Before I’d read a single page of this week’s selection, Ru by Vietnamese-Canadian writer Kim Thúy, it had already taught me an intriguing lesson about categorizing authors by nationality. While reading an enjoyable review of Duong Thu Huong’s Paradise of the Blind last year, I noticed that at least one reader was curious about younger, postwar Vietnamese novelists. (Huong is arguably Vietnam’s most notable author from the war era, and I’m planning to review her work on the site at a later date.) I thought I had discovered the answer in Thúy, a young woman who came of age in Montreal after her family fled Vietnam. Yet in a Condé Nast Traveler article last fall featuring book recommendations from ambassadors, Kirsten Hillman touted Ru as the epitome of Canadian inclusiveness. So how does that book evoke the crossroads between two nationalities so convincingly? This novel’s careful exploration of language—the parallels and divergences between Vietnamese and Canadian French—and its unusual structure provide a unique perspective on exile and belonging.
Compellingly, the book’s title evokes the dissonance of translation; the word “ru” alternately refers to a lullaby in Vietnamese or a stream in French. Far from a simple transition, the bridge between the narrator’s two nationalities is painstakingly built, constructed through memory, longing, and regret. When her parents flee Vietnam as refugees, first to Malaysia and then to Canada, she finds herself grappling with culture shock and frantically paced French and English courses. Though her life seems governed by a Vietnamese proverb—“life is a struggle in which sorrow leads to defeat”—her native language has become “useless” in this new life. Perhaps because of this rapid change, her development is uneven. She describes how her guidance counselors are puzzled when she can sing “the national anthem but not ‘The Chicken Dance’ or the birthday song” or recognize “the word ‘surgeon’ but not ‘darling’ or ‘tanning salon’ or ‘horseback riding.’” Interspersed with this account of her adjustment to Canadian life are vivid memories of her childhood and family history in Vietnam. She recalls her affluent politician Uncle Two, whose title honors the “South Vietnamese tradition to replace the names of brothers and sisters with their birth order, beginning with the number two.” A figurehead of a pro-American party, Uncle Two is a “happy-go-lucky” man who inspires the narrator’s interest in French language and culture as he “travel[s] through memories of being a foreign student in Paris” and “talk[s] about Proust while he ate madeleines.” The greatest strength of this novel is its depiction of the organic development of vocabulary, the connective tissue between words and lived experience.
Even as it forms a love letter to two languages, Ru’s form is also intriguing. On the surface, it seems to be a series of vignettes separated by a drop cap in the translation. Yet they lack the mini-short story format that many other writers use in this vein—Duanwad Pimwana’s Bright, for instance. In keeping with the novel’s hazy but sumptuous narration, these imagistic fragments evoke a dreamscape, drifting back and forth between countries, family members, schools, and jobs. This structural choice both affirms and challenges the narrator’s assertion that immigrants travel light, as she sifts through brief flashes of memory to comprehend her identity. Her account reveals how the immigrant story—her lifelong effort to transcend nationality through knowledge and hard work—is not without consequences. When she returns to Hanoi as an adult, she attempts to speak Vietnamese with a local waiter, who tells her she is “too fat to be Vietnamese.” Though seemingly humorous, she recognizes the undertone of his rebuff: “I no longer had the right to speak Vietnamese because I no longer had their fragility, their uncertainty, their fears.” Like her transnational life, this uneven structure can come at a cost. Though it echoes a transient lifestyle, the anecdotes can curtail meaningful characterization. For instance, we learn of her nonverbal autistic son, Henri, early in the novel, but he makes few other appearances throughout—making it difficult to connect to the story arc of the narrator’s motherhood, which she introduces in the first pages. Despite its flaws, Ru sheds light on the consequences of war, the significance of language when coming of age, and the hardships and beauty of life on the cusp of two nationalities.
Kim Thúy, Ru, trans. Sheila Fischman (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012)
Photo Credit: Huỳnh Mai Nguyễn from Pixabay.
