Nam

Nam is the protagonist and narrator of the collection's opening story. As narrator, Nam shares several biographical overlaps with Nam Le, the author. Both are Vietnamese-Australian men, the sons of fathers who were refugees of the American War. Both held careers as lawyers, before moving to America and attending the Iowa Writers' Workshop to study fiction.

Yet despite the similarities in personal history and artistic interests, Nam exists as more than just a stand-in for Le’s own biography. Through this character, Le explores ideas of race and identity in art, and enacts the conflicts of writing about these ideas when one's identity is fraught with outside cultural expectations of violence and trauma. Nam faces his own history and ethnicity with ambivalence, as evidenced by his classmate's assessment that he does not simply “exploit the Vietnamese thing” (10), but delves into characters and locales outside of this. At the...