This week delves into Ru, a semi-biographical novel inspired by the author Kim Thúy’s exile from Vietnam to Canada. Winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction, CBC Canada Reads 2015, The Grand prix littéraire Archambault, the Prix du Grand Public Salon du Livre/La Presse, the Grand prix littéraire RTL-Lire (France), and the Mondello Prize for Multiculturalism (Italy), the book was originally written in French, translated into English by Sheila Fishman, and published in 14 other languages worldwide.
Ru is situated in history – the cruelty of war, deprivation, and displacement. It seamlessly transports readers from harsh realities to fleeting beauty, memories, and imagination. The landscapes are external as well as internal, and the scope is both objective and deeply personal.
There is an internal rhythm in the book. Very often, a word is carried over from the end of one episode, to the beginning of the next. Each of these words gives musical as well as visual coherence – in most cases poetic imagery, in some, concepts. The experience of reading this book is comparable to viewing a slideshow, when successive pictures of thematic relevance are projected, and the imageries of the previous photo lingers while the next similar image is superimposed. The slideshow turns individual pictures into a coherent narrative.
Take the first 40 pages as an example. They account for a little less than a third of the slim book, and introduce the protagonist’s journey from relatively peaceful days in Vietnam, to the Communist regime resulting in the family’s downfall, leading to their harrowing journey on a packed boat, through a two-year stay in a refugee camp in Malaysia, to their arrival in Canada welcomed by generosity. The book would continue to expand its scope in terms of geography, time, and characters, but focusing on the opening would suffice, for the time being.
Kim Thúy shared in an interview about her subsequent novel a worldview that enlightens what her work is about. “In Vietnamese culture, we are in a chain. We are the result of who our ancestors had been.” The interlocking visual motifs resemble the chain; it is also present when the protagonist positions herself in a long line of relations in the family – as a daughter and eventually as a mother, as a grandchild, niece, cousin, and in relation to to people with whom she has crossed paths.
Following the stream of imagery in Ru, I gravitate towards multiple expressions of motherhood depicted in the book. It is told through the varied portrayals ranging from Nguyen herself, that of her mother, and those of the mothers that Nguyen had chanced upon on the refugee boat, in Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, and Canada.
The book begins with the birth of Nguyen An Tinh (with a dot under the i) in the cacophony of firecrackers for the lunar new year, and gunfire during the Tet Offensive. The juxtaposition of the two clashing occasions foreshadows loss of homes, lives, and identities. Given a name almost identical to her mother (without a dot under the i), the protagonist is expected to serve as an extension of her mother and fulfill the latter’s forsaken dreams. Nguyen re-examines what it means for her children as an extension of her in a completely different geographical and cultural context, where their differences are celebrated and embraced. She then turns inwards to ponder what the love of a mother means. This contemplation takes her back to the boat, sharing space with a mother carrying her child covered in scabies, among many other people fleeing their homes. As Nguyen plunges into this turbulent piece of memory, she takes readers with her on the voyage filled with darkness, sickness, and fear.
A new motif springs from the word “prisoner”. First referring to Dr. Vinh, a political prisoner who sent his children overseas under the care of a priest before he was seized and captured. After his release, he spent the rest of his days sweeping the church steps as an act of gratitude. Dr. Vinh’s fatherly love resonates with grown up Nguyen, who gains a new understanding of motherhood as she comprehends, in retrospect, the hopes and fears that propel a parent on the choices they make for their children when confronting extreme risks; in such scenarios they would choose dignity and sacrifice over survival on behalf of the children.
The prisoner motif shifts its form as Nguyen describes one of his sons, Henri, as a child held captive in another manner.
“I didn’t cry out and I didn’t weep when I was told that my son Henri was a prisoner of his own world, when it was confirmed that he is one of those children who don’t hear us, don’t speak to us, even though they’re neither deaf nor mute. He is also one of those children we must love from a distance, neither touching, nor kissing, nor smiling at them because every one of their senses would be assaulted by the odour of our skin, by the intensity of our voices, the texture of our hair, the throbbing of our hearts. Probably he’ll never call me maman lovingly, even if he can pronounce the word poire with all the roundness and sensuality of the oi sound. He will never understand why I cried when he smiled for the first time.” (Thúy, 7)
Here, readers are transported way ahead of Nguyen’s journey into an emotional confession. In the next segment, readers would be thrown into the whiteness of the first snowbanks that ten-year-old Nguyen would marvel upon landing Mirabel Airport. At the welcoming reception for the arrival in Canada, she would be held captive by the abundance of delicate canapés and hors d’ouevre, together with the pristine snowy landscape.
“I was like my son Henri: unable to talk or to listen, even though I was neither deaf nor mute. I now had no points of reference, no tools to allow me to dream, to project myself into the future, to be able to experience the present, in the present.” (Thúy, 8)
Nguyen enjoys a temporary respite from the culture shock easing into her new life of assimilation. She recalls her mother sending her on errands to make her bolder, more outspoken.
“For a long time, I thought my mother enjoyed constantly pushing me right to the edge. When I had my own children, I finally understood that I should have seen her behind the locked door, eyes pressed against the peephole; I should have heard her talking on the phone to the grocer when I was sitting on the steps in tears. I also understood later that my mother certainly had dreams for me, but above all she’d given me tools so that I could put down roots, so that I could dream.” (Thúy 20)
The relative calm is once again thwarted as Nguyen ponders the contradiction of war and peace. Canada provides a home for the Nguyen’s to settle into their new roles, past the noises of gunfire, past the dangers on the sea, and yet the imagery of war is not far. It resurfaces as her stoic mother wages a silent battle to let go of the past, to live in the present pragmatically. This translates to reinventing herself from the privilege of never having to work before, and devoting herself in manual labour.
This figurative war shifts to something more philosophical as Nguyen contemplates the peace and calm in Canada, and the disparity of her experience in Vietnam.
“As a child, I thought that war and peace were opposites. Yet I lived in peace when Vietnam was in flames and I didn’t experience war until Vietnam had laid down its weapons. I believe that war and peace are actually friends, who mock us.” (12)
One particular contradiction is her encounter with Communist combat soldiers who entered Saigon, her hometown, and raided her home. Her family possessions were confiscated from safes, dressing tables, and chests of drawers, one of which filled with the brassieres of her grandmother and her six daughters. From that day on, half of her family home would be shared with ten soldier-inspectors who were still boys and girls. Nguyen was intrigued why a boy soldier would seal the chest of drawers filled with lingerie without describing its content. She posited if he might be embarrassed at the thought of whom those garments belonged to, but she later realized that it was beyond the boy to understand why the family owned so many coffee filters, like the one that his mother used to make tiny cups of coffee that she would sell to passersby at the foot of a bridge. This seems the least unlikely place to contemplate on tenderness, but here is the portrayal of the young soldier’s mother.
“In the winter, she placed glasses containing barely three sips into a bowl filled with hot water to keep them warm during conversations between the men sitting on benches raised just a bit above the ground. Her customers spotted her by the flame of her tiny oil lamp sitting on the tiny work table, next to three cigarettes displayed on a plate. Every morning, the young inspector, still a child, woke up with the oft-mended brown cloth coffee filter, sometimes still wet and hanging from a nail from his head.” (Thúy 29)
The reverie ends with a tongue in cheek remark. “He didn’t understand why my family had so many coffee filters filed away in drawers lined with tissue paper. And why were they double? Was it because we always drink coffee with a friend?” (Thúy 30) The mention of this jarring innocence might be a hint of empathy, that the young soldier, too, deserved a life simply as someone’s child.
There are a few more interludes before the theme of motherhood re-emerges. Nguyen recalls travelling as a young girl to Hoa Lu. There she met a woman who attempted to give up her daughter hoping to send her away from her fate of running after tourists to sell them trinkets. This piece of memory recurs in her dreams:
“In the midst of those rocky mountains, I saw only a majestic landscape in place of that mother’s infinite love. There are nights when I run along the long strips of earth next to the buffalo to call her back, to take her daughter’s hand in mine.” (Thúy 35)
A past episode that returns to haunt Nguyen, however, is not something that paralyses her; she is always carrying stories and pieces of history with her to move forward. As a mother, Nguyen would look back at this woman as a fellow mother. She is also telling these stories to her son and preserving them for posterity.
“I tell Pascal these stories to keep alive the memory of a slice of history that will never be taught in any school.” (Thúy 37)
Nguyen is not concerned about history with a capital H, but stories that might otherwise be overlooked or forgotten. She understands that distance affords her the time and sensibility to appreciate these humble stories of everyday people.
“If I hadn’t lived in the majestic silence of great frozen lakes, in the humdrum everyday life of peace, where love is celebrated with balloons, confetti, chocolates, I would probably never have noticed the old woman who lived near my great-grandfather’s grave in the Mekong Delta. She was very old, so old that the sweat ran down her wrinkles like a brook that traces a furrow in the earth. Her back was hunched, so hunched that she had to go down staircases backwards so as not to lose her balance and fall headfirst.” (Thúy 38)
This is the way Ru pieces together many individuals – mothers – silently bearing the weight of day-to-day survival and grief in the personal and collective realms. The beginning one-third of the book sets the tone of how Nguyen preserves the soul of something mundane, ephemeral, and beautiful that she would revisit time and again in adulthood to make sense of their meanings.