Luck, she said, played a role in the writing of her second book as well. A collaboration with Ramallah-based Swiss writer Pascal Janovjak, À Toi was published in 2011. Thúy felt drawn to Janovjak while the two Prix Prince Pierre finalists were in Monaco, and went out of her way to meet him. They had breakfast together before they left, she for Montreal and he for Ramallah. Thúy and Janovjak began the email correspondence that eventually grew into À Toi, in which the two writers explore, among other things, cultural displacement, identity, assimilation and adaptation. When Thúy asked if he’d like her to send a copy of Ru to Palestine for him to read, he said the package would probably be opened and the book confiscated. “We couldn’t even read each other’s (previous) books because of physical borders. But we could write a book together because of technology.”
Thúy felt that even the publication of Ru was a matter of luck. She’d never intended to write a book. It began as a way to keep herself awake at red lights on the way home after very long days working at her restaurant. She would nod off at the wheel, and twice was involved in minor accidents at traffic lights. To counter this, she made shopping lists for the next day’s menu each time she waited for a light to change. Then, she began to write down memories in tiny script, eventually filling a notebook. Her husband asked why she didn’t do her writing at home. “But at a red light, you can’t do anything else,” she said, “so I don’t feel guilty like at home, when I should be doing something else.” Eventually, transcribing her notes to her computer, she found she had reached twenty pages. “I had no intention to write a book,” she said. “It was a moment de grace.”
Thúy diverged into a story about a regular customer at Ru de Nam, who always chose the most isolated table and ate alone. Since he ate there several times a week, she thought he must be a “lonely, friendless man” and one day took a few minutes to have tea with him after his meal. This became a habit and they became friends. She later learned that he was a well-known TV personality who came to the restaurant seeking solitude. When she told him about the twenty pages, he asked to read them. Horrified, she said they weren’t fit to be read, but promised that if the writing went well and kept growing, she’d let him look at it. When he finally saw the draft, he insisted she let him pass it along to a friend in publishing. The result was Ru, released in 2009 by Libre Expression.
With its impressionistic vignettes and blank spaces, Ru has the appearance and feel of a thin volume of prose poetry. Thúy explained that she structured the book as very short pieces because the plot would have been too heavy for the reader otherwise. This, she said, was also her reason for alternating lighter and heavier passages. Though not entirely her own personal story, Ru is based very much on her life as well as the experiences of family and friends. She doesn’t remember the finer details of her departure from Việt Nam or her first years in Canada, “just like I have no memory of thirst or the need to use the toilet on the boat,” though obviously, she said, those unpleasant details were part of the voyage. She rebuilt the memories by weaving others’ stories together with hers. “J’ai sublimé les details,” she said. (I sublimated the details.)
Asked about the blend of fact and fiction in Ru, Thúy said “I think my life is very boring. If this book was just about me it would be very small.” She went on to say that to tell the story of the boat people, she had to go outside her own experiences. She hopes that her book is about “us – all boat people” and that through Ru she has managed to tell all their stories. “The most touching compliment would be a Vietnamese coming up to me and saying ‘You told my story.’” At that moment, a Vietnamese woman in the front row put her hand up and spoke quietly: “You did.”
Thúy compared the format of the book to the feather drawing a continuous line across the screen during the opening credits of the film Joy Luck Club. She wanted the book to be continuous, “with no fragmentation – all the small pieces are like parts of a longer piece, like pieces of a puzzle.”
While the vignettes do form a greater whole, there is space between them, like the spaces between stepping stones on a path, or the spaces between memories. Thúy mentioned a question, posed by someone from Le Monde, about how she approached the déstructuration of her story. “I don’t know how I did it. There was no intentional fragmentation or déstructuration…My method was to edit out, to remove.” She laughed and said she could easily have kept cutting until there was nothing left. The important thing was the way the words worked together. “My first motivation was that I love words. My words are tridimensional. Every word has a weight. Every word has a particular odour, a perfume. Some words, when they are next to each other, sound cacophonous; they sound wrong. That was my first love. That was the fire.”
Congrats, Chris on such a beautifully written piece.
“Ru” sounds intriguing. I’ve written vignettes and they’re more difficult to write than short stories. I cannot imagine these vignettes woven together without losing their lyricism.
I love how you describe them, “While the vignettes do form a greater whole, there is space between them, like the spaces between stepping stones on a path, or the spaces between memories.” Beautiful!
I smiled when I read Thuy’s thought on words, “My words are tridimensional.” I totally understand what she means. My mentor always told me to choose my words carefully. They have to have weight. I have to make each word count. So Thuy’s description of her words as cacophonous is just clever.
Beautifully put, Chris!