“Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” by Nam Le
I’ve been capricious with my selection of short stories. Not only am I pulling random collections off my shelves, I’ve also been selecting stories from the tables of contents based on whatever strikes my fancy (e.g. “Poland Is Watching”).
That approach has muddled me up this time. But in a good way: in Nam Le’s The Boat, I read the last story (“The Boat”) then read his first story (title above). In the first story, Nam Le writes about a fictional writing student self struggling to evade and then capitalize on ethnic literature and his family’s personal history as Vietnamese boat people. And the last story is a raw, detailed story about Vietnamese asylum seekers escaping by boat. Is “The Boat” a wry capitulation to the forces outlined in the first story? Is “The Boat” a refutation of the cynical expectations in the first story?
I would surely have felt differently about “The Boat” if I had read the first story first. But I’m kind of glad that my reading of “The Boat” didn’t have this knowingness layered upon it. On the other hand, didn’t Nam want me to have that resonance? What is my responsibility as a reader of short story collections?
