Summary

The first story in Le’s collection features a first-person narrator by the same first name, Nam, “after the homeland” his father “had given up” (19). A graduate student in his final year at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, the story begins with a visit from Nam’s Vietnamese father. Signs of their strained relationship appeared in the opening scenes, with Nam commenting on his father’s strange quirks and the strangeness of speaking Vietnamese again. Nam observed the sound of rain outside and compared it to the “distant detonations of firecrackers” (4).

Prior to moving to America for school, Nam had been a successful but unhappy lawyer in Australia. Nam describes himself as disciplined and hard-working but notes that when he arrived in Iowa, he developed writer’s block and began drinking more heavily. A...