In a seamless blend of memoir and fiction, Kim Th\u00fay\u2019s first novel, Ru<\/i> (Random House, 2012) tells the story of a young girl who leaves Vi\u1ec7t Nam after the fall of S\u00e0i G\u00f2n. Like Th\u00fay, the girl and her family arrive in Canada via a Malaysian refugee camp, and settle in a small city where they begin their new life. Recently shortlisted for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, Ru is no stranger to literary prizes. Originally published in French, the novel won a Governor General\u2019s Literary Award for French Fiction, and also made the 2012 Giller Prize short list, among others. Quill & Quire editor Stuart Woods, the head judge for this year\u2019s Amazon award, says \u201cA first novel should be brash and ambitious, and announce the arrival of a new talent.\u201d Kim Th\u00fay\u2019s Ru meets the bar.<\/p>\n
The day after Ru<\/i> made the longlist for the Man Asian Literary Prize, the author took time out from the final edits of her third book, M\u00e3n, (to be released in April) to speak to a crowd of about 130 people in Pointe Claire, a Montreal suburb. Ru <\/i>is a lyrical, poetic and non-linear collection of vignettes, written from the twin viewpoints of the narrator as a ten-year-old and as an adult. A word or an idea from the end of each vignette sparks the beginning of the next in a meditative flow, and this is also the way Kim Th\u00fay spoke to her attentive audience. She began the evening in a roundabout meander from topic to topic, and I wondered where she was taking us. A small person with a big presence, she spoke with lavish gestures and facial expressions, throwing her whole being into her bilingual presentation. As she spoke, she kept bringing in new threads, nimbly keeping track of the ones she had dropped, only to pick them up again later, weaving them all into a seamless narrative. Over the course of the evening, she linked each anecdote to the previous one in the same way that her book\u2019s title grew out of Ru de Nam, the name of the restaurant she once owned, and the way each story in Ru<\/i> takes its cue from the one before.<\/p>\n
Th\u00fay kept returning to the theme of luck, beginning with how fortunate she felt to have made the crossing from Vi\u1ec7t Nam to Malaysia in just four days without meeting any pirates, and to have spent only four months in a refugee camp. Though her voyage to Malaysia was by no means pleasant, countless Vietnamese spent weeks or months at sea and faced starvation, pirate attacks and other horrors, including the death of boat-mates and family members. Many of them spent years trapped in refugee camps.<\/p>\n
Th\u00fay and her family were among more than 60,000 Vietnamese boat people to settle in Canada. Arriving in Granby, Quebec, when she was ten, they later moved to Montreal, where Th\u00fay earned a linguistics and translation degree, followed by another in law. In 2012, Random House Canada published the English version of Ru<\/i>, translated by Sheila Fischman, award-winning translator of over 150 Quebec novels. When a member of the audience asked how Th\u00fay had managed to snare Fischman, she said \u201cI\u2019m so lucky! Someone from Random House just phoned and asked for permission for Sheila to translate it.\u201d She also felt very lucky winning so many literary awards for Ru<\/i>, including ones she had \u201cnever even heard of, like the Prix Prince Pierre (de Monaco) and the Italian Mondello Prize.\u201d Later in her presentation, she said that each time she won a prize, she felt like she\u2019d won the lottery.<\/p>\n
\nLuck, she said, played a role in the writing of her second book as well. A collaboration with Ramallah-based Swiss writer Pascal Janovjak, \u00c0 Toi<\/i> was published in 2011. Th\u00fay 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. Th\u00fay and Janovjak began the email correspondence that eventually grew into \u00c0 Toi<\/i>, in which the two writers explore, among other things, cultural displacement, identity, assimilation and adaptation. When Th\u00fay asked if he\u2019d like her to send a copy of Ru<\/i> to Palestine for him to read, he said the package would probably be opened and the book confiscated. \u201cWe couldn\u2019t even read each other\u2019s (previous) books because of physical borders. But we could write a book together because of technology.\u201d<\/p>\n
Th\u00fay felt that even the publication of Ru<\/i> was a matter of luck. She\u2019d 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\u2019s 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\u2019t do her writing at home. \u201cBut at a red light, you can\u2019t do anything else,\u201d she said, \u201cso I don\u2019t feel guilty like at home, when I should be doing something else.\u201d Eventually, transcribing her notes to her computer, she found she had reached twenty pages. \u201cI had no intention to write a book,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was a moment de grace.\u201d<\/p>\n
Th\u00fay 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 \u201clonely, friendless man\u201d 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\u2019t fit to be read, but promised that if the writing went well and kept growing, she\u2019d 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<\/i>, released in 2009 by Libre Expression.<\/p>\n
With its impressionistic vignettes and blank spaces, Ru<\/i> has the appearance and feel of a thin volume of prose poetry. Th\u00fay 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<\/i> is based very much on her life as well as the experiences of family and friends. She doesn\u2019t remember the finer details of her departure from Vi\u1ec7t Nam or her first years in Canada, \u201cjust like I have no memory of thirst or the need to use the toilet on the boat,\u201d though obviously, she said, those unpleasant details were part of the voyage. She rebuilt the memories by weaving others\u2019 stories together with hers. \u201cJ\u2019ai sublim\u00e9 les details,\u201d she said. (I sublimated the details.)<\/p>\n
Asked about the blend of fact and fiction in Ru<\/i>, Th\u00fay said \u201cI think my life is very boring. If this book was just about me it would be very small.\u201d 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 \u201cus \u2013 all boat people\u201d and that through Ru<\/i> she has managed to tell all their stories. \u201cThe most touching compliment would be a Vietnamese coming up to me and saying \u2018You told my story.\u2019\u201d At that moment, a Vietnamese woman in the front row put her hand up and spoke quietly: \u201cYou did.\u201d<\/p>\n
Th\u00fay 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, \u201cwith no fragmentation \u2013 all the small pieces are like parts of a longer piece, like pieces of a puzzle.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. Th\u00fay mentioned a question, posed by someone from Le Monde, about how she approached the d\u00e9structuration of her story. \u201cI don\u2019t know how I did it. There was no intentional fragmentation or d\u00e9structuration\u2026My method was to edit out, to remove.\u201d 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. \u201cMy 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nAt this point, Th\u00fay segued back to the topic of her restaurant, Ru de Nam. The customers \u201cthought it was a concept. But there was no concept. I just couldn\u2019t cook more than one dish a day. I learned one dish a day from my mom and made it the next day.\u201d Customers praised the \u201cconcept\u201d, saying it was like eating at their mother\u2019s house. \u201cThey didn\u2019t have to order \u2013 they just sat down and the food came out.\u201d 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
Circling back to the translation of Ru, Th\u00fay described her meetings with Sheila Fischman to discuss the work. On each occasion, Th\u00fay would make soup. They ate many soups before they finally got to the text. \u201cSheila read out a paragraph to me in a deep voice, just like Leonard Cohen. Leonard Cohen! OK, I told her, go ahead!\u201d Fischman wanted to be delicate with the text, but \u201cI 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\u2019s voice \u2013 not me.\u201d (Having read Ru<\/i> in the French first, I found Fischmann\u2019s elegant translation to be true to the original, keeping the lyrical quality of Th\u00fay\u2019s vocabulary and style.) Ru<\/i> has been published in over twenty countries, in fifteen languages and counting. In Vi\u1ec7t 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 Vi\u1ec7t Nam yet, Th\u00fay 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. \u201cOnly the cover will be left, so Vi\u1ec7t Nam is not ready yet for this book.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An Evening with Kim Th\u00fay In a seamless blend of memoir and fiction, Kim Th\u00fay\u2019s first novel, Ru (Random House, 2012) tells the story of a young girl who leaves Vi\u1ec7t Nam after the fall of S\u00e0i G\u00f2n. Like Th\u00fay, the girl and her family arrive in Canada via a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1365,"parent":1261,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-629","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=629"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1330,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/629\/revisions\/1330"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1261"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue15\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}