Biography

Kim Thuy left Vietnam with other "boat people" at the age of ten. She has lived in Montreal for about thirty years. Her background is unusual. She confides that she has had all kinds of jobs - as a dressmaker, interperator, solliciter,in a restaurant before starting as a writer. This novel won the Grand Prix RTL-Lire 2010.

"A woman travels through the chaos of memories,a childhood in its golden cage in Saigon,the arrival of communism in frightened South Vietnam, fleeing into the hold of a ship off the Gulf of Siam, confinement in a refugee camp in Malaysia, the first shivers in the cold of Quebec.A story between war and peace, Ru relates the vacuum and the overflow error and beauty. In the tumult, tragic and comic incidents, ordinary objects emerge like points of reference on a journey. Evoking an acrylic bracelet filled with diamonds, blue bowls rimmed with silver or the power of a smell of fabric softener, Kim Thuy revives the Vietnam of yesterday and today with the mastery of a great writer." (Introduction by the editor)

I came to the world during the Tet offensive in the early days of the Year of the Monkey, when the long chains of firecrackers hanging in front of houses exploded in polyphony with the sound of machine guns. I was born in Saigon, where the remnants of firecrackers exploded into a thousand pieces of red stained the floor like the petals of a cherry blossom, or like the blood of two million deployed soldiers, scattered in cities and villages of a Vietnam torn in two. I was born in the shadow of these skies adorned with fireworks, decorated with Christmas lights, crossed with rockets and missiles.The meaning of my birth was to replace the lost lives. My life had the duty to continue that of my mother.

"Not a word higher than the other. Few descriptions, yet powerful images that are grafted in the mind of the reader. Like those where we see the 2000 refugees huddled in a camp that should accommodate 200. Or those, more striking still, white worms springing out of clay to line the ground already covered in excrement. Kim Thuy saves the reader from the sordid and complacency, she evokes the smells, a lock of hair, an item of clothing ... She proves that we can escape from communism, drowning, pirates, dysentery, but also in the lack of identity that strikes the stateless. She thus makes a remarkable entry into literature." (François Busnel, Lire, January 2010)