“The boat broke apart 15 minutes after we got off it” – Kim Thúy

Before arriving in Canada, Kim Thúy saw the boat that allowed him to leave Vietnam with his family being broken up by the force of the waves.

“The boat broke apart 15 minutes after we got off it. It fell apart before our eyes, swallowed up in the sea,” she confided to Marie-Claude Barrette during the most recent episode of the podcast Open your game“.

“There was some rain that came down and the waves were a little bigger. The boards blew off one by one. The boat was not made to be on the high seas,” added the bestselling author, emphasizing her luck in having landed before the rain.

“15 more minutes, I wouldn’t be here with you,” she continued, adding that all the time she had lived since that moment was a bonus to her.

“We had already accepted death. I am already in the “after death”, I am already living my second life. I’m not supposed to be here,” she said.

The author of Ru also recounted during the episode that before setting sail to eventually seek refuge in Canada, his father had brought cyanide pills in case, on the way, the boat was intercepted by pirates or the police.

“He showed me how you could die very quickly. That is to say, the pill should not be swallowed, but put under the tongue. At 10 years old, you learn how to die, it’s still crazy. You understand that you are heading towards death,” she said.

Neither dead nor alive

Kim Thúy, who settled in Granby with her family in the late 1970s, lived for a time in a refugee camp in Malaysia. An experience she describes as neither life nor death.

“We have never lived in a world in the middle, neither with the dead nor with the living,” she told Marie-Claude Barrette.

“In a refugee camp, you are not dead, but you are not alive either. […] You no longer have an identity, you are no longer attached to any territory, but you are not dead because you still breathe, you still have to feed yourself, you still have to be a slave to your body. […] And when you are between the two for a long time you disappear…”, added the host of Kim’s table.

“But you know it’s fleeting. At any moment, a truck could arrive and transfer everyone elsewhere. You just don’t know when, without notice because we don’t have anything to pick up anyway,” she continued, adding that after going through it, everything becomes a source of great joy.

During the episode, Kim Thúy also talked about her family, their lifestyle, and how they view and deal with money. In her family, despite the more troubled times, everyone is equal, helps each other and “goes up together,” she described.