Michiko Kakutani : A World of Stories From a Son of Vietnam

Review of Nam Lee, The Boat (Knopf), at The NY Times (13.05.2008) :

The boat in the title story of this remarkable collection is filled with Vietnamese refugees, 200 people squashed into a space meant for 15, going on two weeks at sea, racked by thirst and hunger and illness, their skin blistered by the unrelenting sun on deck, the quarters below awash in vomit and human waste. There is no medicine and little water for the ill; the dead, bundles of skin and bones, are thrown overboard into the shark-infested waters. After days on the boat, Mai, the teenage heroine of this story, realizes that she now understands why her father — who spent five years fighting the Communists and two years in a re-education camp — tried to live on the surface, in the now of the moment, not looking backward or inside:

“Because beneath the surface was either dread or delirium. As more and more bundles were thrown overboard she taught herself not to look — not to think of the bundles as human — she resisted the impulse to identify which families had been depleted. She seized distraction from the immediate things: the weather, the next swallow of water, the ever-forward draw of time.”

This story, like many in “The Boat,” catches people in moments of extremis, confronted by death or loss or terror (or all three) and forced to grapple at the most fundamental level with who they are and what they want or believe. Whether it’s the prospect of dying at sea or being shot by a drug kingpin or losing family members in a war, Nam Le’s people are individuals trapped in the crosshairs of fate, forced to choose whether they will react like deer caught in the headlights, or whether they will find a way to confront or disarm the situation.