The title, "Ru", is defined as: in French, a small stream, but also signifies a flow – of tears, blood or money; in Vietnamese, a lullaby. This seems to be the first of the koans one encounters, something to mull and turn over like a gumdrop in your mouth, sucking off the sugar before getting to the chewy center. Every vignette that follows, at a page or two in length, is like a koan; a riddle that might need some further thought, often ending in a gorgeous turn of phrase that cries for a savouring on the tongue, but since the scenes are so short and the next one starts right there on the next page, I found myself skipping ahead, chewing away at the sweet centers, before fully unwrapping and enjoying each treat as it came along.
Moving forward and backwards through time and space, from childhood to adulthood, Vietnam to Quebec and back again, Kim Thúy paints pictures both beautiful and ugly, and when you realise that this is essentially a memoir, the heart breaks for the disrupted childhoods, the loss of homeland, the refugee experience that Thúy describes, that Thúy has known, and the title, in both senses, is fitting and true.
It may require a reread to savour the sugar. It begins:
I came into the world during the Tet Offensive, in the early days of the Year of the Monkey, when the long chains of firecrackers draped in front of houses exploded polyphonically along with the sound of machine guns.
I first saw the light of day in Saigon, where firecrackers, fragmented into a thousand shreds, coloured the ground 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.
I was born in the shadow of skies adorned with fireworks, decorated with garlands of light, shot through with rockets and missiles. The purpose of my birth was to replace lives that had been lost. My life's duty was to prolong that of my mother.A koan, a gumdrop, a stream, a lullaby…
