Kim Thuy and Caroline Vu: Two Very Different Novels by Vietnamese-Canadian Women

Last week the  featured  book was written by an American who fought in Vietnam.  This week let me draw your attention to two books written by women who were born in Vientam, endured part of the American war there, and then ended up in Montreal. Caroline Vu is ten years older than Kim Thuy, but both have written stunning books of life in war torn Vietnam and the immigrant experience in North America.  Both have several to their credit, but  Thuy's debut novel Ru is my favourite of her oeuvre, while the only one of Vu's that I've read so far is her latest, Catinat Boulevard.

 

Vu left  the country when she was 11: her mother, a doctor, was able to get her and her sisters to the US, and to start a new life there.  Thuy was about the same age when her family leflt, but by then Saigon had fallen.   She and her family were among the thousands of "boat people" who fled, often in small boats and always to a future that was dreadfully uncertain. Both women are well-educated: Vu is a family doctor, and Thuy is trained as a lawyer.  Each also is fluent in English, French and Vietnamese: Thuy writes for publication in French and Vu, in English.  Each has two children, and seemingly masses of energy, as witness the number of projects they have successfully undertaken.

 

It's a truism that there are many ways to tell a story, and Vu's and Thuy's stories certainly bear that out.  Despite their similarities, the manner in which each tells hers is strikingly different.  Vu's is sprawling--470 pages--and covers the lives of two women who are school friends in the last days of the old Vietnam, plus the life of the son which one of them has with an African-American GI.   It begins in the 1960s and ends in 2020.  Along the way it deals with pedophilia, begging children, racism, Agent Orange, Communist re-education. and much more.

 

Thuy's book, on the other hand, is spare and poetic.  The trials that the family (modelled on her own, it seems) go through are harrowing, but the message at the end is upbeat.  The family may have to work in the fields in Quebec for a spell, but they have unquestionably found a better place for themselves.

 

Which is better? Hard to say, depends in part on how you like your fiction--long narratives, or short distillations of experience.  Perhaps the best thing for you is to read both and decide...

 

Is the Lesson to Draw from Tim O'Brien That Hope Is the Most Important Thing to Carry?

When I was working on the final chapters of my book Before We Forget: How Remembering Will Get Us through the Next 75 Years, I struggled with what I was going to tell people to do to prepare for tough times ahead. The book was supposed to be a hopeful one, laying out the predicament we're in now, but showing ways that we can approach the future and make sure that our civilizations survive. I knew I had to also give some advice on what to have ready to take with us as we go forward.

It took me a while, but finally I decided a good place to begin was Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. The collection of inter-connected short stories is considered one of the very best books about the Vietnam War.
O’Brien starts the book by detailing the things carried by a group of soldiers as they fought in the country’s jungles. Some things were linked to their previous lives: Lieutenant Jimmy Cross kept letters from a girl he hoped to love folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. Other things the soldiers carried were determined by necessity or near-necessity: can openers, pocketknives, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, C-rations, matches, cigarettes, steel-centred nylon-covered flak jackets, one large compress bandage (usually in the helmet band for easy access), and:
"Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried six or seven ounces of premium dope, which for him was a necessity. Mitchell Sanders, the RTO [radio telephone operator], carried condoms. Norman Bowker carried a diary. Rat Kiley carried comic books. Kiowa, a devout Baptist, carried an illustrated New Testament that had been presented to him by his father, who taught Sunday school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. As a hedge against bad times, however, Kiowa also carried his grandmother’s distrust of the white man, his grandfather’s old hunting hatchet.
"Necessity dictated."
Necessity dictates a lot, and one of the most necessary things is the telling of stories. Sometimes the stories are explanations of what has been happening, sometimes they are a sort of spell against what may happen. If they are done right, they can be transformative, and if the story teller has a soul filled with art, they can be both a pleasure and a pain to hear.
As I write, the world is embroiled in a half dozen conflicts, some big, some small, all harrowing for the people involved. I wonder if there is a soldier somewhere taking notes, talking into his phone, preparing the way for a book that one day may cause people to reflect on the wars going on now. Would that book change the way history unfolds? Probably not. No more than O'Brien's book has kept us out of the current wars...
But we can hope that it makes some difference. And hope is perhaps the most important thing to carry.

The Library Book: A Tribute to Books, Reading and the Places Where Our Culture Is Kept.

  

A librarian friend of mine recommended The Library Book by Susan Orleans quite a while ago, but it is only this month that I sat down and started to read it.  And a very good read it is.

 

Orleans who had a love affair with libraries from an early age  set out to tell the story of the Los Angeles Public Library and the fire that nearly swept away its main branch in 1986.  She operates on two time frames.  The first is the history of the library itself, which goes back the mid-19th century. The second is what happened one fateful spring day when somehow the library caught fire, and what happened then: salvaging thousands of books that were waterlogged and/or scorched by fire, rebuilding, and trying to find who set the library on fire.  The book's ante-hero is Harry Peake, a would-be actor and big time fabulator, who confessed more than once to setting the fire, but also denied he knew anything about what had happened that fateful day.

 

The book ends with the rebuilt library open for business and under-current of satisfaction that books, library-lovers, and the great history of collections of the world's knowledge survive against sometimes stiff odds. We never learn who set the library on fire, but we don't care because the books survive.

 

Orlean wrote her book when the shift toward  internet dependence was just beginning: it was published in 2018.  We hear how people still called the library to get information, even though it was becoming very easy to Google a query oneself.  Physical books were the foundation of the library's collection and e-books were somewhat of a novelty.   

 

Time have changed somewhat. Visit any library today and you'll see that the shelves are still filled with physical books, but e-books are now an extremely large portion of collections.  The great increase in e-book use followed the Covid 19 pandemic (the American Library Association says the jump was in 2021-22. ) I know that I had never borrowed on before the Bibliothèque de Montréal shut the doors to its many branches during the lock-down.  Ever vigilant, the library system  added something like 45,000 e-book titles over night early on in the pandemic.  How wonderful it was to be able to have access to books even when I was stuck at home!

 

The habit has endured: I currently have two physical books out of my local library, and two e-books waiting for me on Libby.  I think I'd rather read a physical book, but it is very nice to be able to pull out my phone and pick up where I left off reading an e-book.  That's how I was able to read a good portion of The Library Book while on the bus or in the Métro without lugging a physical book with me everywhere.