Kim Thúy’s Rú and the Art of the Anecdote

Abstract

The gradual female gendering of Thúy's text as it moves forward is nicely wrapped in the comfortable and seemingly simple form of the anecdote, so that the text comes to represent, in both its genre and gender, what (in Perreault words) I would call "autography that is articulating not a site or a space but an energy" and creates an "'I' that works for the social, material, and personal transformations that we know as feminism." By a close reading of the text using the development of its anecdotal style joined with a theorization of the nature of anecdote as a generic literary tool that can illuminate the concept of flashback in theories of psychology, I hope to offer a fuller reading of the relationship of gender and genre in Rú.