Despite this research, Bui is quick to stress that her characters are very much fictional. ‘I didn’t write any person’s particular story, and I didn’t really want to either. Once I chose to do fiction, [the interviews] would just be for inspiration – one person would have one particular story that I liked, or I liked one person’s attitude or manner of speaking, and I’d blend things together.’
While many of Bui’s stories use a more traditional first or third person narration, others are told in a conversational oral-storytelling style, with a noticeable disconnect between the author and the narrator. Bui tells me this style of narration was inspired by Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, as much as from her interviews: ‘I liked the idea of the story as a sit-down confession, with that really intimate style, and it allowed me to write the way that someone speaks, which I really enjoy – it’s compelling, I think it’s easier to read, and it flows more.’
Taking the collection as a whole, it becomes clear that Bui is subtly experimenting with authorial voice and the role of the narrator – and by extension the reader. In ‘I Just Want To Hear You Say It’, the fate of a young woman, Linh Ngô, is cast as a direct consequence of the storytelling decisions of the omniscient narrator: ‘It is no joy to write about what happened…At some point, when we are in the thick of it, you may be tempted to believe that I have a choice, but you should not; I do not.’
‘I liked the idea of the story as a sit-down confession, with that really intimate style.’
‘I wanted to make the narrator really abusive and nasty,’ Bui tells me. ‘I really wanted the reader to pay attention to the narrator as something that exists, and then the reader is implicated in this story as well – this is what you’re watching, and this is what you’re allowing to happen.’ It’s a friction that colours the more traditionally-delivered stories as well – particularly ‘Hot Days’, which revisits Linh without the interventionist narrator. ‘When you have “Hot Days” afterward, it means you think really about that absence of the narrator. The narrator has made herself invisible, but we we know someone’s still in control.’
The idea of controlling someone else’s narrative, even a fictional character, was something that played on Bui’s mind as she wrote – while many of the Vietnamese and Vietnamese–Australian characters in the collection are grounded in Bui’s family or personal experience, there are Argentinian, Pakistani–American, Nepalese and Zanzibari narratives being explored as well. ‘I admit I was nervous to write about them,’ Bui tells me, ‘especially the Zanzibari story (‘Abu Dhabi Gently’) – after I was finished, I was really nervous about showing anyone, just in case I got something wrong. I think my process is to be as respectful as possible, because I did so much research and I talked to people from there, and I studied the history, the politics, the art – I talked to friends that grew up in the places that I would write about.
‘My approach in writing is focusing on the human stories – more than a political backdrop, it would be about: how did this one person feel? what did they eat? who did they love? And I think those things definitely transcend cultures, and I think one of the great strengths of literature is that it’s an exercise in empathy for both readers and writers. So I think it can only be a good thing if I’m trying to learn as much about other people as possible.’
Indeed, a common thread running through all Bui’s stories is a sense that her characters, many of whom have been displaced, exist in a permanently liminal space – feeling constantly on the precipice of some large change, or grappling with a almost paralysing desire for something, even if they don’t know what. ‘I thought of it as untraceable trauma,’ Bui says. ‘Once it passes down the generations, a lot of the victims of it don’t exactly understand it, or know where their pain is coming from. And maybe in simple terms, people who have suffered, and know something is wrong, but don’t know what it is.’
‘My approach in writing is focusing on the human stories – how did this one person feel? what did they eat? who did they love?’
Many stories in the collection, Bui tells me, are inspired by a particular author – from Roberto Bolaño to Jhumpa Lahiri, Clarice Lispector and Sherman Alexie. This is particularly evident in ‘The Honourable Man’, a homage to and thematic inversion of Nam Le’s ‘Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice’. Bui tells me that reading Le’s The Boat as a teenager had a profound effect on her as a writer and Vietnamese–Australian. ‘That was the first time it clicked for me that literature could be about about refugees, and big families like mine, rather than just white families – really, that was what literature had seemed it was only about for my whole childhood.’ It’s an experience that Bui hopes to pay forwards with Lucky Ticket. ‘My ideal reader would also be someone about fifteen, a kid living in Australia, maybe he or she’s a migrant themselves, or in a family of migrants – I’d want them to read this and feel like my strange Australian story is also a great Australian story.
‘I think literature draws out a lot of empathy, so I hope that reading, not necessarily my book, but any book about refugees and migration stories would help people put themselves in the shoes of refugees and asylum seekers more, understand where their pain comes from and why that might lead them down dark places, or put them through really tough situations, so that maybe we can all understand more.’
