Ru by Kim Thuy

I'd read Ru years ago, shortly after it won the Canada Reads competition  in 2012.  I remembered it as a short, beautiful, and poetical book about the refugee experience, which is why I recommended it as a selection for my book club.

It's more properly a novella than a novel, having only 141 sparsely populated pages, so I delayed re-reading it until just before the group met.   I tore through the book again, finishing two days before our meeting and thought "But what am I going to say about this book?". 

It was only then that it occurred to me that Ru is a novel, not a memoir.  Thuy is a Vietnamese refugee who came to Canada as part of the huge exodus of "boat people' in the mid-70s.  The book is written in the first person, and she did draw upon her own experiences in writing the book.  But Ru is a novel.  That means that the incidents and structure and language of the book have been carefully selected by the author to produce a certain effect, and to convey a certain message.  I couldn't assume, as I had unconsciously been doing, that Thuy had simply been recounting selected incidents from her life.   I needed to re-read, thinking about why, how, and when the author had inserted each incident, and what she was trying to say with what she was writing.

Unfortunately I didn't have time to finish the book for a second time before we met.  But the more critical re-reading I did have time to do was a revelation.   The book has a beautiful structure.  In French, a "ru" is a flow, as of a stream of water or tears.  In Vietnamese, a "ru" is a lullaby.  And the book itself is a ru....it is a series of linked stories, linked not by chronology but by themes.  One fragment will end with mention of a photo, or of a floor, or of the narrator's voicelessness.  The next will begin across time and space with a mention of a different floor, a different photo, another incident of speech or silence, the stories connected only by the theme and the fact that they tell fragments of the same person's life.  The book was also filled with interesting images:  what was the significance of the pink acrylic bracelet filled with diamonds used to smuggle wealth out of Vietnam, but stolen and discarded by thieves in Canada who had no idea of the value hidden inside?  How could I have missed the metaphorical nature of the brick wall built dividing the author's childhood home, half given over to the communists, and the other half invaded by soldiers that they were obliged to billet?

I didn't finish my re-reading, but reading the book as a novel definitely enhanced my enjoyment of it, and my appreciation of the artistry involved. 

The other striking feature of the book is that it was written in French, and translated.   The translator did a fabulous job of capturing the poetic language of the book.