Review: Ru with Kim Thuy

Kim Thuy's novel Ru was adapted for the screen in 2023

As part of the Vancouver Writers Fest, this evening had the chance to see Kim Thuy again -- in person and on the big screen! In 2009, her book Ru was published, described as a novel about her impressions of her family fleeing Vietnam as refugees and then making it to Quebec, Canada.

She explained after the film screening of Ru that she wrote about her own memories and did not consult her parents about what happened -- it was how she remembered it. 

Ru became a bestseller, originally in French and then translated into English which got even more people reading the novel.

Thuy was 10 years old when she came to Canada

Before Thuy became a writer she was a restaurateur and one of her regular customers was a man she thought had no friends, and read books, but in fact he was reading scripts. He helped her get her story published and then he bought the rights to turn the book into a film.

The film opens showing 10-year-old Thuy, her first name Tinh, in a wealthy home in Saigon, with her grandmother, parents, two younger brothers and an uncle. Her father was a deputy minister in the government. But Communist soldiers charge into the house, ransacking it, and the family has to leave. 

They flee onto a ship, then a small boat and make it to a refugee camp (in Malaysia, but it's not explained in the film), and from there the family is chosen by the Canadian government to go to Quebec because Thuy's parents can speak French fluently.

But when they arrive, it's in the depths of winter and they've never seen snow before. Thuy later said when they arrived she was overwhelmed by the snow, but also they were very unhealthy, having lived in a refugee camp for months, sleeping next to the open latrines so they had a lot of infections, lice in their hair, diarrhea. 

However, the small town they went to welcomed them with open arms, giving them a reception and paired up families with a sponsor family who helped them get set up rent-free for the first three months, helped them with furniture and integrating into Canadian life.

The family landed in Quebec in 1979

And this, Thuy says, is what makes her so grateful for this sponsor family and everyone, including her first teacher in Quebec, to help her to learn how to be Canadian.

Her parents had a rough time starting over, as her dad began working as a food delivery person for a Chinese restaurant, her mother a seamstress in a clothing factory. 

In one poignant scene, an elderly Vietnamese man who shovels snow tells Tinh that he used to be a judge and nearly had his brains blown out. But when the soldier ran out of bullets, the former judge looked up at the sky and for him it was his ticket to freedom. Which is why he kept asking her about the colour of the sky. 

When the filming began, it was all shot in Montreal and they could not go to Vietnam nor Thailand because of Covid-19. Thuy was named associate producer in the film, but she says she was only given this role so that she could be on set because of pandemic restrictions.

Thuy recalls when she stepped onto the set of the home, she began crying because it brought her back to when she was 10 years old, and made us the audience realise that she still hadn't fully processed her trauma. She said the most emotional scene for her was the car driving along a stretch of road in the snow, which to Thuy says demonstrates how far her family had come, and she found it unbelievable that they had come from Vietnam and were now in Canada.

Thuy (right) is grateful about being in Canada

She also says it was at the age of 50 that she first expressed anger, being in touch with emotions she had repressed for decades because her family had to live with Communist soldiers in the house, so they didn't dare say anything that would incriminate themselves; she was forced at school to denounce her parents and grandparents for playing music, or reading books and such. So it was best to keep quiet about everything.

These days she's very open, emotional, lively and grateful for everything that has happened to her in her life. At the end of the family the post script says her parents retired, and her brothers became an actuary (for Sun Life) and a dentist.

Someone asked what Ru means, and she said in French it's a small stream at the top of a mountain, which eventually becomes a river, while in Vietnamese it means a lullaby, lulling a child to sleep. So to her both words were beautiful images she wanted to convey.

Ru

Directed by Charles-Olivier Michaud

116 minutes

Based on Ru by Kim Thuy

We Must Remember

Picking up the last edition of Apple Daily a year ago

Today marks the one year anniversary that Apple Daily shut down.

I remember waking up relatively early, there was light rain and I raced out to the nearby Circle K convenience store to see if there were any copies of the last edition of Apple Daily.

Luckily there was a massive stack of papers and I grabbed six of them, relieved to be able to get them no problem.

Staff waving to readers, many are unemployed

I went to the office and my colleague was distraught that she was unable to get the paper. I reached into my bag and gave her a copy. She was so grateful.

Why? 

Because it is the last physical piece of democracy that we can hold in our hands. The paper represented free speech, free press, independence, brashness, creativity, resilience and determination.

The Apple Daily website does not exist, and its founder Jimmy Lai Chee-ying has been in jail for the past 18 months.

Six other executives have been held in pre-trial detention for 11 months.

Everyone at Apple Daily lost their jobs that day, and since then some other media organisations have shuttered, resulting in some 1,000 journalists out of work, or completely switching to other jobs like taxi driver or working at McDonald's.

Having worked at Apple Daily is either a badge of honour or a sign to be shunned.

Lai has been behind bars for 18 months

I still have that copy of the last edition of the paper even though I don't know what it means. But we need to preserve it to prove to ourselves that Apple Daily existed.

We have to tell ourselves that what we experienced, saw and read was real.

We have to do that because the government, and by extension Beijing is rewriting Hong Kong's history.

The authorities have scrubbed away anything in Hong Kong related to what happened in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. For 30 consecutive years there was a massive candlelight vigil held at Victoria Park with tens of thousands of people attending, each holding a white candle in their hands as they sang songs, shouted slogans and heard speakers talk about their experiences that horrible day.

But now those vigils are no more. There are no more statues or murals commemorating the incident, nor can people even gather at Victoria Park anymore that day. It's as if the authorities are trying to re-program people into thinking June 4 is like any other day, but Hongkongers are hardwired to think otherwise after decades of annual ritual.

The Pillar of Shame dismantled and removed

The same goes for the protests, scrubbing the city clean of graffiti, though there may be a few lingering... the protests are now called "social unrest", a euphemism for a cataclysmic event in the city's recent history that led to the implementation of the national security law that pushed many to leave Hong Kong for good.

There are no more signs of dissent, from the civil society groups, unions and grassroots organisations that supported the protests -- they have either shut down or gone underground. But shutting down hasn't ensured the peaceful end of these groups as they are still targeted by the police for things they have done retroactively. It's relentless.

A friend says it's good that I've left and can move on, but I can't.

I told him I spent 18 years of my life in Hong Kong, it played a huge role in my life and I cannot just turn my back from it.

And yet it is painful watching what is happening there day by day, as the government forms its own alternate reality, like Hong Kong was never a British colony.

It's such an absurd belief that the last governor Chris Patten had to do a double take.

Patten mocks China for denying HK colony status

In a recent letter to the editor of The Times Newspaper he wrote:

"Sir, it was with some relief that Ben Macintyre reassured me that I really was governor of the colony of Hong Kong from 1992 to 1997 before China, in President Jiang Zemin's words, "resumed the exercise of sovereignty".

"The attempt to rewrite Hong Kong's history in the territory's school textbooks claiming that it had never been a British colony but an "occupied territory" is on par with Beijing's efforts to expunge any memory of the Tiananmen murders in 1989.

"But if Hong Kong was simply an "occupied territory" perhaps President Xi and his communist stooges in Hong Kong should own up to the fact that the overwhelming majority of the people who occupied it were themselves refugees or the families and descendants of refugees from the brutalities of communism. 

"They found a safe haven in a British colony and established a hugely successful free society there under the rule of law."

See, we remember. We have to.