Ru

One issue with writers’ festivals is deciding whether to read a book before or after you hear the author speak. This was one instance where I was glad for the latter. I read Ru after Thuy’s packed-house presentation at the Sunshine Coast Writers Festival. Thuy gave a stirring account of her own family’s life in communist-controlled Saigon, their escape from Vietnam via boat, their time in a refugee camp in Malaysia, and adapting to their new home as immigrants in Quebec. Because I heard this story so vividly told in a linear format, each of the seemingly temporally random remembrances or vignettes in Ru fit beautifully into that storyline for me. Even though Ru is not a memoir, Thuy shares not only many of the experiences, but show more also many of the characteristics of the narrator, most notably, a predisposition to value memories over possessions. “Remembering only images that stay luminous behind my closed eyelids…. preferring them because I can shape them according to the colour of time.” (100) show less

Kim Thúy was ten when she fled Vietnam with her family in the wave of "boat people" fleeing the Communist reprisals after the fall of Saigon. After four months in a Malaysian refugee camp, her family was chosen for emigration to Canada based on her parent's French proficiency. They settled in Granby, Quebec (by chance the town my grandfather is from) and were warmly welcomed. Thúy attended the University of Montreal and then worked as an interpreter and translator for a Canadian firm based in Vietnam advising the Vietnamese government on their move toward capitalism. She later opened a restaurant in Montreal called Ru de Nam. Ru is her debut novel and highly autobiographical, referring to all the events above, as well as being the show more parent of an autistic child. The book won the Governor General’s Literary Award and the translation was a finalist for the Giller Prize.

In addition to a mesmerizing story, what draws me to Thúy's books is her writing. It's like reading poetry. Almost every page is a new "chapter", usually only a paragraph or two, and ends with an impactful sentence. Although a complete thought in themselves, they string together flawlessly, creating a beautiful stream of thought moving back and forth in time. I get swept along and usually finish her book in a sitting or two. Highly recommended. show less

Als Zehnjährige floh die Autorin gemeinsam mit ihren Eltern aus Vietnam und gelangte über Malaysia nach Kanada. In kurzen Stücken, die selten mehr als eine Seite umfassen, blickt die nunmehr 40jährige in diesem Buch in nicht chronologischer Reihenfolge zurück auf ihre Vergangenheit und die ihrer Familie. Viele dieser Erinnerungen bergen den Ansatz für den Sprung zu einer anderen in sich.
Ein Beispiel: Sie berichtet von Kindern der GIs in Vietnam, die zumeist Waisen und/oder Obdachlose wurden. Einem dieser ehemaligen Kinder, einer mittlerweile jungen, obdachlosen Frau, begegnet sie in New York ohne ihr helfen zu können. Dabei erinnert sie sich an einen Onkel, der in Princeton seinen Doktor in Statistik machte und sie fragt sich, ob show more er die Anzahl der Risiken und Hindernisse berechnen könnte, denen diese junge Frau ausgesetzt war. Davon ausgehend überlegt sie, ob ihm dies auch mit der Berechnung der Wahrscheinlichkeit des Überlebens von Herrn An möglich wäre. Auch Herr An, ein früherer Richter und Universitätsprofessor, ist ein Flüchtling, der Grauenvolles durchmachte und ihr 'die Nuancen gelehrt' hat so wie Herr Minh in ihr den Wunsch zu schreiben weckte. Der Herr Minh, der an der Sorbonne französische Literatur studiert hatte. Und so weiter...
Menschen und Geschehnisse aus der Vergangenheit wecken Erinnerungen an Bekannte aus jüngerer Zeit und andersherum. Und so entsteht nach und nach ein Bild eines vielschichtigen, bunten Lebens, das neben Leid und Schmerz auch viel Wärme und Freude erlebt hat. Besonders eindrucksvoll empfand ich die Liebe und Dankbarkeit zum Dasein, die immer wieder durch die poetischen Sätze hervorklingen trotz all der entsetzlichen Dinge, die Kim Thúy erlebt hat. Ein berührendes Buch! show less

Wow. Beautiful.
An elegiac and lyrical autobiographical novel of a family that fled Vietnam in the 1970s. They arrived in Canada, via Malaysian refugee camps, and eventually settled in Quebec.

The story is prefaced with an explanation. "In French, 'ru' means a small stream and, figuratively, a flow, a discharge--of tears, of blood, of money. In Vietnamese, 'ru' means a lullably, to lull.

The narrator was ten years old when 'the History of Vietnam' ended her "role as an extension of my mother." Her name was very similar to her mother's, because she was the sequel to her, she would continue her story. But the events changed their own planned futures and histories. She tells their story from her perspective thirty years later, as a Canadian show more immigrant who had to adapt to a new country, new languages, new customs. She had to learn how to accommodate these new layers of being-ness within her own identity.

It is not a straight linear narration, but neither does it alway jump back and forth between discrete episodes of time. Instead she shares her memories as part of the flow of her present and past life. Woven throughout is an appreciation of the power and love of family, of ancestors and descendants.

The tale occasionally started to stray toward the territory of sentimentality but fortunately veered away before arrival. It does not dwell or revel in horrors and atrocities. It is simple, yet elegant, and quietly inspiring.

It won Canada's Governor General's Award for French-language fiction last year, and has since won other international awards. show less

RU caught me up and kept me reading from page one. Written in small snippets detailing her life as a child in a privileged Saigon family that is finally forced to flee the country after the Communist takeover, author Kim Thuy also gives us glimpses into their horrifying experiences as boat people, then in a refugee camp in Malaysia, before final stops in Canada. The short sections here flow effortlessly from one to another, although the chronology skips haphazardly between various locales and years and extended family members. The title, 'ru,' means a small stream, or a flow in French (the language in which it was first published), while in Vietnamese it means a lull, or even a lullabye. Kim Thuy's story, which I suspect is highly show more autobiographical, does indeed flow naturally and gently, by subjective memories, and reads very much like a lengthy, meandering prose poem, giving us an artfully told tale of one family's long journey into a new life. RU is, I think, a must-read for anyone interested in the Vietnamese diaspora, a direct result of the years-long Vietnam war. (Called the American war by the Vietnamese.) I was enormously impressed by this little book. A magnificent achievement. My very highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less

Kim Thuy won the 2010 Governor General's Award for her first book, Ru: A Novel. Although the book is styled a novel, it is based on Thuy's own experience and memories. When she was 10 years old, she and her family fled Vietnam on a boat that took them to a refugee camp in Malaysia, eventually ending up in Montreal.

This is a gorgeous book. It's written in brief vignettes traveling back and forth in time and from place to place to finally piece together a picture of identities and a family split asunder which emerge into a new life. Many of the vignettes are prose poems (and great credit must also be given to the translator of the English edition) that capture fleeting moments:

After the old lady died, I would go every Sunday to a lotus show more pond in a suburb of Hanoi where there were always two or three women with bent backs and trembling hands, sitting in a small round boat, using a stick to move across the water and drop tea leaves into open lotus blossoms. They would come back the next day to collect them one by one before the petals faded, after the captive tea leaves had absorbed the scent of the pistils during the night. They told me that every one of those tea leaves preserved the soul of the short-lived flowers.

An interview with Kim Thuy on NPR: http://www.npr.org/2012/11/24/165563101/a-refugees-multilayered-experience-in-ru show less

How do you leave a country with only what you can carry on your body and make a new life in a new country using a new language? Through episodic memories that move back and forth through time, the narrator tells of her childhood in South Vietnam, of life in a reeducation camp, of a boat journey to a new land, of living in a refugee camp in Malaysia, of arriving in Canada and adjusting to a new culture and a new language, of returning to work in Vietnam years later, and of motherhood. Anyone old enough to remember images of the Vietnam War or the boat people will have no trouble visualizing what Thuy so movingly describes. It's short enough to read in a single sitting, and I think this factor is a key to its impact. Thuy pulls readers show more into her world and keeps them there just long enough to feel the weight of Vietnamese history before releasing them back to their own worlds.

We often forget about the existence of all those women who carried Vietnam on their backs while their husbands and sons carried weapons on theirs...They were so weighed down by all their grief that they couldn't pull themselves up, couldn't straighten their hunched backs, bowed under the weight of their sorrow. When the men emerged from the jungle and started to walk again along the earthen dikes around their rice fields, the women continued to bear the weight of Vietnam's inaudible history on their backs. Very often they passed away under that weight, in silence. show less