Ru is fundamentally a story about the Vietnamese diaspora, and the lasting impacts of the Vietnam War and the flight of refugees that followed. It is an immensely personal piece of writing to the author, and distinctly a diasporic story.
Its writing is indulgent and delicate, perhaps overly so, in its metaphors and descriptions. Ru reads like an oral history of the migrant crisis, with short vignettes that build up to tell the story of many others, to “keep alive the memory of a slice of history that will never be taught in any school”. In some ways, writing by the Asian diaspora has remained the same.
What I think is interesting is that Ru, assigns no blame to those that fought for the north — to Thúy, they were Vietnamese all the same. And the embrace of a western “American dream” in Québec receives nothing short of gratitude.
I think it would be distinctly wrong to assign a rating to a book like this, that is close to autobiographical.
Written 9 January 2024
Adapted from my review on Goodreads.
Additional notes
I felt Ru was uncomfortably anti-communist and unquestioningly grateful for the notion of the American dream. For many diaspora, this is true. For much of diasporic writing, a critical attitude is often more nuanced. No-No Boy’s take on diaspora, while dissimilar from Ru, took a much deeper exploration.