ABSTRACT
After her acclaimed debut novel Ru (2009), which poetically narrates a personal journey of a Vietnamese boat person growing up in Montréal, Kim Thúy became a familiar name within the Québécois literary scene. Much of her success was the result of a casual yet effective writing style that blended trauma writing with a refugee sentimentality, which consistently moves between themes of integration and alienation. Her follow-up novel, Mãn, was no different in that it continues the same balancing act between cultural and linguistic coherency and absolute aporias. In this chapter, I argue that in Mãn, rather than producing a field of intelligibility to bridge the gap between the traumatic experience of childhood and the Vietnam War, Thúy uses the figure of untranslatability to challenge our understanding of cultural alienation. This takes place on three different levels: first is the personal, where one must write the self; second, the landscape of refugee writing; and last, the broader landscape of Asian-North American literature. Taking Naoki Sakai’s explication of the figure of translation as an operation of co-figuration, wherein the unity of language and culture are produced within the act of translation itself, I read moments of cultural and linguistic translation within Mãn as violent non-encounters with the putative county of Vietnam, and as a demonstration of the aporia of translation.
