Summary
The opening short story of The Boat, "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice," tells the story of a man named Nam who has moved from Australia to Iowa to pursue a writing career.
As the chapter opens, Nam’s father, known as Ba, has just arrived to visit Nam in Iowa. Nam hasn’t seen his father in three years and remains on shaky terms with him; Nam lacks trust in his father and sees him as someone who is trying to control him. Nam also feels far removed from his father and his old life; Nam has a girlfriend where he lives now and has been trying to put down roots and be independent.
Nam’s father arrives at a time when Nam is trying to make a writing deadline; he has to write his final thesis and is struggling to come up with a topic. Nam finds himself drawn to writing about his past, but he also struggles to find the ability to accurately word everything. Now that Nam’s dad is in his presence, Nam finds himself digging up the old feelings that he remembers from his childhood, feelings that he tried to escape by moving. Nam doesn’t quite know how to act around his father. On one hand, Nam resents him because remembers the verbal and physical abuse that he experienced from his father during his childhood; however, Nam also feels pity for his dad because he remembers hearing about his father’s traumatic experience of being part of a massacre during the Vietnam War.
As Nam and his father begin to build a bit of trust between each other, Nam decides that he wants to write his thesis about his father’s traumatic past. Nam interviews his dad and then stays up all night typing it on his typewriter, leaving the copy on his desk in the morning. When Nam wakes up, his father and the writing copy are gone. Nam goes to look for his father. He finds him by the river talking to a tramp, warming his hands over a gasoline fire in a drum. His father seems to have burned his story. The story closes with Nam reflecting on his regrets over the things he said to his father that day.
Analysis
"Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice" portrays many parallels between the author and the main character in this story. However, the author never explicitly says that this chapter is an exact representation of his past. In fact, in an interview for The New York Times, Le stated, “One of the chief ambitions of the story was to play with that idea of what we consider to be authentic, how much autobiography is implied or assumed, how we read something differently if we think it’s been drawn from the author’s life.” This short story contrasts with the other short stories in The Boat in which the characters are fictional and the situations are not ones the author has experienced himself.
Nam's conversations with his girlfriend about his father in "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice" demonstrate the difficulty many children of immigrants have processing their identities and familial relationships. Nam's girlfriend, Linda, who is implied to be a white American, criticizes Nam's relationship with his father. She is hurt that Nam will not introduce her to him, and Nam seems to be at a loss to explain why he is hesitant to do so. Throughout the rest of the story, the reader is shown how Nam has taken on his father's trauma and how conflicted Nam feels about letting his father see his life in America.
Nam's friends fail to understand Nam's complicated identity as a child of an immigrant, particularly one who faced great trauma in his country of origin. Nam's friends encourage him to write "ethnic literature" (p.9) about Vietnam since they believe it will be easy to write and highly lucrative. Nam (the character) is hesitant to sell out his father's personal story in this way. In parallel, Le (the author) ends the story with Nam's fictional father burning the story Nam wrote about his life, reclaiming the story from being sold.
Though "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice" is semi-autobiographical, Le also showcases his ability to vividly depict the lives of those different from him and the similar themes to his own experience. For example, just after Nam has argued with his girlfriend about meeting his father, Le writes, "Behind them, a mother sat with her son. 'I'm not playing,' she murmured, flipping through her magazine. 'L,' said the boy. 'I said I'm not playing'" (p.19). This small interaction shows a complicated dynamic between a parent and a child, which parallels Nam's difficult relationship with his father. The fact that the boy is seeking his mother's attention also parallels Nam's girlfriend wanting Nam to open up to her more.
Readers may find it odd that Nam's father was willing to tell his son about his life and trauma, knowing that Nam wanted to hear the story that he could write about it, and then would destroy what his son had written. Le hints that Nam (the character) finds out later why his father burned the story, writing, "If I had known then what I knew later, I wouldn't have said the things I did" (p.28). However, Le never tells the reader why the father destroys the story. It could be because there were mistakes; the father remarks earlier in the short story that Nam made mistakes in his previous stories about Vietnam. It could also be because the father felt that a reader would pity him after reading it, since that is his initial concern about Nam writing this story. This is ironic because by publishing "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice," Le actually does let readers know his father's story.
