Ru - Reading Group Guide

In Brief

These discussion questions are designed to enhance your group’s conversation about Ru, an autobiographical novel based on the author’s real-life experience as a Vietnamese émigré and how she found both her way—and her voice—after immigrating to Quebec.

Details

For discussion

1.  The novel’s title, Ru, has different meanings in both the author’s native and adoptive languages: in Vietnamese, ru is a lullaby; in French, a stream. How do these two different meanings play out during the course of the book?
2. Thúy has chosen to tell her story in short vignettes, often linked by subject rather than chronology. What do you think her reasoning might be for choosing this form over a more traditional narrative arc?
3. The narrator reveals in the first pages of Ru that her name is a variation of her mother’s, that she was supposed to be her mother’s extension and sequel, but that this role ended when she was ten years old (2). Why and how does her relationship to her mother change?
4. The narrator describes herself in childhood as being her cousin Sao Mai’s “shadow” (18). What does she mean? What are some of the other times in her life when she feels like a shadow?
5. About the Communist child inspectors living in her family’s home, the narrator writes: “We no longer knew if they were enemies or victims, if we loved or hated them, if we feared or pitied them. And they no longer knew if they had freed us from the Americans, or, on the contrary, if we had freed them from the jungle of Vietnam” (32). How does the narrator’s up-is-down-and-down-is-up war experience continue to color her views toward her homeland and its people throughout the course of her life?
6. Constant movement is one of Ru’s themes. At one point, the narrator writes, “I never leave a place with more than one suitcase . . . Nothing else can become truly mine” (100). Why do you think she believes this? Do you think it is true for her?
7. In, Vietnamese, the narrator tells us, there are different words for different ways of loving (96). But the narrator says it is her children who define for her what it means simply “to love” (102).  How do you think her love for her children is different from what she feels for her parents, relatives, or lovers?
8. The narrator describes an incident at restaurant school in Hanoi when a waiter reminded her that she “no longer had the right to declare that [she] was Vietnamese because [she] no longer had their fragility, their uncertainty, their fears” (78). The narrator seems to believe he was right; do you?
9. Music appears throughout the book in various forms and situations: the music the narrator’s father plays on the piano to corrupt the child inspectors; the Fame theme song Johanne teaches her to sing; the music her middle-aged mother dances to in her weekly dance classes; the melodies the strolling merchants sing while advertising their basket wares. What is music’s importance in Ru?
10. The American Dream plays an integral role in the narrator’s life and her search for meaning, and she references it often during the novel. What is her version of the American Dream? Do you think she attains it?
11. The narrator speaks of the Vietnamese women permanently hunched by the weight of their grief (39). To what extent do you think she identifies with those women ?
12. Many aspects of this novel are clearly autobiographical, but the author classifies it as fiction. Why do you think Thúy chose to write the book she did, rather than a straight memoir?

Suggested reading 
Rhea Tregebov, The Knife Sharpener’s Bell; Jean Kwok, Girl in Translation; Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers; Anthony Shadid, House of Stone; William Saroyan, My Name Is Aram; Robert Trando, Letters of a Vietnamese Émigré; John Bul Dau, God Grew Tired of Us; Lac Su, I Love You’s Are for White People; Sopheap Ly, M.D., No Dream Beyond My Reach; Chanrithy Him, When Broken Glass Floats; Juliet Lac, Blossoms on the Wind; Le Ly Hayslip, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places and Child of War, Woman of Peace; Andrew X. Pham, The Eaves of Heaven

SOURCE: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/ru-9781608198986/