Two Shores

Caroline Sin is a Ph.D. candidate in English at McMaster University in
Hamilton.

This bilingual collection by Vuong-Riddick, a Vietnamese-Canadian poet,
is divided into three parts: the author’s childhood and youth in
Vietnam; her sojourn and study in France; and her eventual settlement in
Canada. The book is prefaced by the poem “Searching,” in which
Vuong-Riddick explains the driving force behind the collection: her
desire to find what she calls a “country of the mind,” an
imaginative homeland that cannot be found on maps or in books but exists
rather in the connections between family and friends, wherever they may
be.

Two unifying themes run through the collection. The first is a concern
with war and violence. Vuong-Riddick explores the Vietnam war, the 1968
student riots in Paris, and the FLQ crisis in Quebec, focusing in each
instance on the discrepancies between the ideological justifications for
violence and the victims of that violence, the people killed and the
families torn apart in the name of revolution. The second is a more
pressing concern—born perhaps out of the deprivation of war—of the
need to appreciate the everyday experiences of life, in all its diverse
manifestations. Indeed, the best poems in the collection explore the
pleasures involved in the quiet moments spent alone or with loved ones
enjoying the sweetness of fruit, trudging through the first snowstorm of
the year, watching as your child rolls around in the smells of your
discarded clothing.

The poems about Vietnam are the most skilful, but the strength of the
collection as a whole lies in the series of contrasts and parallels that
are drawn between the three disparate countries Vuong-Riddick has
adopted as her homelands. The qualities unique to each culture are
emphasized in the contrasting concerns of each of the three sections,
but at the same time, similar themes permeate throughout the entire
collection, suggesting a core of basic human experiences held in common
by all three.