I came into the world during Tet's assault, in the early days of the Year of the Monkey, while the long chains of firecrackers hanging from houses exploded, creating a polyphony along with the sound of machine guns. I saw the sunlight in Saigon, where the remnants of firecrackers shattered into a thousand pieces painted the ground red, like the petals of cherry blossoms, or like the blood of two million lined-up soldiers scattered across the cities and villages of a Vietnam torn in two.

I was born in the shadow of that sky adorned with Chinese lanterns, crossed by missiles and rockets. My birth was meant to replace the lives that were lost. My life had the duty to continue that of my mother. The History of Vietnam, with a capital H, thwarted my mother's plans. It threw the tonal marks of our names into the water when it forced us to cross the Gulf of Siam thirty years ago. It also stripped our names of their meanings, reducing them to sounds as foreign and strange as those in the French language.

RU means "little stream" in old French and metaphorically "flow of tears, blood, money". In Vietnamese, ru means "lullaby, to lull". Ru is the fragmented narrative of a Vietnamese refugee girl from Saigon, who along with other boat people left Southern Vietnam by boat in the mid-1970s, when the country was experiencing civil war, managed to cross the Gulf of Siam and arrived safely but stripped bare in Malaysia, at the risk of storms and pirates.

The narrator and her family sought refuge in Canada. Thirty years later, integrated into the new country, the author narrates life in the paradisiacal and wounded homeland, alongside her gradual and difficult maturation and integration into the host country. A life that was born from the ruins, in a narrative with fragments of memory, family moments with uncles, grandmothers, grandfathers, and children, romantic relationships—all conveyed with poetic sensitivity, amidst the tragic and the comical, and with sensuality, in a text filled with scents, images, and sensitivity, which tenderly heals the trauma like a lullaby.

If a sample of tenderness can sometimes be perceived as an insult, possibly the gesture of love is not universal: It must also be translated from one language to another, it must be learned. In the case of Vietnamese, it is possible to categorize, to quantify the gesture of love with specific words: I love out of sympathy (thích), I love without passion (thu’o’ng), I love romantically (yêu), I love with intoxication (mê), I love blindly (mù quáng), I love out of gratitude (tình nghĩa). Therefore, it is impossible to simply love, to love without your head.

BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS

Born in Saigon in 1968, KIM THUÝ left Vietnam with the boat people and settled with her family in Quebec, Canada. A graduate translator and lawyer, she has worked as a seamstress, interpreter, lawyer, restaurant owner, and gastronomy critic. She now lives in Montreal and has dedicated herself to writing. In 2017, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Concordia University for the power with which she gave voice to the refugee experience, and she received the Honor Medal from the National Council of Quebec. The illustrated edition of the Petit Robert dictionary 2018 honored her by including an entry for her and her work. Ru is her first book. Published in 2009, it was immediately honored with several awards. This was followed by À toi (2011, co-written with Pascal Janovjak), Mán (2013), Vi (2016), Le Secret des Vietnamiennes (2017), a book of Vietnamese recipes. As the mother of an autistic teenager, she also contributed to the book on autism L’Autisme expliqué aux non-autistes by Brigitte Harrisson and Lise St-Charles (2017).