In the open air, we admire the valleys below.
We are small against the carvings
exploring something we missed
only to find the natives
excavating our temple.
KIM THÚY was born in Saigon in 1968. At the age of 10, she left Vietnam with her parents and two brothers. After a stay in a refugee camp in Malaysia, the family arrived in Granby, in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. She pursued studies at the Université de Montréal where she completed degrees in linguistics and translation, then in law. Her first novel, Ru, fictionalizes her family’s long journey from Vietnam to Quebec. The novel has been translated into several languages. Thúy is the recipient of the Grand Prix RTL-Lire and Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award.
SHEILA FISCHMAN (translator) is a Canadian translator who specializes in the translation of works of contemporary Quebec literature. She holds an MA from the University of Toronto. She is a founding member of the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada and founding co-editor of Ellipse: Œuvres en traduction/Writers in Translation. She has been the recipient of the Governor General’s Award for Translation, the Canada Council Prize for Translation, and the Félix-Antoine Savard Award offered by the Translation Center, Columbia University, among others. Her translation of Ru by Kim Thúy has been selected for Canada Reads: Next Episode. She currently lives in Montreal.
FROM RU
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, colored 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.
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 color 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 dark surrounded by two hundred people.
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.
I know the sound of flies by heart. I just have to close my eyes to hear them buzzing around me again, because for months I had to crouch down above a gigantic pit filled to the brim with excrement, in the blazing sun of Malaysia. I had to look at the indescribable brown color without blinking so that I wouldn’t slip on the two planks behind the door of one of the sixteen cabins every time I set foot there. I had to keep my balance, avoid fainting when my stools or those from the next cabin splattered. At those moments I escaped by listening to the humming of flies. Once, I lost my slipper between the planks after I’d moved my foot too quickly. It fell into the cesspit without sinking, floating there like a boat cast adrift.
I am waiting until Pascal is a few years older before I make the connection between the story of the mother from Hoa Lu and Tom Thumb. In the meantime, I tell him the story of the pig that traveled in a coffin to get through the surveillance posts between the countryside and the towns. He likes to hear me imitate the crying women in the funeral procession who threw themselves body and soul onto the long wooden box, wailing, while the farmers, dressed all in white with bands around their heads, tried to hold them back, to console them in front of the inspectors who were too accustomed to death. Once they got back to town, behind the closed doors of an ever-changing secret address, the farmers turned the pig over to the butcher, who cut it into pieces. The merchants would then tie those around their legs and waists to transport them to the black market, to families, to us.
I tell Pascal these stories to keep alive the memory of a slice of history that will never be taught in any school.
I went back to Vietnam to work for three years, but I never visited my father’s birthplace some two hundred and fifty kilometers from Saigon. When I was a child, I would vomit the whole way whenever I made that twelve-hour journey, even though my mother put pillows on the floor of the car to keep me still. The roads were riddled with deep fissures. Communist rebels planted mines by night and pro-American soldiers cleared them away by day. Still, sometimes a mine exploded. Then we had to wait hours for the soldiers to fill in the holes and gather up the human remains. One day a woman was torn to pieces, surrounded by yellow squash blossoms scattered, fragmented. She must have been on her way to the market to sell her vegetables. Maybe they also found the body of her baby by the roadside. Or not. Maybe her husband had died in the jungle. Maybe she was the woman who had lost her lover outside the house of my maternal grandfather, the prefect.
For many immigrants, the American dream has come true. Some thirty years ago, in Washington, Quebec City, Boston, Rimouski or Toronto, we would pass through whole neighborhoods strewn with rose gardens, hundred-year-old trees, stone houses, but the address we were looking for never appeared on one of those doors. Nowadays, my aunt Six and her husband, Step-uncle Six, live in one of those houses. They travel first class and have to stick a sign on the back of their seat so the hostesses will stop offering them chocolates and champagne. Thirty years ago, in our Malaysian refugee camp, the same Step-uncle Six crawled more slowly than his eight-month-old dau
ghter because he was suffering from malnutrition. And the same Aunt Six used the one needle she had to sew clothes so she could buy milk for her daughter. 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.
There were twenty-five of us, sometimes thirty, arriving in Montreal from Fanwood, Montpelier, Springfield, Guelph, coming together in a small, three-bedroom apartment for the entire Christmas holiday. Anyone who wanted to sleep alone had to move into the bathtub. Inevitably, conversations, laughter and quarrels went on all night. Every gift we offered was a genuine gift, because it represented a sacrifice and it answered a need, a desire or a dream. 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.
Once it’s achieved, though, the American dream never leaves us, like a graft or an excrescence. The first time I carried a briefcase, the first time I went to a restaurant school for young adults in Hanoi, wearing heels and a straight skirt, the waiter for my table didn’t understand why I was speaking Vietnamese with him. At first I thought that he couldn’t understand my southern accent. At the end of my meal, though, he explained ingenuously that I was too fat to be Vietnamese.
I translated that remark to my employers, who laugh about it to this day. I understood later that he was talking not about my forty-five kilos but about the American dream that had made me more substantial, heavier, weightier. 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.
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.
Around that time, my employer, who was based in Quebec, clipped an article from a Montreal paper reiterating that the “Québécois nation” was Caucasian, that my slanting eyes automatically placed me in a separate category, even though Quebec had given me my American dream, even though it had cradled me for thirty years. Whom to like, then? No one or everyone? I chose to like the gentleman from Saint-Félicien who asked me in English to grant him a dance. “Follow the guy,” he told me. I also like the rickshaw driver in Da Nang who asked me how much I was paid as an escort for my “white” husband. And I often think about the woman who sold cakes of tofu for five cents each, sitting on the ground in a hidden corner of the market in Hanoi, who told her neighbors that I was from Japan, that I was making good progress with my Vietnamese.
She was right. I had to relearn my mother tongue, which I’d given up too soon. In any case, I hadn’t really mastered it completely because the country was divided in two when I was born. I come from the South, so I had never heard people from the North until I went back to Vietnam. Similarly, people in the North had never heard people from the South before reunification. Like Canada, Vietnam had its own two solitudes. The language of North Vietnam had developed in accordance with its political, social and economic situation at the time, with words to describe how to shoot down an airplane with a machine gun set up on a roof, how to use monosodium glutamate to make blood clot more quickly, how to spot the shelters when the sirens go off. Meanwhile, the language of the South had created words to express the sensation of Coca-Cola bubbles on the tongue, terms for naming spies, rebels, Communist sympathizers on the streets of the South, names to designate the children born from wild nights with GIs.
Most of those children of GIs became orphans, homeless, ostracized not only because of their mother’s profession but also because of their father’s. They were the hidden side of the war. Thirty years after the last GI had left, the United States went back to Vietnam in place of their soldiers to rehabilitate those damaged children. The government granted them a whole new identity to erase the one that had been tarnished. A number of those children now had, for the first time, an address, a residence, a full life. Some, though, were unable to adapt to such wealth.
Once, when I was working as an interpreter for the New York police, I met one of those children, now adult. She was illiterate, wandering the streets of the Bronx. She’d come to Manhattan on a bus from a place she couldn’t name. She hoped that the bus would take her back to her bed made of cardboard boxes, just outside the post office in Saigon. She declared insistently that she was Vietnamese. Even though she had café au lait skin, thick wavy hair, African blood, deep scars, she was Vietnamese, only Vietnamese, she repeated incessantly. She begged me to translate for the policeman her desire to go back to her own jungle. But the policeman could only release her into the jungle of the Bronx. Had I been able to, I would have asked her to curl up against me. Had I been able to, I’d have erased every trace of dirty hands from her body. I was the same age as her. No, I don’t have the right to say that I was the same age as her: her age was measured in the number of stars she saw when she was being beaten and not in years, months, days.
Just recently in Montreal, I saw a Vietnamese grandmother ask her one-year-old grandson: “Thương Bà d-ể d-âu?” 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.
If a mark of affection can sometimes be taken for an insult, perhaps the gesture of love is not universal: it too must be translated from one language to another, must be learned. In the case of Vietnamese, it is possible to classify, to quantify the meaning of love through specific words: to love by taste (thích) without being in love (thường); to love passionately (yêu); to love ecstatically (mê); to love blindly (mù quáng); to love gratefully (tính nghĩa). It’s impossible quite simply to love, to love without one’s head.
I’m lucky that I’ve learned to savor the pleasure of resting my head in a hand, and my parents are lucky to be able to capture the love of my children when the little ones drop kisses into their hair, spontaneously, with no formality, during a session of tickling in bed. I myself have touched my father’s head only once. He had ordered me to lean on it as I stepped over the handrail of the boat.
—Translated from the French by Sheila Fischman
PAUL TRAN is the poetry editor at The Offing and Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow in the Writing Program at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Their work appears in The New Yorker, Prairie Schooner, RHINO, which gave them a 2015 Editor’s Prize, and elsewhere. A recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, VONA, Poets House, Lambda Literary Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, The Conversation, Palm Beach Poetry Festival, Miami Writers Institute, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Tran is the first Asian-American since 1993 to win the Nuyorican Poets Café Grand Slam, p
lacing in the Top 5 at the National Poetry Slam.
SELF-IMMOLATION
In the world before this one,
all my lovers fell to my feet
like soldiers in a bombed gully.
I placed framed photographs
of them in the Thien Mu Temple,
arranged fresh oranges on a plate.
August 1963: Thich Quang Duc
took a baby-blue Austin Westminster
to Phan Dinh Phung Boulevard.
He sat in the lotus position
while another monk poured petrol
over his darkening robes.
Police in white-and-khaki uniforms
kept protesters from hurling
into the flames with their batons.
Black smoke exploded like wings
from his body, which did not move
except to bow before the Buddha.
When he fell back on the street,
a camera lunged forward to record
his final minutes in this universe.
Everything burned
but his heart, which remained intact
and wrapped in sunlit cloth.
In dreams, I touch his handsome face
and blaze in the battlefield
where my past loves wait.
I’m the field. I’m the fire
unwilling to release them in fear
no one else will want me.
HEIRLOOM
We know how the story goes.
A pirate leads her off the boat, onto the shore.
He rapes the other women first, shoots them in the head,
Inheriting the War Page 37