Love and honour...

Key terms

Vietnam War: the conflict between South Vietnam (aided by various countries) and the Vietcong and North Vietnam that started in 1954 and ended in 1975

Refugee: a person who flees their home in search of safety, particularly during times of war and political upheaval

Who is the composer?

Nam Le was born in Vietnam in 1978. When he was less than a year old, he came to Australia with his family by boat, living in a camp on a Malaysian island for seven months before being accepted into Australia. As a minority Asian child, he was often picked on at school for being different, but his parents pushed him to study hard and he was awarded a scholarship to the prestigious Melbourne Grammar School, where there were many other Asian students. Nam enjoyed school and excelled academically. He achieved the high VCE score in 1997 and was able to attend Melbourne University on a full scholarship where he studied a Bachelor of Arts/Bachelor of Law with honours. While he appreciated the understanding of power and social contracts that his law studies gave him, Nam’s passion lay in reading, writing and poetry. Upon graduating, he took a job with a corporate law firm in Melbourne but never felt that it was right for him. He applied for the prestigious Iowa Creative Writing Program and in 2004 attended and completed a Masters in Creative Writing, after which time he became the editor for the Harvard Review. He was awarded the Truman Capote fellowship and has taught at universities in Europe, North America and the UK. He has won many prizes for his work, including the Dylan Thomas Prize for his first book, The Boat, a collection of short stories published in 2008. In the following year he was awarded the Prime Minister’s Literary award for Fiction for the same book.

What is the context of the text?

The text is a short story from Le’s first book The Boat, published on May 13th 2018 by Alfred A. Knopf in the USA. The book is a collection of seven stories that take place in various different countries and circumstances. The book has been critically acclaimed as ‘masterful’. Each story of the book is located carefully within its own context, and as the text unfolds, the reader is offered insights into Le’s intent. Most of the book was written while Le participated in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and each story is well-crafted and carefully thought out, displaying artistic skill. It is also worth noting that place is important to the stories of The Boat, acting both as a medium of location and as an existential conflict metaphor. Stories reference places such as Tehran, Colombia, Hiroshima and the Vietnam War. The name of the story is taken from Faulkner’s Verities and the author has tried to sculpt this work around the themes.

What is the intended purpose and audience of the text?

The text seems to be intended for a broad audience, generally those who have an interest in literature and like to read. To narrow down the audience, you could say the text may be appealing to those interested in diverse narratives of experiences foreign to their own, who want to reflect, imagine and understand the experience of another whose life is far removed from their own. The book may also appeal specifically to Australians and to migrant Australians. The nature of the story would also appeal to other writers as it seems to be about the connection between writing and the self.

What is the text about?

The text is about a character named Nam, who, while living and studying in Iowa with a looming deadline on a short story assessment, is visited by his father from Australia. As the protagonist struggles to write his story, he also reflects on his father and his past, as well as his girlfriend, Linda, who he does not discuss with his father. The young author who narrates the story struggles with a dilemma – should he ‘sell out’ and write an ethnic story so that he can break through his writer’s block and meet his deadline? The author eventually relents and writes the story, only for his father to take it while he is asleep and burn it by the river. Feeling betrayed, the author reflects on his reaction to this act with regret, and there is a sense that the father has saved him from himself. Through his relationship with his father, and his Vietnamese roots, Nam essentially examines the question of his own identity. It seems he is trying to discover what he, as the descendant of refugees and as a writer, who is seeking his place in the world, must understand. Nam writes his father’s story but his father claims it is inauthentic and it is this struggle between them, the real and the imagined, that draws the narrator Nam back to his roots. The story forces questions around ethnic and immigrant literature, about what counts as exploitation or authenticity and what defines a personal narrative. Furthermore, is also questions ‘who’ is allowed to write it?

How does it engage the responder through ideas, techniques and strategies?

Le’s story is told in first person by the character Nam, who acts as narrator. It is written in a stream of consciousnes style that describes happenings in the narrator’s thought flow. The reader is able to feel as though they are inside the narrator’s mind and this internal view sheds some light onto the motivation and plot of the story: This stream of consciousness style is good for integrating the inner and outer realities of a character, creating a more three dimensional figure and crafting a meaningful story. In the case of the text, the reader is privy to Nam’s internal struggle against writing his own ethnic story and all that this connotes. The reader becomes excited by this invitation to become involved in questions surrounding authenticity and exploitation, about what a personal narrative is and who is allowed to write it. This in itself is engaging for the reader, as the theme of cultural appropriation and ethnic writing can be emotionally loaded in this era. Interestingly, it seems this is where the real power of the story lies – in its themes, as Le’s prose is lacking any noticeable flourishes. His words do, however, create imagery that is evocative enough to hook the reader and keep them interested, allowing them to experience Nam’s senses. For example, he writes: ‘I twisted over the side of the bed and cracked open the window. The sound of rain filled the room—rain fell on the streets, on the roofs, on the tin shed across the parking lot like the distant detonations of firecrackers. Everything smelled of wet leaves’ and ‘The apartment smelled of fried garlic and sesame oil when I returned.

The text also includes other cultural themes and symbolism. His characters represent various cultures, and there are clear distinctions between them. Nam is Vietnamese Australian, his father Vietnamese, his friends and girlfriend are American. There is a cultural conflict present between Nam’s Vietnamese heritage and his current life in America. He has been surrounded by American friends and his American girlfriend, and has not spoken Vietnamese in a very long time. He says: ‘It felt strange, after all this time, to be speaking Vietnamese again.’ His friends and girlfriend have opinions on Nam’s ethnicity that they have made through their own lens, showing they do not really understand what it is like to be Nam. The arrival of his father reminds Nam of aspects of his cultural identity that he has forgotten. For example, when Nam eats Vietnamese food his father has cooked for him, the food itself, often a strong cultural symbol, reintroduces him to his Vietnamese self and he begins to relax into it: ‘For so long my diet had consisted of chips and noodles and pizzas, I’d forgotten how much I missed home cooking.’

There is also a recurring motif of water in the story. In the beginning, it is raining heavily, and then later, Nam hears water rushing and sees his father doing his dishes. Together, the two of them go for a walk to the river and meet a homeless man, which is also the setting for the final part of the story. Nam also recounts a moment of intimacy with his girlfriend, as shown through the imagery of her body – ‘slippery with sweat and hard to hold’. The most memorable use of water, however, is Nam’s telling of his father’s experience in the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam war. This involved his father’s family and fellow villagers being shot and killed in a ditch full of water. Le creates heartbreaking imagery of this scene as he imagines what his father tells him: ‘They made us kneel back down in the water. When they started shooting I felt my mother’s body jumping on top of mine; it kept jumping for a long time, and then everywhere was the sound of helicopters, louder and louder like they were all coming down to land, and everything was dark and wet and warm and sweet.’

One of the most significant ways Le engages his audience is through the carefully constructed narrative that builds to the climax at the very end of the story. It is here that he reveals that the story he has been writing, which he decides to make about his father’s experiences, has been destroyed by his father. This is a kind if twist in the story as we realise that the story is not about relaying a migrant experience, but about the relationship between father and son and the very nature of story construction. The reader comes to understand that the story the narrator ends up writing and ultimately submitting, is the one we are reading.