**http://www.namleonline.com/index.html
"My relationship with Vietnam is complex. For a long time I vowed I wouldn’t fall into writing ethnic stories, immigrant stories, etc. Then I realized that not only was I working against these expectations (market, self, literary, cultural), I was working against my kneejerk resistance to such expectations. How I see it now is no matter what or where I write about, I feel a responsibility to the subject matter. Not so much to get it right as to do it justice. 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 book's final story, "The Boat," is another 'ethnic' Vietnamese tale about a harrowing 13-day journey in which boat people endure squalid conditions, survive a terrifying storm at sea, then almost die of thirst before finally reaching land. The protagonists in the five other stories, however, are a 14-year-old Colombian hit man, an elderly and ailing New York painter, an Australian teenager, an 8-year-old Japanese girl in Hiroshima in August 1945 and an American attorney visiting an Iranian friend in Tehran. That range of characters is unusual, but what is truly remarkable about these stories is that the language and tone of each one is perfectly suited to the characters and setting, even incorporating snatches of Colombian gangster slang, Vietnamese proverbs and wartime Japanese patriotic slogans. The stories are so different from one another it is hard to believe all seven are the work of a single author.
Of all these heartrending stories of pain and loss, the most moving and unforgettable in the collection is "Halflead Bay," which, at 69 pages, is also the longest story in the book. Rarely has one read such a sensitive and empathetic treatment of adolescent angst, all the more remarkable because the story's main character is shy and inarticulate. Eighteen-year-old Jamie experiences an unaccustomed moment in the limelight as his high school's sports hero, attracting the attention of the glamorous Alison Fischer. But Jamie knows that by encouraging her flirtation, he is setting himself up for a savage beating by her Neanderthal boyfriend. On a deeper level, the story deals with how Jamie and his younger brother (and by extension their fisherman father) struggle with the knowledge that their mother is dying of multiple sclerosis. As if this were not painful enough, the achingly beautiful bay where they live in Australia, which has provided the family with a good living for generations, is also dying, having been overfished, and is losing its port traffic to nearby Maroomba. The story is especially memorable for its richly poetic Australian vernacular, a language Nam Le clearly feels in his bones.
**http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/11/DDS2117GM7.DTL
"If you only read that first story ("Love and Honor"), you might peg me as a very self-conscious writer," said Le on a visit to San Francisco. The impetus behind this tale seemingly drawn from his own life, he went on, came from a very different source - his desire to "examine the idea of authenticity and why we're all so quick to correlate text to biography."
Le gave his own first name to his character, he explained, "to not let myself off the hook. A lot of people assume that writing from your real life is easier. To me it's much more difficult. If something exists for me and is easily slottable into a story, that means perhaps I haven't looked adequately at whether it exists on the page."
Once past the initial story of the collection (Knopf; $22.95), readers will discover an author able to make a sweeping range of people, places, actions and states of feeling come to life vividly on the page. Few young writers are driven to step outside themselves and their own experiences so decisively. One of Le's stories depicts an aging New York painter's meeting with a daughter he hasn't seen for 18 years. Another explores an Australian boy's storm of sexual and violent emotions as his mother drifts toward death. "Hiroshima" takes place in a haunting calm before the bomb falls.
The protagonist of "Cartagena" is a teenage assassin in the drug-drenched neighborhoods of Medellín, Colombia. "I am no child, wet behind the ears," Juan Pablo Merendez insists, with the machismo cadence of a child who has grown up too fast. "I have now fourteen years and two months. I know how things work."
For Le, "minds and sensibilities that we would normally see only from the outside, in a simplistic and reductive way" are particularly compelling. "Juan Pablo is illiterate and uneducated," he said, "and he is also a heinous creature in many ways." The writer's challenge, met in full by the story, was "to make the case for the character with eloquence and dignity, and without being sociological or anthropological." Le grinned at his own flight of rhetoric and regrounded himself: "Let's give this guy a voice."
Seated at a table in full sun outside the Ferry Building and sipping pineapple juice, Le retraced his unlikely path to a widely heralded early success. Like his fictional namesake, he left Vietnam as an infant with a family forced to flee the country after the war. After a stay in a Malaysian refugee camp, where the 3-month-old Le fell ill, the family accepted an offer to immigrate to Australia.
"My parents took the first chance to get medical help," he said. "We would have gone to America if it weren't for me." Other members of Le's extended family immigrated to Southern California.
Le's parents were well-educated high achievers in Vietnam. His father was a teacher and top government aide. In Australia, they took factory jobs and got by at first with the help of donated food and clothing. His mother worked for the postal service and later became a chef. His father was the outreach director of a children's center and is now retired. Neither of Le's parents spoke much about their escape from Vietnam or the years his father spent in a re-education camp.
By then Le was reading voraciously - Auden, Tennyson, Rilke - and writing poetry. "That was the dream - to become a poet." Instead, feeling the pressure to succeed, he enrolled in law school and found a job with a huge corporate firm. His heart was never in it. After a year, Le took a loan, traveled for a year and began work on what would eventually become a 700-page novel about coming-of-age in Melbourne.
Le applied with the first five chapters of his abandoned novel and was accepted into the highly selective program. With teachers such as Marilynne Robinson, Ethan Canin and the late Frank Conroy and a community of fellow fiction writers and poets, Le flourished in Iowa. "When I came to the United States I became completely smitten with the short-story form. With all the techniques and methods and voices and styles available, it was not a no-brainer to test them out and test my own limitations
Le never foresaw his diverse stories ending up in book form. "There was good reason to believe these stories would never make their way into a collection," he said. "Publishers were more interested in linked stories or at least thematically congruous stories. That just wasn't where my mind and interests were."
"I'm trying to be OK with the intermittency," he said, "but it comes across - to myself, at least - as slackness. I was a slacker when I was at university.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/11/DDS2117GM7.DTL#ixzz16AhgO75a
