Ru- Kim Thuy and Sheila Fischman (2012)

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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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