Ru Read online

  PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

  COPYRIGHT © 2012 KIM THÚY

  English translation © 2012 Sheila Fischman

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2012 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, and simultaneously in the United Kingdom by The Clerkenwell Press, a division of Profile Books Limited, London. Originally published in French in Canada as Ru by Éditions Libre Expression, Montreal, in 2009. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Thúy, Kim

  [Ru. English]

  Ru / Kim Thuy; translated by Sheila Fischman.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-35972-8

  1. Thúy, Kim. I. Fischman, Sheila II. Title.

  PS8639.H89R813 2012 C848′.603 C2011-904061-1

  Cover designed by CS Richardson

  Images: (winter landscape) Andrew Bret Wallis / Getty Images;

  (dragon pattern) John Lock / Shutterstock.com

  v3.1

  In French, ru means a small stream and, figuratively,

  a flow, a discharge—of tears, of blood, of money.

  In Vietnamese, ru means a lullaby, to lull.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  First Page

  About the Author

  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 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.

  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.

  My name is Nguyễn An Tịnh, my mother’s name is Nguyễn An Tĩnh. My name is simply a variation on hers because a single dot under the i differentiates, distinguishes, dissociates me from her. I was an extension of her, even in the meaning of my name. In Vietnamese, hers means “peaceful environment” and mine “peaceful interior.” With those almost interchangeable names, my mother confirmed that I was the sequel to her, that I would continue her story.

  The History of Vietnam, written with a capital H, thwarted my mother’s plans. History flung the accents on our names into the water when it took us across the Gulf of Siam thirty years ago. It also stripped our names of their meaning, reducing them to sounds at once strange, and strange to the French language. In particular, when I was ten years old it ended my role as an extension of my mother.

  Because of our exile, my children have never been extensions of me, of my history. Their names are Pascal and Henri, and they don’t look like me. They have hair that’s lighter in colour than mine, white skin, thick eyelashes. I did not experience the natural feelings of motherhood I’d expected when they were clamped onto my breasts at 3 a.m., in the middle of the night. The maternal instinct came to me much later, over the course of sleepless nights, dirty diapers, unexpected smiles, sudden delights.

  Only then did I understand the love of the mother sitting across from me in the hold of our boat, the head of the baby in her arms covered with foul-smelling scabies. That image was before my eyes for days and maybe nights as well. The small bulb hanging from a wire attached to a rusty nail spread a feeble, unchanging light. Deep inside the boat there was no distinction between day and night. The constant illumination protected us from the vastness of the sea and the sky all around us. The people sitting on deck told us there was no boundary between the blue of the sky and the blue of the sea. No one knew if we were heading for the heavens or plunging into the water’s depths. Heaven and hell embraced in the belly of our boat. Heaven promised a turning point in our lives, a new future, a new history. Hell, though, displayed our fears: fear of pirates, fear of starvation, fear of poisoning by biscuits soaked in motor oil, fear of running out of water, fear of being unable to stand up, fear of having to urinate in the red pot that was passed from hand to hand, fear that the scabies on the baby’s head was contagious, fear of never again setting foot on solid ground, fear of never again seeing the faces of our parents, who were sitting in the darkness surrounded by two hundred people.

  Before our boat had weighed anchor in the middle of the night on the shores of Rach Gia, most of the passengers had just one fear: fear of the Communists, the reason for their flight. But as soon as the vessel was surrounded, encircled by the uniform blue horizon, fear was transformed into a hundred-faced monster who sawed off our legs and kept us from feeling the stiffness in our immobilized muscles. We were frozen in fear, by fear. We no longer closed our eyes when the scabious little boy’s pee sprayed us. We no longer pinched our noses against our neighbours’ vomit. We were numb, imprisoned by the shoulders of some, the legs of others, the fear of everyone. We were paralyzed.

  The story of the little girl who was swallowed up by the sea after she’d lost her footing while walking along the edge spread through the foul-smelling belly of the boat like an anaesthetic or laughing gas, transforming the single bulb into a polar star and the biscuits soaked in motor oil into butter cookies. The taste of oil in our throats, on our tongues, in our heads sent us to sleep to the rhythm of the lullaby sung by the woman beside me.

  My father had made plans, should our family be captured by Communists or pirates, to put us to sleep forever, like Sleeping Beauty, with cyanide pills. For a long time afterwards, I wanted to ask why he hadn’t thought of letting us choose, why he would have taken away our possibility of survival.

  I stopped asking myself that question when I became a mother, when Dr. Vinh, a highly regarded surgeon in Saigon, told me how he had put his five children, one after the other, from the boy of twelve to the little girl of five, alone, on five different boats, at five different times, to send them off to sea, far from the charges of the Communist authorities that hung over him. He was certain he would die in prison because he’d been accused of killing some Communist comrades by operating on them, even if they’d never set foot in his hospital. He hoped to save one, maybe two of his children by launching them in this fashion onto the sea. I met Dr. Vinh on the church steps, which he cleared of snow in the winter and swept in the summer to thank the priest who had acted as father to his children, bringing up all five, one after the other, until they were grown, until the doctor got out of prison.

  I didn’t cry out and I didn’t weep when I was told that my son Henri was a prisoner in his own world, when it was confirmed that he is one of those children who don’t hear us, don’t speak to us, even though they’re neither deaf nor mute. He is also one of those children we must love from a distance, neither touching, nor kissing, nor smiling at them because every one of their senses would be assaulted by the odour of our skin, by the intensity of our voices, the texture of our hair, the throbbing of our heart
s. Probably he’ll never call me maman lovingly, even if he can pronounce the word poire with all the roundness and sensuality of the oi sound. He will never understand why I cried when he smiled for the first time. He won’t know that, thanks to him, every spark of joy has become a blessing and that I will keep waging war against autism, even if I know already that it’s invincible.

  Already, I am defeated, stripped bare, beaten down.

  When I saw my first snowbanks through the porthole of the plane at Mirabel Airport, then too I felt naked, if not stripped bare. In spite of my short-sleeved orange pullover purchased at the refugee camp in Malaysia before we left for Canada, in spite of my loose-knit brown sweater made by Vietnamese women, I was naked. Several of us on the plane made a dash for the windows, our mouths agape, our expressions stunned. After such a long time in places without light, a landscape so white, so virginal could only dazzle us, blind us, intoxicate us.

  I was as surprised by all the unfamiliar sounds that greeted us as by the size of the ice sculpture watching over a table covered with canapés, hors d’oeuvre, tasty morsels, each more colourful than the last. I recognized none of the dishes, yet I knew that this was a place of delights, an idyllic land. I was like my son Henri: unable to talk or to listen, even though I was neither deaf nor mute. I now had no points of reference, no tools to allow me to dream, to project myself into the future, to be able to experience the present, in the present.

  My first teacher in Canada walked with us, the seven youngest in the group of Vietnamese, across the bridge that led to the present. She watched over our transplantation with all the sensitivity of a mother for her premature baby. We were hypnotized by the slow and reassuring swaying of her shapely hips, her round and generous behind. Like a mother duck, she walked ahead of us, asking us to follow her to the haven where we would be children again, simply children, surrounded by colours, drawings, trivia. I will be forever grateful to her for giving me my first desire as an immigrant: to be able to sway my bum the way she did. Not one of the Vietnamese in our group possessed such opulence, such generosity, such nonchalance in her curves. We were all angular, bony, hard. And so when she bent down to me, placing her hands on mine to tell me, “My name is Marie-France, what’s yours?” I repeated each of her syllables without blinking, without needing to understand, because I was lulled by a cloud of coolness, of lightness, of sweet perfume. I hadn’t understood a word she’d said, only the melody of her voice, but it was enough. More than enough.

  When I got home, I repeated the same sequence of sounds to my parents: “My name is Marie-France, what’s yours?” They asked me if I’d changed my name. It was at that split second that my present reality caught up to me, when the deafness and muteness of the moment erased my dreams and thus the power to look ahead, to look far ahead.

  My parents, though they already spoke French, could not look far ahead either, for they’d been expelled from the Introduction to French course, that is, struck off the list of people who would receive an allowance of forty dollars a week. They were overqualified for the course but underqualified for everything else. Unable to look ahead of themselves, they looked ahead of us, for us, their children.

  For us, they didn’t see the blackboards they wiped clean, the school toilets they scrubbed, the imperial rolls they delivered. They saw only what lay ahead. And so to make progress my brothers and I followed where their eyes led us. I met parents whose gaze had been extinguished, some beneath the weight of a pirate’s body, others during the all too many years of Communist re-education camps—not the war camps during the war, but the peacetime camps after the war.

  As a child, I thought that war and peace were opposites. Yet I lived in peace when Vietnam was in flames and I didn’t experience war until Vietnam had laid down its weapons. I believe that war and peace are actually friends, who mock us. They treat us like enemies when it suits them, with no concern for the definition or the role we give them. Perhaps, then, we shouldn’t take too much stock in the appearance of one or the other to decide our views. I was lucky enough to have parents who were able to hold their gaze steady, no matter the mood of the moment. My mother often recited the proverb that was written on the blackboard of her eighth-grade class in Saigon: Ðời là chiến trận, nếu buồn là thua. Life is a struggle in which sorrow leads to defeat.

  My mother waged her first battles later, without sorrow. She went to work for the first time at the age of thirty-four, first as a cleaning lady, then at jobs in plants, factories, restaurants. Before, in the life that she had lost, she was the eldest daughter of her prefect father. All she did was settle arguments between the French-food chef and the Vietnamese-food chef in the family courtyard. Or she assumed the role of judge in the secret love affairs between maids and menservants. Otherwise, she spent her afternoons doing her hair, applying her makeup, getting dressed to accompany my father to social events. Thanks to the extravagant life she lived, she could dream all the dreams she wanted, especially those she dreamed for us. She was preparing my brothers and me to become musicians, scientists, politicians, athletes, artists and polyglots, all at the same time.

  However, far from us, blood still flowed and bombs still fell, so she taught us to get down on our knees like the servants. Every day, she made me wash four tiles on the floor and clean twenty sprouted beans by removing their roots one by one. She was preparing us for the collapse. She was right to do so, because very soon we no longer had a floor beneath our feet.

  During our first nights as refugees in Malaysia, we slept right on the red earth, without a floor. The Red Cross had built refugee camps in the countries adjoining Vietnam to receive the boat people—those who had survived the sea journey. The others, those who’d gone down during the crossing, had no names. They died anonymously. We were among those who had been lucky enough to wash up on dry land. We felt blessed to be among the two thousand refugees in a camp that was intended to hold two hundred.

  We built a cabin on piles in an out-of-the-way part of the camp, on the side of a hill. For weeks, twenty-five members of five families working together, in secret, felled some trees in the nearby woods, then planted them in the soft clay soil, attached them to six plywood panels to make a large floor, and covered the frame with a canvas of electric blue, plastic blue, toy blue. We had the good fortune to find enough burlap and nylon rice bags to surround the four sides of our cabin, as well as the three sides of our shared bathroom. Together, the two structures resembled a museum installation by a contemporary artist. At night, we slept pressed so close together that we were never cold, even without a blanket. During the day, the heat absorbed by the blue plastic made the air in our cabin suffocating. On rainy days and nights, the water came in through holes pierced by the leaves, twigs and stems that we’d added to cool it down.

  If a choreographer had been underneath the plastic sheet on a rainy day or night, he would certainly have reproduced the scene: twenty-five people, short and tall, on their feet, each holding a tin can to collect the water that dripped off the roof, sometimes in torrents, sometimes drop by drop. If a musician had been there, he would have heard the orchestration of all that water striking the sides of the tins. If a filmmaker had been there, he would have captured the beauty of the silent and spontaneous complicity between wretched people. But there was only us, standing on a floor that was slowly sinking into the clay. After three months it tilted so severely to one side that we all had to find new positions so sleeping women and children wouldn’t slip onto the plump bellies of their neighbours.

  In spite of all those nights when our dreams spilled onto the sloping floor, my mother still had high hopes for our future. She’d found an accomplice. He was young and certainly naive because he dared to flaunt joy and light-heartedness in the midst of our dull and empty daily lives. Together, he and my mother started an English class. We spent whole mornings with him, repeating words we didn’t understand. But we all showed up because he was able to raise the sky and give us a glimpse of a new horiz
on, far from the gaping holes filled with the excrement of the camp’s two thousand people. Without his face, we could never have imagined a horizon without flies, worms and nauseating smells. Without his face, we couldn’t have imagined that someday we would no longer eat rotting fish flung down late every afternoon when rations were handed out. Without his face, we would certainly have lost the desire to reach out our hands and catch our dreams.

  Unfortunately, from all the mornings with this impromptu English teacher, I remembered only one sentence: My boat number is KG0338. It turned out to be totally useless because I never had a chance to say it, not even during the medical examination by the Canadian delegation. The doctor on call didn’t speak a word to me. He tugged the elastic of my pants to confirm my sex instead of asking, Boy or girl? I also knew those two words. The appearance of a ten-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl must have been much the same, because of our scrawniness. And time was short: there were so many of us on the other side of the door. It was terribly hot in the small examining room with its windows open onto a noisy alley where hundreds of water buckets collided at the pump. We were covered with scabies and lice and we all looked lost, beyond our depth.

  In any case, I spoke very little, sometimes not at all. Throughout my early childhood, my cousin Sao Mai always spoke on my behalf because I was her shadow: the same age, the same class, the same sex, but her face was on the bright side and mine on the side of darkness, shadow, silence.