Friday 56 & #BookBeginnings: Ru

For Book Beginnings:

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. 
- p. 1

For Friday 56:
After the first wave of boat people in the late 1970s, it no longer made sense to send girls to sea because encounters with pirates had become inevitable, a ritual of the journey, an inescapable injury. 
- p. 56

Here's another book after my own immigrant heart. While I didn't face the extreme conditions that Ru did, I can definitely relate to the feelings of displacement, alienation, and the need to be "can do" in a new culture and environment. How else can one move on?

Synopsis of Ru by Kim Thuy: Ru. In Vietnamese it means lullaby; in French it is a small stream, but also signifies a flow--of tears, blood, money. Kim Thúy's Ru is literature at its most crystalline: the flow of a life on the tides of unrest and on to more peaceful waters. In vignettes of exquisite clarity, sharp observation and sly wit, we are carried along on an unforgettable journey from a palatial residence in Saigon to a crowded and muddy Malaysian refugee camp, and onward to a new life in Quebec. There, the young girl feels the embrace of a new community, and revels in the chance to be part of the American Dream. As an adult, the waters become rough again: now a mother of two sons, she must learn to shape her love around the younger boy's autism. Moving seamlessly from past to present, from history to memory and back again, Ru is a book that celebrates life in all its wonder: its moments of beauty and sensuality, brutality and sorrow, comfort and comedy.