#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 

#10- Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice- Nam Le

#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."

Rating: 9-8-8-8 Total =33