Nam Le's THE BOAT, anchors us all together

Nam Le is a Viet Namese born, Australian Writer.  His book of short stories, THE BOAT, won the Dylan Thomas Award, the most prestigious literary prize for young writers.  Nam was an infant when his parents fled Viet Nam as boat refugees.  He studied law & served on the Supreme Court of Victoria. Nevertheless,  he made a major career choice to become a writer. Nam enrolled in the Iowa Writer's Workshop.  His motivation for change stemmed from his passion for reading & his desire to create the feelings he got from books.  The hero of the 1st story is a writer @ Iowa's Writers Workshop named Nam Le. He is visited by his father, a Viet Namese refugee now living in Australia.  Le tries to capture's his father's own tale of survival and family sacrifice during the invasion of the Viet Cong & American soldiers in what we call My Lai.  Nam painstakingly captures his father's story only to realize his father destoryed his only manuscript. Nam in anger tells him he does not understand what he did was unforgiveable.  He feels both regret and remorse with wisdom too late knowing his father did understand.  The 6 other  stories in this keenly intelligent and captivating collection take you on a journey around the globe; a coming of age male Australian high school student, a young girl living outside Hiroshima prior to the bombings, an American tourist visiting her friend in Tehran who returned to support the revolt,  an elderly American artisit hoping to meet his estranged daughter, a male adolescent caught up in the violence of the drug cartel in Columbia.  Each story is incredulous in its power to enthrall the reader.  As varied as each locale and character are, I felt the mind and heart of each.  There is a unifying theme to these stories.  Nam poetically uses water, rain or bodies of water as an analogy for life and shared human experiences.  In the final story, The Boat, Mai, a young Chinese girl crammed amongst a boatload of human bodies, recall's her father's stories - of storms & waves at sea, mild in comparison to the "dense roaring slabs of water," flailing their tiny vessel.  "Flesh pressed against her on every side, the human warmth, feeling every square inch of skin against her body and through it the shared consciousness of - what? Death? Fear? Surrender? She stayed in that human coccon." Nam captures the emotions we all share & anchors us to humanity and one another.