Ru: A Novel

by Kim Thúy

Ðời là chiến trận, nếu buồn là thua. Life is a struggle in which sorrow leads to defeat.

We often forget about the existence of all those women who carried Vietnam on their backs while their husbands and sons carried weapons on theirs. We forget them because under their cone-shaped hats they did not look up at the sky.

Even though she had café au lait skin, thick wavy hair, African blood, deep scars, she was Vietnamese, only Vietnamese, she repeated incessantly. She begged me to translate for the policeman her desire to go back to her own jungle. But the policeman could only release her into the jungle of the Bronx. Had I been able to, I would have asked her to curl up against me. Had I been able to, I’d have erased every trace of dirty hands from her body. I was the same age as her. No, I don’t have the right to say that I was the same age as her: her age was measured in the number of stars she saw when she was being beaten and not in years, months, days.