In a Nutshell:

Translated from French (beautifully translated by Fischman, I may add), Thuy’s fictionalised memoir, Ru is her debut novel.  Born into a wealthy Vietnamese family during the Tet Offensive, the main character, as a girl, she flees Vietnam, she endures an arduous boat journey and a Malaysian refugee camp before arriving in Granby, Canada. The book consists of 100 or so vignettes, they go from her childhood to the present day.

Powerful, insightful and poetic.

Themes:

Identity, language, belonging, desexilio, exile.

Observations:

In Vietnamese, the word ru means lullaby, in French, it means a rivulet, a stream.

The Tet Offensive: following a period of stalemate, the North Vietnamese People’s Army of  Vietnam (PAVN) launched an offensive against the South Vietnamese Army of The Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), the US armed forces and their allies. The name of the offensive comes from the Tét Holiday, the Vietnamese New Year when the first attacks took place.

Thuy has worked as a seamstress, interpreter, lawyer and restaurant owner, she ran a restaurant called Ru de Nam and she published a cookbook last year called Secrets from My Vietnamese Kitchen.

Quotes: 

“I first saw the light of day in Saigon, where firecrackers, fragmented into a thousand shreds, coloured the ground red like the petals of cherry blossoms or like the blood of the two million soldiers deployed and scattered throughout the villages and cities of a Vietnam that had been ripped in two.”

“After such a long time in places without light, a landscape so white, so virginal could only dazzle us, blind us, intoxicate us.”

” 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.”

“Someone told me that bonds are forged with laughter but even more with sharing and the frustrations of sharing.”

“But the young waiter reminded me that I couldn’t have everything, that I no longer had the right to declare I was Vietnamese because I no longer had their fragility, their uncertainty, their fears. And he was right to remind me.”

“I often think about the woman who sold cakes of tofu for five cents each, sitting on the ground in a hidden corner of the market in Hanoi, who told her neighbours that I was from Japan, that I was making good progress with my Vietnamese.”

“I had to relearn my mother tongue, which I’d given up too soon. In any case, I hadn’t really mastered it completely because the country was divided in two when I was born. I come from the South, so I had never heard people from the North until I went back to Vietnam.”

“I’d forgotten that love comes from the head and not the heart. Of the entire body, only the head matters. Merely touching the head of a Vietnamese person insults not just him but his entire family tree.”

“To love by taste (thích); to love without being in love (thương); to love passionately (yêu); to love ecstatically (mê); to love blindly (mù quáng); tolove gratefully (tình ).”

“For five dollars they got a clumsily made-up girl who came for a coffee or a beer with them and roared with laughter because the man had just said the Vietnamese word urinate instead of pepper, two words differentiated only by an accent, a tone that is nearly imperceptible to the untrained ear.”

Details:

Book: Ru

Author: Kim Thuy

Kim Thuy‘s full name is Kim Thúy Ly Thanh. She was born in Saigon, Vietnam, but fled with her family a decade later, eventually settling in Quebec. She studied at the University of Montréal in linguistics and translation (1990) and law (1993

Thuy has worked as a a seamstress, translator, interpreter, lawyer, food commentator and restaurateur. Thúy was the proprietor of a restaurant called Ru de Nam. Thúy recently published a cookbook in French: Le secret des Vietnamiennes (Montréal: Trécarré, 2017), that won the Taste Canada 2018 gold/or award in the French language category: Livres de cuisine régionale et culturelle. The cookbook was published in English translation in 2019 as Secrets from My Vietnamese Kitchen: Simple Recipes from My Many Mothers (Appetite by Random House, 2019). Her newest novel Em (2020) was published in English translation in the fall of 2021, by the same translator as Ru.

Translator: Sheila Fischman

Sheila Fischman

Publisher: Profile Books Ltd

Publishing Date: 24th May 2012

A bit about me!

Here I am with my husband visiting one of our favourite places in the world, the Westonbirt Arboretum!

A bit about me, my name is Jess Andoh-Thayre. I am from Brixton, South London. I currently live in Cambodia. Before living here in Cambodia, I lived in Tanzania with my husband, who is a diplomat. I have also lived in Chile and Spain. I am a French, Spanish and English as an Additional Language (EAL) teacher. I recently qualified as a SENCo (Special Educational Needs Coordinator). After taking three years off to have a baby in a pandemic and also retrain, I have just returned to work as an Elementary Learning Support Teacher.