Proceedings of the 7th World Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities
Year: 2024
DOI:
[PDF]
Snarling with Time” in Kim Thuy’s Ru
Chun Fu
ABSTRACT:
On a Vietnamese family’s exodus after the Vietnam War, Kim Thúy’s debut novel Ru (2009) chronicles excruciating experiences en route to freedom and a welcoming embrace in the host country. Given Ru is read as an autobiographical novel, this paper argues, concerning the conceptualization of “authorship,” Kim Thúy the author has a unique connection with the ship that associates and predates the fluidity expounded in Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity (2000). As explained in the epigraph, ru in Vietnamese means a lullaby which seems to suggest that by settling down in Canada the refugee immigrant could finally find peace. In the spectrum of memories, Kim Thúy marks two extremes, as it were, that one end lies something insuppressible and the other a void. As with any refugee immigrant, the narrator incorporates two territories and temporalities while the novelist presents her life story in a way that accentuates the fleeing journey from breakup to breakthrough is one nevertheless entangled with meshes of memories. Here, “snarling with time” enacts less a mere Proustian echo of the past than shifting and colliding tectonic plates that would eventually alter the memorial landscape. Moreover, seen as complementary history, Ru becomes particularly urgent amid Ukraine-Russia, Israil-Hamas warfare, and migrant boats adrift in the Mediterranean. It not only redresses the inadequacy of the popular imaginary but can be read in its urgency as an epistle to the future.
keywords: authorship, Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Ru, Kim Thúy