Ru

The account of a Vietnamese refugee, one of the boat people, whose memories become by turns a source of amusement and of contemplation, swinging between the tragic and the comic, between Saigon and Granby, between the everyday and the spiritual. In the belly of the boat that carried her away, heaven and hell were entwined: the promise of a new life, and the fear of pirates, of hunger, of drinking water running out, of never setting foot on land again. Caught between East and West, past and present, she follows the fate of a people whose turbulent destiny is bound up with the history of decolonized Vietnam.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

144 pages in the original

Genres

Migration, Autofiction (assigned by AI)

Set in

Vietnam, Canada

First published

2009 by Libre Expression

Author's age

41 when first published

ISBN

9782764804636 (original)

9781608198986 (Bloomsbury, United States)

9780307359704 (Random House Canada, Canada)

9781846685484 (Clerkenwell Press, United Kingdom)

9780345816146 (Vintage Canada, Canada)

More

Wikidata