Nam Le’s family fled Vietnam in a boat after the Vietnamese War. He arrived in Australia as a baby with his parents and older brother in 1979.

In 2008, Le published a collection of short stories called The Boat. The stories cover themes associated with migration, but also examine people who feel connected and disconnected, rooted and adrift.

The final story in the collection is also called ‘The Boat’. Its protagonist Mai is a 16-year-old girl whose father fought for the South Vietnamese against the Communist North. After the fall of Saigon, he was put in a reeducation camp, where he lost his sight. In the wake of the war, fearing what the future entails for them, Mai’s mother pays for Mai to escape the country. Mai travels several hours by bus to meet an ‘uncle’ who takes payment to get her on a boat overcrowded with other refugees. Mai departs, leaving her parents and little bother behind. At sea, the boat is hit by a huge storm:

“Hugging a beam at the top of the hatch, Mai looked out and her breath stopped: the boat had heeled so steeply that all she saw was an enormous wall of black-green water bearing down; she shut her eyes, opened them again – now the gunwale had crested the water – the ocean completely vanished – and it was as though they were soaring through the air, the sky around them dark and inky and shifting.”

The boat loses its engine and starts to drift. Days pass. They run out of water and people start dying. By the end of the story, Mai is one of the few who have survived. Someone on board spots land, but we’re left hanging, unsure of what will happen to Mai.

The story is an exercise in empathy. Its final scenes bring to mind the ending of Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize winning novel, Prophet Song. Should Mai feel fear, or should she feel hope?

This year, 16 years after writing The Boat, Nam Le released his second book. 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem is a collection of poetry that examines how concepts of identity and authenticity can straitjacket a writer, and I assume, by extension, a human being. I’m extremely interested in what he has to say about both.

Collected in The Boat, Canongate, 2008; you can watch an animated version of it here