LE THI DIEM THUY is talking about learning to swim as an adult, 28 years after her older brother drowned in the South China Sea and 24 years after her older sister drowned in the same sea while, as a refugee, she was on her way to the US.
'My mum had lost two kids in the water, so her reaction was to keep her kids out of the water,' says le, now 32. 'I'd been raised with the idea we couldn't swim, so I wanted to see if it was true. There's always tension between things that float and sink.'
With the publication of her first novel, The Gangster We Are All Looking For (Knopf), le has clearly shown that she floats. The immigrant, who in 1978 fled on a boat from the South Vietnamese town of Phan Thiet with her father, has been hailed for her portrait of a Vietnamese family trying to build a life in America. It has been described as luminous, poetic and lyrical in the reviews.
The New York Times, which named Gangster a Notable Book of the year, wrote: 'The cumulative, almost liturgical effect of the novel is both heartbreaking and exhilarating ... le's novel is a brilliant evocation of human sorrow and desire.'
Sitting in the Mandarin Oriental's lobby cafe, le says it is in part a fascination with the workings of memory - 'both personal and national' - that impelled her to write the novel, which is heavily based on her own life. 'It's a landscape I've travelled both physically and emotionally, but there are details in the book that are very different from what occurred in my own life,' she says.
She also felt driven to tell a story with fully developed Vietnamese characters rather than the caricatures that typically inhabit tales about white Vietnam war veterans, and 'to address the loss of a child not lost in war'. The loss of a brother hangs over the novel in the same way, le says, that she was 'always aware of my brother and sister having been'.