#10- Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and
Sacrifice (2008)- Nam Le
A young writer at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, on a deadline
for the program’s final project is visited by his Vietnamese father. He’s a
father that survived the My Lai massacre, a father he hasn’t seen in 3 years, a
father he “learned to hate with a straight face.”
Father/adult son relationships are often fragile to begin
with. The ties between this pair extend
beyond normal generation gaps, the muddied water between them caused by more
than mere distance. It is noted that the father traveled Viet Nam to Australia
to Los Angeles to Denver to Iowa to cast the large shadow only a father can
create.
A son tries his whole life to free himself of this shadow,
or at least to feel the warm sunshine of his father’s pride and
acceptance. But this son has a heavy
burden. He acutely feels the inadequacy
of never being able to live up to his name.
Nam, the name given to him to represent his past, of the country his
family left and the sacrifices his father made to get him here.
Heavy subject, heartbreaking end. The title references
Faulkner and the verities that all authors should write about. Le touches on all of them here.
Notable passage: “And it occurred to me then how it took
hours, sometimes days, for the surface of a river to freeze over- to hold its
skin the perfect and crystalline world- and how that world could be shattered
by a small stone dropped like a single syllable."
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