After bursting onto the scene with her first book, Ru, winner of the French-language Governor General’s Award for Literature, Thúy has followed up with Mãn. Like Ru, Mãn is the story of a Vietnamese immigrant woman living in Montreal. Similar also is the way Thúy wrote the books, each in a long unbroken text that was divided into short sections with her editor. “In my mind it’s always one story. One breath,” she says. “To me, it’s almost like calligraphy. Yes, you have many lines, but it should just be one stroke…. People sometimes say they can read each page alone, but to me it’s impossible.”

“The next book will be about the same,” she says. “It’s my breath. I can only do that size. It’s rhythm, probably, and my rhythm is that short.” It is typical of Thúy to offer a realistic assessment of her work with both humour and humility. “I’m very loud in person, and I can never tell a short story,” she laughs. “But when I write I become very economical. Because I don’t have the vocabulary, and the knowledge of the language. I don’t feel I have the leisure of a real author who can play with the structure. So I remain quite primitive … My knowledge of French is quite restrained, so I don’t have the luxury to spread myself. I can’t fly. I fly like a chicken, only for half a second. My writing is like a chicken trying to fly.”

Of course, not every flying chicken wins the Governor General’s Literary Award on its first flapping foray. “Every word for me is a jewel, a treasure,” she says. “I worked very hard to gain that … I can sometimes understand a word very well for a long time before I know how to use it … I love those words. I have carried them.” In both books she has listed in the margins Vietnamese words linked to the text, with their French or English translations. This is intimately connected to Thúy’s experience of moving between languages and cultures. Thus the reader shares her discovery of the words.

She offers examples that demonstrate the richness to be found between languages, and the generosity of her impulse to draw the reader into her lush bicultural space. “In French when you say goodbye it’s adieu, you give someone to God. In Vietnamese when you say goodbye to somebody it’s to accompany somebody to the next starting point. So in one culture it’s the end, in the other it’s the starting point.”

She also says, “I appreciate the words for love in Vietnamese … in English and French it’s more limited.” In Vietnamese there is a word for love of a spouse, a word for love of a parent, another for love of ice cream. In French and English we have only the one verb. “If I only knew Vietnamese, I wouldn’t have appreciated this richness.”

Thúy is conscious of the distance she has traveled from her refugee childhood. She is a constitutional lawyer who also has degrees in translation and linguistics, an accomplished cook and restaurateur, wife, mother to an autistic son, and now internationally acclaimed writer. Many of the stories in her books come from her experiences or those of women in her family, but she was also a lawyer in Vietnam for three years, where she made a point of meeting ordinary people and hearing about their experiences of the war and its aftermath. She is sensitive to the many small acts that make a life, and how many of those are the daily hard work, small attentions and sacrifices of women caring for their families – even more so in time of war. “We tend to forget that without these mothers, Vietnam would have disappeared. Ordinary, everyday heroes.”