Highlights from Ru by Kim Thúy Last read on May 1, 2022
Highlights from this book
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With those almost interchangeable names, my mother confirmed that I was the sequel to her, that I would continue her story.
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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.
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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.
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Life is a struggle in which sorrow leads to defeat.
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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.
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One of the vendors threw in a red cowl-necked sweater for my father. He wore it proudly every day of our first spring in Quebec. Today, his broad smile in the photo from that time manages to make us forget that it was a woman’s sweater, nipped in at the waist. Sometimes it’s best not to know everything.
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Love, as my son Pascal knows it, is defined by the number of hearts drawn on a card or by how many stories about dragons are told by flashlight under a down-filled comforter. I have to wait a few more years till I can report to him that in other times, other places, parents showed their love by willingly abandoning their children, like the parents of Tom Thumb.
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I was a young girl then. In the midst of those rocky mountains, I saw only a majestic landscape in place of that mother’s infinite love. There are nights when I run along the long strips of earth next to the buffalo to call her back, to take her daughter’s hand in mine.
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I am waiting till Pascal is a few years older before I make the connection between the story of the mother from Hoa L and Tom Thumb. In the meantime, I tell him the story of the pig that travelled in a coffin to get through the surveillance posts between the countryside and the towns.
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One of those women, whom I knew, died when she lost her footing in the toilet, perched above a pond full of bullheads. Her plastic slippers slid. Anyone watching her at that moment would have seen her cone-shaped hat disappear behind the four panels that barely hid her crouching body, surrounding her without protecting her. She died in the family’s septic tank, her head plunging into a hole full of excrement between two planks, behind her hut, surrounded by smooth-skinned, yellow-fleshed bullheads, without scales, without memory.
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After the old lady died, I would go every Sunday to a lotus pond in a suburb of Hanoi where there were always two or three women with bent backs and trembling hands, sitting in a small round boat, using a stick to move across the water and drop tea leaves into open lotus blossoms. They would come back the next day to collect them one by one before the petals faded, after the captive tea leaves had absorbed the scent of the pistils during the night. They told me that every one of those tea leaves preserved the soul of the short-lived flowers.
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A Vietnamese saying has it that “Only those with long hair are afraid, for no one can pull the hair of those who have none.” And so I try as much as possible to acquire only those things that don’t extend beyond the limits of my body.
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As for me, I had an acrylic bracelet, pink like the gums of the dental plate it had been made from, filled with diamonds. My parents had also put diamonds in the collars of my brothers’ shirts. But we had no gold in our teeth because it was forbidden to touch the teeth of my mother’s children. She often told us that teeth and hair are the roots, maybe even the fundamental source, of a person. My mother wanted our teeth to be perfect.
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Someone told me that bonds are forged with laughter but even more with sharing and the frustrations of sharing.
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Today, my mother regrets not bringing me up to be a princess, because she’s not my queen in the way that Uncle Two was a king to his children.
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I used my voice to read to Uncle Two just before he died, in the very heart of Saigon, some of the erotic passages from Houellebecq’s Particules élémentaires. I no longer wanted to be his princess, I’d become his angel, reminding him how he had dipped my fingers into the whipped cream on café viennois while singing Besame, besame mucho...
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His body, even once it was cold, even once it was rigid, was surrounded not only by his children, by his wives—the old one and the new—by his brothers and sisters, but also by people who didn’t know him. They came in the thousands to mourn his death. Some were losing their lover, some their sports reporter, others their former member of parliament, their writer, their painter, their hand at poker.
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He had lost his idol. I hadn’t. I’d lost neither my idol nor my king, only a friend who told me his stories about women, about politics, painting, books; and mostly about frivolity, because he hadn’t grown old before he died. He had stopped time by continuing to enjoy himself, to live until the end with the lightness of a young man.
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My mother envied my uncle’s irresponsibility, or rather his capacity for it.
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Very early, my father learned how to live far away from his parents, to leave places, to love the present tense, to let go of any attachment to the past.
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That is why he’s never been curious to know his real date of birth. The official date recorded on his birth certificate at the city hall corresponds to a day with no bombardment, no exploding mines, no hostages taken. Parents may have thought that their children’s existence began on the first day that life went back to normal, not at the moment of their first breath.
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Their daughter invited me to her roller skating competitions. She passed on to me her dresses that had become too small, one of them a blue cotton sundress with tiny white flowers and two straps that tied on the shoulder. I wore it during the summer, but also in winter over a white turtleneck. During our first winters, we didn’t know that every garment had its season, that we mustn’t simply wear all the clothes we owned. When we were cold, without discriminating, without knowing the different categories, we would put one garment over another, layer by layer, like the homeless.
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Thirty years ago, we lived in the dark with them, with no electricity, no running water, no privacy. Today, we complain that their house is too big and our extended family too small to experience the same intensity of the festivities—which lasted until dawn—when we used to get together at my parents’ place during our first years in North America.
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Every gift we offered was a genuine gift, because it represented a sacrifice and it answered a need, a desire or a dream.
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We were well acquainted with the dreams of our nearest and dearest: those with whom we were packed in tightly for nights at a time. Back then, we all had the same dreams. For a long time, we were obliged to have the same one, the American dream.
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Once it’s achieved, though, the American dream never leaves us, like a graft or an excrescence.
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That American dream had given confidence to my voice, determination to my actions, precision to my desires, speed to my gait and strength to my gaze. That American dream made me believe I could have everything, that I could go around in a chauffeur-driven car while estimating the weight of the squash being carried on a rusty bicycle by a woman with eyes blurred by sweat; that I could dance to the same rhythm as the girls who swayed their hips at the bar to dazzle men whose thick billfolds were swollen with American dollars; that I could live in the grand villa of an expatriate and accompany barefoot children to their school that sat right on the sidewalk, where two streets intersected.
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But the young waiter reminded me that I couldn’t have everything, that I no longer had the right to declare I was Vietnamese because I no longer had their fragility, their uncertainty, their fears. And he was right to remind me.
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The parents of that step-uncle became very rich thanks to ice. American soldiers would buy entire blocks one metre long and twenty centimetres wide and thick to put under their beds. They needed to cool down after weeks of sweating with fear in the Vietnamese jungle. They needed human comfort, but without feeling the heat of their own bodies or of women rented by the hour. They needed the cool breezes of Vermont or Montana. They needed that coolness so they could stop suspecting, for a moment, that a grenade was hidden in the hands of every child who touched the hair on their arms. They needed that cold so as not to give way to all those full lips murmuring false words of love into their ears, to drive away the cries of their comrades with mutilated bodies. They needed to be cold to leave the women who were carrying their children without ever returning to see them again, without ever revealing their last names.
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During this chaotic peacetime, it was the norm for hunger to replace reason, for uncertainty to usurp morality, but the reverse was rarely true. Anh Phi and his mother were the exception. They became our heroes.
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The ancestors—though they may have been gamblers, incompetent or violent—all became respectable and untouchable once they were dead, once they’d been placed on the altar with incense, fruits, tea. The altars had to be high enough so that the ancestors looked down on us. All descendants had to carry their ancestors not in their hearts but above their heads.
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Just recently in Montreal, I saw a Vietnamese grandmother ask her one-year-old grandson: “Thu’o’ng Bà để dâu?” I can’t translate that phrase, which contains just four words, two of them verbs, to love and to carry. Literally, it means, “Love grandmother carry where?” The child touched his head with his hand. I had completely forgotten that gesture, which I’d performed a thousand times when I was small. I’d forgotten that love comes from the head and not the heart. Of the entire body, only the head matters. Merely touching the head of a Vietnamese person insults not just him but his entire family tree. That is why a shy Vietnamese eight-year-old turned into a raging tiger when his Québécois teammate rubbed the top of his head to congratulate him for catching his first football.
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That memory definitely explains why I never leave a place with more than one suitcase. I take only books. Nothing else can become truly mine. I sleep just as well in a hotel room, a guest room or a stranger’s bed as in my own. In fact, I’m always glad to move; it gives me a chance to lighten my belongings, to leave objects behind so that my memory can become truly selective, can remember only images that stay luminous behind my closed eyelids. I prefer to remember the flutters in my stomach, my light-headedness, my upheavals, my hesitations, my lapses … I prefer them because I can shape them according to the colour of time, whereas an object remains inflexible, frozen, unwieldy.
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Because I had become a mother, I lied to her too by remaining silent about the night her son took my child’s hand and wrapped it around his adolescent penis, and about the night when he slipped inside the mosquito net of Aunt Seven, the one who is mentally retarded, defenceless. I shut my mouth to keep my aging, worn-out step-aunt Two from dying because she had loved so much.
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One of my roommates spent several years studying theology and archaeology in order to understand who our creator is, who we are, why we exist. Every night, she came back to the apartment not with answers but with new questions. I never had any questions except the one about the moment when I could die. I should have chosen the moment before the arrival of my children, for since then I’ve lost the option of dying.
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The sharp smell of their sun-baked hair, the smell of sweat on their backs when they wake from a nightmare, the dusty smell of their hands when they leave a classroom, meant that I have to live, to be dazzled by the shadow of their eyelashes, moved by a snowflake, bowled over by a tear on their cheek. My children have given me the exclusive power to blow on a wound to make the pain disappear, to understand words unpronounced, to possess the universal truth, to be a fairy. A fairy smitten with the way they smell.
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They were right to banish the outfit. It took three times as long to button it than to take it off. One brisk movement was enough to make the snap fasteners pop open. My grandmother took not three but ten times longer to put on the tunic, because after giving birth to ten children her body had to be sculpted, redrawn with a girdle that had thirty hooks and eyes, to respect the cut of that hypocritically modest and deceptively candid garment.
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During my first months in Vietnam, I was very flattered when people thought I was my boss’s escort, in spite of my designer suit and my high heels, because it meant that I was still young, slim, fragile. But after witnessing the scene where the girls had to bend down to pick up the hundred-dollar bills wadded at their feet, I stopped feeling flattered out of respect for them, because behind their dreamy bodies and their youth, they carried all the invisible weight of Vietnam’s history, like the women with hunched backs.
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That son was running with his childhood in his legs. He couldn’t see the very real risk of being picked up by soldiers of the enemy camp. He was six years old, maybe seven. He couldn’t read yet. All he knew was how to hold tightly in his hands the scrap of paper he’d been given. Once he was captured, though, standing in the midst of rifles pointed at him, he no longer remembered where he was running to, or the name of the person the note was addressed to, or his precise starting point. Panic muted him. Soldiers silenced him. His frail body collapsed on the ground and the soldiers left, chewing their gum. His mother ran across the rice paddy where traces of her son’s footprints were still fresh. In spite of the sound of the bullet that had torn space open, the landscape stayed the same. The young rice shoots continued to be cradled by the wind, imperturbable in the face of the brutality of those oversized loves, of the pains too muted for tears to flow, for cries to escape from that mother who gathered up in her old mat the body of her son, half buried in the mud.
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I listened to them without turning around, still sewing, without commenting, because I wanted to protect the innocence in their words, not tarnish their candour by my interpretation of the act. It was certainly thanks to that innocence that they became engineers after ten years of studies in Montreal and Sherbrooke.
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One look at that scar and our tropical roots, transplanted onto land covered with snow, emerged again. In one second we had seen our own ambivalence, our hybrid state: half this, half that, nothing at all and everything at once. A single mark on the skin and our entire shared history was spread out between two gas pumps in a station by a highway exit. He had concealed his scar under a midnight blue dragon. I couldn’t see it with my naked eye. He had only to run his finger over my immodestly exhibited scar, however, and take my finger in his other hand and run it over the back of his dragon and immediately we experienced a moment of complicity, of communion.
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The salesperson just has to promise me, You’ll walk on air, and I buy them. When we’re able to float in the air, to separate ourselves from our roots—not only by crossing an ocean and two continents but by distancing ourselves from our condition as stateless refugees, from the empty space of an identity crisis—we can also laugh at whatever might have happened to my acrylic bracelet the colour of the gums on a dental plate, the bracelet my parents had turned into a survival kit by hiding all their diamonds in it.
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Who would have thought, after we avoided drowning, pirates, dysentery, that today the bracelet could be found perfectly intact, buried in a garbage dump? Who would have thought that burglars would steal from people living in an apartment as miserable as ours? Who would have imagined that thieves would saddle themselves with a ridiculous piece of jewellery made of pink plastic? All the members of my family are convinced that the burglars tossed it aside when they were sorting their haul. So maybe one day, millions of years from now, an archaeologist will wonder why diamonds were arranged in a circle and placed in the ground. He may interpret it as a religious rite, and the diamonds as a mysterious offering, like all those gold taels discovered in amazing quantities in the depths of the South China Sea.