#24 The Boat- Nam Le

#24 The Boat (2007)- Nam Le

We get to the final and title work of this great Nam Le short story collection.  We come full circle from the first story “Pride” where the young Vietnamese writer is told to write about what he knows, to write an “ethnic" story about “boat people.” Nam Le brings emotion to all of these stories and as any good writer we wonder how much of what he writes is imagined or remembered (if not literally than culturally).

A group of refugees attempt to escape post war communist Viet Nam.  They are 200 aboard a ship built for 15.  The journey is scheduled to take 2 days but a storm and broken engines turn their trip into a 13 day harrowing ordeal.  Mai, a young woman traveling alone befriends a slightly older young woman with a 6 year old child, Troung. 

As starvation, dehydration and fever sets in, the deceased are dumped into the water for the sharks to eat.  Voices and whispers appear on the wind as they drift through “the fields of the dead, those plots of ocean where thousands had capsized with their scows and drowned.”

Mai’s life flashes before her as her past and her present weave a mesh of emotions.  All this is encapsulated by Troung who has become a symbol for everything Mai tries to cling to. His stolid face reminds her of her father, and of the dead-calm of their past experience.  The Boat trip is about loss, loss of war, loss of childhood, loss of innocence, loss of hope…loss of life.  After such is lost, what lives on?

Well, thats it for Le.  I highly recommend the collection. Perhaps later in the year i'll look for some of his other works.

Rating: 8-8-8-8 Total =32

#21 Tehran Calling- Nam Le

#21- Tehran Calling (2006) Nam Le

Another great story from this collection, Tehran Calling is a personal tale surrounded by a political landscape.  The narrator Sarah, visits her friend Parvin, a young Iranian-American woman who’s moved back to Tehran to promote woman’s rights issues. 

It’s a story about identity, identity though culture, gender, through the eyes of the people around you, by the people you associate with.  It’s also a story about control and independence. More specifically, woman taking control of their lives.  Sarah tries to reconcile the disparity between her meager independence issues of breaking up with her unfulfilling boyfriend and the life or death issues of woman in the starkly less woman friendly Middle East.

Le does a great job of posing hard questions about culture and gender issues but without jamming it down the reader’s throats.  As Parvin, born in Iran but with very Americanized ideas about the word, rejoins her family in Tehran during a very radical time, she deals with her own cultural identity.  She’s seen as a source of strength but also as an opportunist interloper, and when she brings in an outsider, we see where cultures completely disconnect. 

Parvin and Sarah’s relationship is strained over this disconnect. Parvin never tells her basic details about her own family, afraid that she’ll be defined as “that exotic friend with a traumatic past.”

We’re shown a warning sign in a radio station: PLEASE LEAVE THE STUDIO IN THE SAME CONDITION.  Its kind of like a Leave No Trace warning on hiking trails, that here reminds us not to leave cultural footprints where we don’t belong.

Who has ownership over a culture, where does one belong, can that bridge ever truly be crossed, do you need a shared past to belong, to understand, to survive? Tough questions.

 Notable Passage: “He was the aberration of her life: the relief from her lifelong suspicion that she was, at heart, a hollow person, who clung to hollow things.”

“This is why she’d come—to see exactly this—the city as it was—the proof of this place unthinkably outside herself.”

Rating: 9-8-8-8 Total= 33 

#19 Hiroshima- Nam Le

#19 Hiroshima (2008) Nam Le

This is why I wanted to alternate between two authors.  Sometimes unlikely connections or comparison can be made.  Hiroshima and yesterday’s Vermont Tale are both stories written from the perspective of children. I did not care for Vermont Take at all (as I’m sure you gathered from my write-up) but I’m completely floored by Hiroshima.

Yesterday I couldn’t exactly pinpoint what I didn’t like about Helprin’s narration, but it took this story to help me see what was missing. Helprin wrote like an adult trying to represent what the child saw, but Le wrote like he was remembering what the child saw. Helprin was using an adult voice with adult imagery but occasionally slipping in a child inspired thought, which lead, for me at least, to a cognizant disconnect.  I think that’s why I felt it lacked emotion.  I never knew who to connect with, the child or the adult.

Children pick up a lot, but don’t know how to describe it. They say what they see in simple terms, not by what their adult selves interpret them to be years later.  That’s what I like about Le’s approach vs. Helprin’s.  Let the child describe their world, the adult reader can filter the details themselves. 

Hiroshima is a story about a third grade Japanese girl in the days leading up to the bomb. War is war but life goes on and children are resilient.  Reality is just what’s around them. The constant stream of imagery is compelling. The sound of cicadas, the cold water, bomber planes overhead, state radio programs repeating war slogans, school games, boys training in Morse code, girls making straw sandals, cold food, smell of the gingko trees, pine oil, and chrysanthemums, demolition rubble being cleared from the street, older people saying over and over that they are safe.

This is a much different style of writing than the others in this collection. Its not quite stream of consciousness, but more like a running remembrance of her thoughts, long paragraphs with no true dialogue, at least not in the traditional sense.  This helps get into the mind of the narrator.  Instead of being like a listener of a story, it’s like hearing her remind herself what it was like.  Ambitious style but well executed by Le.

Notable Passage: “We are at war and some people don’t like to be reminded of the gods”

Rating: 9-8-9-9 Total =35 

#17 Halfhead Bay- Nam Le

#17- Halfhead Bay (2008) Nam Le

Clocking in at 70 pages, this is definitely a longer form short story.  Stories of this length sometimes struggle with identity, caught in a no-man’s land.  They either should have been developed into longer novellas or culled down into something more traditional.  That said, 70 pages seems to be the exact right amount of space to tell the story of Halfhead Bay.

This is a very pleasurable read, even when the topic get less so.  Like most of what I’ve read from Le, the plot comes right out of a “Short Story Writing for Beginners” guide book.  Jaime is a High School student on the fringes of the in-crowd, falls in Love with a popular Girl, angers her boyfriend, has troubles at home that distracts him from the big game.  Sound familiar?   Halfway through I had the sudden urge to see if Netflix was streaming Three O’clock High.

However, because his writing is so powerful, and his craft is so well honed, and his characters so richly developed, readers soon forgive the simple premise and look deeper into the characters well represented in this collection.  The family struggles like we all do with life decisions and taking sides; Outsiders vs. Local, friends vs. family, opportunity vs. comfort, even obviously team vs. team.

Jaime himself has a hard time seeing these as decisions. His football nickname is   “loose ball Jamie.”  We hear later that “It means he doesn’t go hard…I’m not saying he’s gutless—but he freezes.” The coming of life story or the right of passage story always involves the dilemma of choosing vs. following.

The imagery and metaphor in this story is done beautifully and subtly.  Things like smell comes off like natural descriptives until you see it develop into an actual theme. The town always smells of fish, or mud or dead animals.   Everyone has dirt on them except for Allison, his love interest and cause of his biggest threat.  She always wears an immaculate, untarnished, white uniform.  Whether we are to believe Jaime sees her character as unblemished or that is how she wants herself to be seen is up for interpretation

Notable Passage: “This was where she loves most of the time. He felt toward her an immense quantity of love but it was contaminated by his own venom, made sour.”

Rating: 10-7-9-8 Total =34

#14 Meeting Elise- Nam Le

#14 Meeting Elise (2008) Nam Le

Henry Luff is a successful New York Artist.  Strangely, we don’t see any of his art in this story and ironically we don’t see any beauty in the life of this artist.   From the tragedy of his love dying too soon, to his bitter break with his first wife, to the overly descriptive scene at his proctologist’s office, Henry’s current existence is wrought with ugliness. 

Perhaps that’s why he hasn’t created any art in a year. We’re to believe that Henry is a hard man to like at best, and is more likely detestable.  He has only one friend and has driven away anyone in his life that got close.  His one and only chance for redemption, for forgiveness, for hope as he faces death and obsolescence is seeing his daughter one more time, the first time since she was taken from him 17 years ago. 

It’s a very emotional story, and Le is a capably emotional writer.  I find a very musical quality to his writing.  Where I find the themes and plot elements of his stories a little cliché at times, I find craft and delicacy in the execution of his narration.

Notable Passage: “The past’s a cold body of water for me and nowadays my bones ache after even a quick dip.”

Rating: 8-8-8-7 Total =31