
Sang stays with Sopeap, just as the old woman in the story stayed with the elephant. She reads to her from Hans Christian Andersen’s story, “The Phoenix Bird,” her favorite, and Sopeap “lets go of her final breath, flies away with [the] words that drift distant in the night to the glorious place where family waits—and it is over” (259). She leaves Mr. Rangsey’s house and finds Ki waiting for her and together they return home to the dump.
Chapter 30 Summary
Sang gathers the residents of Stung Meanchey to tell them a fable, as a correction to the “false fable, a story of Sopeap Sin that was a lie” (262). This false fable insists that Sopeap Sin is “the illegitimate child of Vadavamukha, a sky god with the body of a man and the head of a horse” (262). He hid this child in the trash and threw the can away to keep his wife from finding out about his infidelity. Stung Meanchey grew from that trash can.
Sang revises this story, instead claiming that Vadavamukha wanted to help the residents of Stung Meanchey, who had lost hope and forgotten “their true nature” because of “[t]he long hours, their meager earnings, and the filthy conditions at the dump” (262). With his wife, Queen Reak Ksaksar Devy, they decide to send their beautiful daughter, the princess Soriyan, to teach and provide comfort to the residents. However, Soriyan must disguise her true nature and offers to “clothe [her]self in garbage as a disguise, so that [she] might have the chance to teach the people and restore their hope” (262) because “there is no greater gift […] than that of hope” (263). Unfortunately, when her father hurled her to the earth, she hit her head and forgot who she was and what she was meant to do. However, she slowly regained her memories, “wrote down her most important lessons in the form of simple stories,” and “called on others to both write and tell stories, stories filled with truth–though sometimes hidden—to offer direction to anyone with patience and a heart ready to listen” (263).
Sang ends her own story by reflecting on the dream she had at the very beginning, in which her grandfather told her that the day she found the book would be “a very lucky day,” and stating her intention to go “teach a young boy how to write his name” (264).
Chapters 29-30 Analysis
The last two chapters of the book weave together all the elements of the story overall: the way that the past influences the present, the radiating consequences of our actions and behaviors, and the need for compassion and empathy. In the end, Sang stays with Sopeap as she is dying, reading to her what Sopeap has called her favorite story, “The Phoenix Bird” by Hans Christian Andersen. With this scene, Wright emphasizes the importance of story, of literature, of education.
Like Sarann, there exist many versions of the story of a bird who is reborn every so often from the ashes of its predecessor. In Andersen’s version, the bird was born in the Garden of Eden from the first rose and “flutters round us, swift as light, beauteous in color, charming in song” (258). According to the story, we all know this bird, though we may not realize it, revealing at the end that when the phoenix was born in that garden “beneath the Tree of Knowledge,” it “receivedst a kiss” and its true name, “[p]oetry” (259).
In the final chapter, Sang re-creates Sopeap Sin, revising the fable told about her and making of her a character much like the phoenix: She is the daughter of the sky god and his wife Reak Ksaksar Devy who sacrificed herself to go to earth and bring the community of Stung Meanchey hope. As he has done throughout the book, Wright manipulates the expectation of a clear happy ending. Although Sang is content, there does not seem to be a decisive change in her life, which she describes as “still a constant storm of struggle” (264). However, the narrative does end, fittingly, with a sense of hope, as Sang says she will be “going to teach a young boy how to write his name” (264). Wright brings the reader full circle, from the first fable about Sopeap Sin to Sang’s revision as well as from Sang’s desire to learn to her own role as teacher.
