“It’s hot! Ethnic literature’s hot ... You could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing!”
That’s what author Nam Le’s friends tell him in “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” an autobiographical short story about Le’s struggle to reconcile with his Vietnamese father. Though initially motivated by the need to write something that would actually sell, Le turned out a story that explores not only life during the Vietnam War but also parental estrangement, feelings of dislocation, and other experiences that transcend ethnicity.

At the Peter Jay Sharp Theater on Wednesday, actors Jason Ma and Robin Miles performed two stories by emerging writers Le and Uwem Akpan. As part of Symphony Space’s ongoing series entitled “Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story,” PEN American Center presented a night of coming-of-age stories from around the world. Other writers and performers from this series have included Stephen King, Jeffrey Eugenides, John Lithgow, and Jhumpa Lahiri.

Akpan, a finalist for the 2007 Caine Prize for African Writing, is a Nigerian-born Jesuit priest whose first short story debuted in the New Yorker in 2005. Say You’re One of Them, his first collection of short stories about children growing up in Rwanda, Nigeria, and Ethiopia, will be released by Little, Brown and Company in June.

Beautifully read by Miles, Akpan’s “My Parents’ Bedroom” left the audience shocked, with hands gripping armrests and whispers circling through the crowded theater. Told from the perspective of Monique, the child of a Hutu father and Tutsi mother in war-ravaged Rwanda, the story is both exquisite and excruciating. It is dominated by scenes of graphic violence—including an unthinkable act of desperation committed by Monique’s father.

While it serves as an insightful description of the Rwandan genocide, “My Parents’ Bedroom” is really an elegant account of childhood innocence put to the test by horrific circumstances. Akpan’s tone makes the story stylistically remarkable, independent of its subject matter. Monique’s voice is entirely matter-of-fact—she does not express her own emotions but merely provides straightforward, even objective, observations. In doing so, Akpan veils political and social analysis beneath a girl’s innocent commentary. Speaking of a Hutu attacker who has invaded her home, Monique recognizes the primitive nature of violence: “He is like an overgrown kid looking for his toy.”

Following “My Parents’ Bedroom,” Le’s irony-tinged story seemed a bit lighter. Winner of the Pushcart Prize and the current fiction editor of the Harvard Review, Le was born in Vietnam, raised in Australia, and came to the United States to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His debut collection of short stories, entitled The Boat, will be published by Knopf in May.

Though Le’s “Love and Honor” stood in demure contrast to Akpan’s bloody descriptions, it left the audience equally engrossed. It is Le’s father who comes of age under the Vietcong, not Le himself—however, Le also develops before the reader’s eyes, growing both as a writer and a troubled son. “Love and Honor” does more than tackle Vietnam—it contemplates the value of “ethnic lit.” After deciding to write a piece entitled “Ethnic Story” for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Le explains that he writes about Vietnam so that people will remember his family. In the story, his father replies, “They will read and clap their hands, and forget.”

And we might indeed forget. But while ethnic literature records the lives of people living in particular places and times, it’s something more than a history textbook. As Akpan and Le prove, such stories contemplate universal human concerns—the loss of innocence, familial divide, fear. While we may not remember the details of Monique’s struggle or the conversations between Le and his father, we are permanently struck by their deep humanness. Symphony Space’s audience members walked away with not only the names of two exciting, upcoming writers, but also a new understanding of the term “ethnic lit.”