Mind Picker: Vi

My first name, Bảo Vi, showed my parents' determination to “protect the smallest one.” In a literal translation, I am “Tiny precious microscopic.” As is often the case in Vietnam, I did not match the image of my own name.

I loved Kim Thúy's words the first time I encountered them in Ru; her poetic and touching Canada Reads-winning novella about the Vietnamese refugee experience. And I admired Thúy's maturing voice in 2014's Mãn that sensually explored the expression of a woman's love through the food she prepares. Naturally, I was excited to pick up her new book Vi, but I have to admit I'm a bit disappointed in this one – it has neither the gorgeous writing of Thúy's first book or the clear plotting of her second; it feels rather pointless overall (but noting that the main character, Vi, is a “graduate in translation and law”, as is Thúy herself as noted in her author bio, she may have been reaching for something even more autobiographical here; perhaps making this less universal.) Still happy to have reconnected with Thúy here and will continue to pick up anything she writes.

Told from the first-person, Vi begins by sharing her ancestors stories – particularly focussing on the love stories of her grandparents and parents. A happy and well-off Vietnamese childhood is soon interrupted by war, and her mother is able to leave with her and her brothers on a smuggler's boat out of the country. Eventually landing in a Malaysian refugee camp (as did Thúy's own family), this slim book only briefly covers that refugee experience:

Quite soon, dragging one's empty pail for three hours to reach the well became as banal as the pains from chronic dysentery. The discomfort of physical and mental proximity diminished, to the rhythm of spontaneous laughter and miraculous reunions. In this isolated world, friendships were born of the simplest bond. Two classmates became two sisters, two natives of the same town helped each other out as if they were cousins, two orphans formed a family.

Vi's mother is fluent in French and her family is soon accepted by the Canadian government and settled in Montreal (as did Thúy's own family). Although Vi's oldest brother plans for her to become a surgeon, a puppy love compels Vi to follow a young man to Ottawa, where she has middling success studying translation; followed by law school and the social tutelage of her mother's old friend, Hà. It is this education, and the failed love affair, that launch Vi on some international NGO work, and she travels extensively through Asia and Europe to her mother's disapproval; and as always, Thúy is lush in her descriptions of exotic food and settings. The following long passage, from when she has finally found a settled love and place, is quoted in full because it seemed to me to be the heart of Vi's story:

Whispering Hà's words into the hollow of Vincent's collarbone, I realized that my mother had taught me above all to become as invisible as possible, or at least to transform myself into a shadow so that no one would attack me, to pass through walls and melt into my surroundings. She insisted that in the art of war, the first lesson consisted of mastering one's disappearance, which was at the same time the best attack and the best defence. Until I saw the light shining like crystals in Vincent's beads of perspiration, I had always thought that my mother preferred her boys out of habit, out of love for my father. My voice echoing in the circle of Vincent's arms finally led me to understand my mother's desire to have me grow up differently, to launch myself elsewhere, to offer myself a fate different from her own. It took me two continents and an ocean to grasp that she had had to go against her nature to entrust the education of her own daughter to Hà, another woman, far away from her, and her exact opposite.

Ah, but we can't so easily escape our fates, and Vi's echoes her mother's in many ways; ending on a similar note of uncertainty. And just because I liked the writing and the resonance of these passages, I'm including the description of when Vi's grandfather fell in love with her grandmother at first sight:

Some believed that he was in love with her long-lashed almond eyes, others, with her fleshy lips, while still others were convinced that he'd been seduced by her full hips. No one had noticed the slender fingers holding a notebook against her bosom except my grandfather, who went on describing them for decades. He continued to evoke them long after age had transformed those smooth, tapering fingers into a fabulous myth or, at the very most, a lovers' tale.

And when the ecologist-ornithologist Vincent fell in love with Vi, as she braided the hair of a street food hawker:

In the forest, amid dozens of animals of all sorts that appeared and disappeared around him, the colour of a feather, the length of a beak, the form of a nest, would catch his eye, and reveal to him the features of a species. As for what had captivated him about me, it was my ability to bend my legs, to curve my back, and to hunch my shoulders to match the fragility of the young merchant who was preparing portions of ant eggs with the help of small green leaves.

At 130 pages, Vi is a very quick read. Unfortunately, unlike Thúy's first two slim books, I found this one lacking depth and heft; I liked what there was, I just wanted more.