The Boat- Nam Le (2008)

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The Boat is the stunning debut from Vietnamese- Australian writer Nam Le, a collection of short stories that exhibit talent and versatility as they jump across oceans and continents to immerse the reader in the worlds of a fourteen year old hitman in the slums of Columbia, an ailing artist in New York and an American woman searching for answers amongst dissidents in Tehran.

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In the years following the fall of Vietnam to communist forces in 1975, many hundreds of thousands of people who had been associated with the Southern regime, or feared persecution for any other reason, secretly fled the country by boat, to risk drowning, starvation and interception by Thai pirates. The boats would be squalidly overcrowded and many would never reach their final destination of refugee camps in Malaysia, Indonesia or the Philippines. It is estimated that two hundred thousand lives may have been lost on the swathes of the South China Sea. This dark episode of recent Vietnamese history inspires the name of the book and the final story- of Mai, sent alone by her family to an uncertain future on the other side of the sea.

Le himself was one of the ‘boat people’ who escaped Vietnam at the end of the war, although he was less than one year old at the time. This book is not an autobiographical one; it takes inspiration from personal experience, and particularly the experiences of the author’s family, but only for the purpose of a creating a compelling story, not as an exploration of Le’s feelings towards his distant homeland. In a 2008 interview with Asia Pacific Post, he explains: “no matter what or where I write about, I feel a responsibility to the subject matter… Having personal history with a subject only complicates this — but not always, nor necessarily, in bad ways. I don’t completely understand my relationship to Vietnam as a writer. This book is a testament to the fact that I’m becoming more and more okay with that.”

The first story of the collection, the only other in the book to be based on Vietnamese characters and storylines, follows Le’s self-inspired protagonist, a Vietnamese-born lawyer turned short story writer. The narrator muses on the idea of writing ‘ethnic stories’ that will appeal to publishers. “’You could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing,’” he is told by a friend. “’But instead, you choose to write about lesbian vampires and Colombian assassins, and Hiroshima orphans- and New York painters with haemorrhoids.’”

When the narrator finally pens the story of his father’s experience of the My Lai massacre- in which up to five hundred villagers were murdered by the US Army Americal Division in 1968- he is convinced it is a winner. His confidence crumbles into dismay when, with no explanation, his father destroys the only copy of the manuscript. It is interesting that the author chose for this story- a story within a story- to be destroyed, so that, counter to my hopes, it would not appear as one of the short stories later in the book. “’Only you’ll remember. I’ll remember.’”, the father criticises his son, who expects readers to be moved by the story he had written. “‘They will read and clap their hands and forget’”.

Herein is the subtlety of Le’s work- that he pays tribute to the great inflictions suffered by the Vietnamese populace during the war years, but neither seeks to ‘profit’ from a story that is not his own, nor to direct the focus of his book to one particular place and time. A mention is offered, but the raw tragedy is kept just above and out of sight.

Moreover, the collection finds a comfortable balance between stories taken from Le’s family’s own experiences and those from worlds presumably totally alien to the author. He has a striking ability to convincingly place the reader in the worlds of his characters, each one varying greatly in setting and experience. All seven capture a character at a pivotal moment of their life. Several were particularly moving; a favourite of mine was Cartagena, the story of young Juan Pablo who becomes recruited as an assassin in the hope of alleviating himself and his mother from poverty and to defend them both within the Colombian city’s criminal network. When he fails to complete an assignment- the assassination of his best friend- he is called to the home of his formidable agent. It was gripping, anguishing, with a heart-stopping cliff-hanger ending.

All but one of the stories in this collection had been published elsewhere- in anthologies or short-story magazines- prior to the publication of The Boat in 2008. For me, the effectiveness of this book in displaying the author’s ability is in the marriage of these unrelated stories set in different corners of the world; throughout, I searched for a link that tied the stories from Colombia, New York, Tehran, Hiroshima and small-town Australia to the author’s experience of Vietnam, but found none. Eventually I came to understand the aforementioned purpose of the book, not as a story of Vietnam told through metaphors but a series of stories from around the world, each given equal importance, that merely starts and ends with the author’s own experiences to neatly tie the collection together.

For the purpose of my project, The Boat was not a useful book to study. Only two of the seven stories were based on themes relating to Vietnam, and from these I gathered only minor new insights into Vietnamese life, history and society. I found the characterisation of Nam Le’s father in the opening story, described in the context of the things he had experienced as a child in a country at war, very interesting- particularly his ruthlessly unforgiving approach to parenting- although this cannot necessarily be held as a valid reflection of a war-afflicted generation of Vietnamese at large. For personal reading, however, I would highly recommend this book. Le’s approach is bold, adventurous and overall wholly successful; the characters and landscapes he paints are both convincing and intriguing. His writing is witty and unpretentious but with an attention to detail that can set a scene with elegance. Both the compelling stories and the soaring imagination of the author will leave a lasting impression.