IN THE OPENING STORY OF NAM Le's first collection, we find a writer named Nam, who is on a tight deadline during his last year at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Le is struggling with writer's block, an affliction his classmates find perplexing. "Just
write a story about Vietnam," one of them advises. Instructors and "visiting literary agents" reinforce this. "Ethnic literature's hot. And important too." "You have to ask yourself, what makes me stand out? ... Your background and life experience."
Unfortunately for the fictional Le, even in this highly professionalised world, where the latest succes d'estime is "a Chinese woman trying to immigrate to America who had written a book of short stories about Chinese characters in stages of immigration to America", a certain jadedness has set in. "I'm sick of ethnic lit," says one of Le's anonymous interlocutors. "It's a licence to bore." This friend then congratulates the writer's fictional alter ego: "You could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing. But instead, you choose to write about lesbian vampires and Colombian assassins and Hiroshima orphans – and New York painters with haemorrhoids."
Sure enough, The Boat contains all these stories, minus the lesbian vampires, who presumably got lost in the edit. As the fictional Le is struggling with the problems of becoming a minority cultural worker (to commodify or not to commodify, that is the question), his father arrives from Australia, a physical embodiment of Vietnamese authenticity, speaking in pithy proverbs, "smaller, gaunter" than his son remembers from their last meeting three years previously. This visit prompts Le to abandon his scruples and start a piece he gives the self-ironising heading "Ethnic Story".
Amazingly, Dad turns out to be a native of My Lai, a survivor of the massacre – exactly the type of material that is gold dust to the experience-scavengers of Iowa. Le knows this and succumbs to temptation. "It was a good story. It was a ... great story." And so we get war porn: "I saw him switch the fire selector on his gun from automatic to single-shot before he shot Grandma Long ... bodies on the road, a baby with only the bottom half of its head." However, we're now primed to ask what function this gory tale is performing. Is it really just "material" for another chunk of "ethnic lit"? Isn't this hyperauthentic narrative of Vietnamese victimhood just the sort of thing calculated to tug at the heartstrings – and wallets – of liberal American readers? Could the writer, just possibly, be lying? For money?
This is all painfully self-conscious, but it at least allows Le to stage some of the real and slippery problems facing a non-white writer trying to negotiate the world of contemporary fiction production. It reads as a manifesto of sorts, a way for the author to assert his right to roam outside his ethnicity, and to justify the rest of his collection, which neurotically avoids the "Vietnamese thing", taking the reader around the world in 80 days, with narrators of all ages and genders, before coming full circle in the title story – 40 pages of entirely un-postmodern realism about boat people suffering as they try to escape the new Communist state.
This striving for otherness has a fraught, weightless quality, like watching someone thrash around in zero gravity. Stories about teenage Medellin gangsters and Second World War-era Japan are peppered with evidence of research. This is a shame, because Le has the ability to hit notes of real emotional intensity, usually when he's not embroiled in a kind of writing that hovers between reportage (conflict, crime, guns and drugs) and picturesque travel journalism. In "Tehran Calling", one of the stronger pieces in the collection, along with "snowcapped" mountains and reminders of the atrocities of the Iran-Iraq war we are given this description of the narrator's ex-lover:
"When he cooked for them, he rolled up his sleeves and tipped and tilted the frying pan in a half-haute style that never failed to delight her. When he made their bed, he made it a point to billow the sheet out over the mattress in a single flourish. She loved the striations of his character – how, at work, he became serious, taciturn." In passages like this Le loses his self-consciousness and begins to write – not toward or away from anything – but just to write, and to do so well.
The Boat is transparently a product of the increasing formulae within which American writers train – a well-wrought collection that, in its acute self-consciousness, trails a tell-tale whiff of "the industry" that is its initial concern, of the "heap of fellowship and job applications" the fictional Le needs "to draft and submit" when he's interrupted by his father.
"Ethnic lit" is unhappily what emerges when identity politics head into the marketing meeting, and for any writer with an exotic name, it's all too easy to feel one is being pimped for one's "background and life experience". Le is starting to grapple with the subtleties of authenticity, but one comes away feeling it's not really his subject, that he has a future as a very different kind of writer.
The full article contains 875 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
