At this point, Thúy segued back to the topic of her restaurant, Ru de Nam. The customers “thought it was a concept. But there was no concept. I just couldn’t cook more than one dish a day. I learned one dish a day from my mom and made it the next day.” Customers praised the “concept”, saying it was like eating at their mother’s house. “They didn’t have to order – they just sat down and the food came out.” But the restaurant business took its toll; her doctor warned her to slow down. Joking that she changes her profession every five years, she mentioned working as a seamstress, translator, interpreter, and lawyer before becoming a restaurateur. When it came time to renew the lease, she and her husband decided to close down Ru de Nam because financially, it wasn’t doing well. Her husband insisted she take a month off to sit at home, think about what she wanted to do, and choose a new career that she could stick with. During that month, she began to enter all her notes into a computer document and discovered that she loved spending the day working with words.
Circling back to the translation of Ru, Thúy described her meetings with Sheila Fischman to discuss the work. On each occasion, Thúy would make soup. They ate many soups before they finally got to the text. “Sheila read out a paragraph to me in a deep voice, just like Leonard Cohen. Leonard Cohen! OK, I told her, go ahead!” Fischman wanted to be delicate with the text, but “I told her to just write it. I would love the book to be in your own voice. Just forget about me. So the translation is very much Sheila’s voice – not me.” (Having read Ru in the French first, I found Fischmann’s elegant translation to be true to the original, keeping the lyrical quality of Thúy’s vocabulary and style.) Ru has been published in over twenty countries, in fifteen languages and counting. In Việt Nam, the publishing industry is state-owned, and all written material must pass through rigorous screening several times before publication and release. Publication of certain taboo topics is an offence. This includes material seen as critical of the political system or misinterpreting historical events. Asked if the book had been published in Việt Nam yet, Thúy explained that the Vietnamese publishers wanted to do the book but they wanted to take out all the pages where she talks about boat people. “Only the cover will be left, so Việt Nam is not ready yet for this book.”
As her talk drew to a close, I thought to myself that we were in the presence of a master story-teller. She sat on the edge of the conference table like a tall-tale teller on a barstool at a pub, and couldn’t resist squeezing in one more humorous anecdote before she settled in to sign books and chat with the people lined up, copy in hand, awaiting their turn.
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!