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In French, ru means a small stream and, figuratively, a
flow, a discharge- of tears, of blood, of money. In Vietnamese, ru means a lullaby, to lull.
So begins Ru, the debut of Vietnamese-Canadian writer Kim
Thuy. Her brave and exposed autobiographical novel follows Nguyen An Tinh as
she leaves her home country at the age of ten and adapts to the life of a
refugee following the fall of Saigon to the communists in 1975. Originally
published in French in 2009, Ru was awarded the 2010 Canadian Governor
General’s Award for fiction. The English version, translated by Sheila
Fischman, was published in 2012.
The name of the book is very well-chosen. The word that has
both French and Vietnamese meanings corresponds to the writer’s Francophone-Vietnamese
identity; the two translations of the word, flow
and lullaby, relate to the sequential
structure of the book and the dream-like tone of the writing. Constructed
entirely from meandering vignettes, the story is a flow of memory rather than a
chronological account, showing how one memory from the author’s life recalls
another from a different time, a different place, linked by an idea, an object
or an emotion. In this way, we learn how the narrator’s perspective in life
evolved from her experience of growing up: adapting to different surroundings
and lifestyles, and in these new settings, learning to find her place. Thuy is
particularly affected by the family members, neighbours and strangers who
inspired her along the way; she calls these people her angels.
Through these glimpses into the life of her character, we
build a chronology of events; how the bourgeois Saigon lifestyle of a wealthy
family is transformed to poverty as they are forced to sell their belongings to
pay for a ticket out of the country by boat, eventually landing in a
maggot-infested refugee camp in Malaysia. In Canada, the family begin a new
life. They experience the generosity of their Montreal community and the
blissful comfort of peace in a quiet town laced with pure white snow, never mind
that their mattresses are flea-ridden and their clothes ill-fitting
hand-me-downs. Later the woman returns to Vietnam, visiting the North, the
birthplace of Vietnamese communism, for the first time, where she works in
Hanoi. This gives her an opportunity to reflect on the impact of war on her
homeland and to question where her own identity lies. A new chapter of her life
is her experience of motherhood; she discovers a new definition of love, one
that is tinged with heartache through her struggle to accept that she is unable
to get close to her autistic son.
Like her character, Kim Thuy was born in 1968, the year of
the bloody Tet Offensive that marked the ‘point of no return’ in the American mission
in Vietnam. War is an ever-present background to An Tinh’s childhood. But as
Thuy relates in the narrative, the distinction between peace and war can be
hazed. “I lived in peace when Vietnam was in flames and I didn’t experience war
until Vietnam had laid down its weapons”. Notably, she does not criticise the
communist cause, despite the Viet Cong soldiers that occupied her family home
and confiscated their belongings and despite being led to flee the country. Contempt
is shown towards individual acts of cruelty, such as the brutish behaviour of
the soldiers living in her paternal grandfather’s home as he lay on his
deathbed, but this extends also to the cruelty on the other side; of the
pro-American soldiers who executed a child in front of his village for carrying
secret messages for the communists. A sympathetic passage is dedicated to the
childhood of the inspector from the new communist regime who searched An Tinh’s
family home. Snapshots of war are seen from the ground, through the eyes of
ordinary people without regard for background or ideology; in this way the
novel is very human. In an interview with CBC news, Kim Thuy talks of being
criticised for not expressing condemnation of the communists. Her response is
that from working with those who lay down their lives to fight for the National
Liberation Front, she learned that they wanted the same thing as the rest of
the Vietnamese population, those who had known nothing in their lives but
French colonial oppression: a free and independent Vietnam.
Thuy lays down her life on the pages with no words wasted on
self-pity or dramatization. Her story is not just her own, but that of a
population of Vietnamese uprooted, of the hundreds of thousands of ‘boat
people’ who set out to sea at night to escape the new regime, with no certainty
of ever reaching land and facing the risk of drowning, starvation or being
intercepted by Thai pirates. It is often estimated that 200,000 people died
along these journeys across the South China Sea. It is also the story of the
old women with hunched backs who worked tirelessly in the rice fields
throughout the war, who “carried Vietnam on their backs while their husbands
and sons carried weapons on theirs”. Thuy’s novel crosses generations, from her
grandparent’s story to that of her own children, and all those who she
encountered in-between.
Ru is undoubtedly an important story- more than just an
autobiography, it expands to a reflection of the lives of the majority of
Vietnamese who lived through the war and its aftermath. In interviews, Thuy
comments on the fact that the story of the boat people is not yet ‘written in
history books’ in Vietnam. This makes her novel and those of others who
survived the boat experience very valuable. Indeed, some copies of Ru have
found their way to Vietnam, she says, where they have been controversial. For
me, Ru was an interesting read that gave me some insight into the Vietnamese
wartime experience, and that of Vietnamese refugees.
The structure of the story, written in vignettes that crossed
time and setting, added intrigue, but this was not a seamless effort. Often,
the links between one recount and the next felt forced, where it would be more
coherent to begin a new thread of thought. Although I admired the evident optimism
and bravery of the writer, the writing is often overly-sentimental, with gushing
talk of ‘dreams’ and ‘angels’. The style,
too, is occasionally overbearing, over-reliant on repetition as a poetic
device. Eventually this becomes tiring, predictable, ineffective… Of course,
repetition could be a device of the translator trying to better capture the
meaning of a French word translated to English, but from reading some passages
from the French version, it seems that Fischman’s translation is very loyal to
the original text, which also brims with this endless repetition-of-three. There
are many touching and beautifully expressed moments, but in the end the
over-sentimentally of the writing tarnishes what could have been a very
poignant and moving novel.
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