‘The Headmaster’s Wager’ by Vincent Lam

Reviewed by Victor Enns

This might be easier on an e-reader thought Victor. He had registered on Net Galley, downloaded Adobe digital reader, and with a word from his editors gained access to a galley – what advance reading copies are coming to – for Vincent Lam’s new fiction, a first novel called The Headmaster’s Wager. He brightened briefly when he looked next to his laptop and saw three fingers of scotch over just the right amount of ice, in his favourite glass, his company and encouragement to begin the first novel he would read completely on his computer.

His editor wanted the scoop; did Vincent Lam have the chops to live up to his advance billing and endorsement by Margaret Atwood after his first book, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, a  collection of stories, won the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was adapted for television and broadcast on HBO Canada?

Victor read Lams’ debut story collection years ago with some enthusiasm because he had a hospital fetish, having had seven surgeries, and enjoyed the complete release from responsibility (except for the staying alive). He was currently recovering from a five hour bone reconstruction surgery on his foot, barely out of the wheelchair before starting in on The Headmaster’s Wager, ensconced in a leather office chair in his writing studio.

The Story

Chen Pie Sou is given a small lump of gold for good luck by his father, who then abandons the family and never returns to China.  When Chen is old enough he goes in search of his father who he finds in Cholon, Vietnam, addicted to opium, owning a large house, largely unused. Chen cares for his father and opens an English school, becoming known as Headmaster Percival Chen. His sidekick Mak, one of the teachers, plays a large role in keeping the school viable in ever-increasing difficulties. Finally as a spy for the Viet Cong, Mak persuades the new communist government that Chen had been teaching Vietnamese students English so they could get prominent jobs with Americans and work as spies for the Viet Cong, which was true but unknown to Chen, who is quick to accept this story as a way to survive.

Percival brought his wife Cecelia to Vietnam. She divorces him as soon as it becomes legal to do so. They have a son Dai Jai, who remains with his father. Chen sends him to China with the lucky lump of gold when it is clear Dai will be drafted to fight for South Vietnam, but not before Dai has an affair with a Vietnamese student of the Academy. Chen goes to great lengths to get his son out of China’s Cultural Revolution, but unfortunately, Dai returns by way of the North Vietnamese army.

Chen likes to gamble and one particularly successful night wins a beautiful Vietnamese woman Jacqueline, in the headmaster’s wager of the title, whom he comes to love.  She becomes pregnant, and later in the story we learn that Dai Jai is the real father. This does not change Chen’s love for the child Laing Jai, whom he smuggles out of Vietnam safely by air to the United States by giving him up to another woman who passes as Laing’s mother. Chen has lost most everything, but we leave him at the end of the novel huddling in a boat, and with his luck, expecting him to make his escape.

The Review

The Headmaster’s Wager faces several formidable comparisons – Turgenev’s  Father & Sons, Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, and Graham  Greene’s The Quiet American.  The Headmaster’s Wager is unlikely to share their impact or staying power, though its suspenseful pulse will keep most readers turning pages, engaging with its passages about the Tet offensive and the fall of Saigon, from the point of view of a survivor.

The headmaster’s father and the headmaster send sons away. “What else was a father to do?” There is a disquieting distance between fathers and sons, and the writer and his characters. Even if this novel has elements of family history, Lam ‘s ancestors  were Chinese from Vietnam before settling in Canada, and Lam does not let readers get close to many major characters.  While Chen is quick to illustrate the stereotype of the Chinese  in Vietnam, doing their best  to make money from all sides in rough conditions, the Vietnamese characters get by far the worst of it, particularly when it comes to brutality.

The women are portrayed as cool and calculating, making major compromises with principle and love to survive,[1] living off the avails provided by men.  Chen’s first wife Cecilia is depicted as a manipulative, demanding bitch, and his lover Jacqueline is a prostitute whom he abandons to enhance his chances at survival. Much is made of Chen’s reputation as a womanizer, not only in the novel but also in its publicity in reference to Lam’s grandfather who inspired Chen’s character. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, boys just want to have fun.

There is a reference given to Jacqueline who images her child will be a boy and responds to Chen’s question, why not a girl, by saying “It’s hard to be a woman.”  It might be easier to accept this as a fair portrayal of the historical and situational reality of the time if there was less valorizing of Chen’s attitudes toward women as sex objects.[2]

There are several melodramatic plots most people my generation know,  from childhood books,  theatre,  cartoons, TV and Guy Maddin’s commentary on his favourite movies. Sidney Whiplash, for example, binding the damsel in distress to the railway track, twirling his mustache as the train comes barreling down the track. We know Sidney is going to get his comeuppance and the damsel will be rescued, only to be tied up again next week. Or the evil banker calling in the mortgage on the house, whose occupants find the cash they need, always in the nick of time.

The Headmaster’s Wager uses both familiar storylines; Chen faces the danger of losing the Chen Pie Sue English Academy, his son and his grandson. Their futures all depend on headmaster Chen’s luck at the gaming tables in Saigon.  Fortunately, Chen is lucky when he needs to be or the plot needs to move forward.

Lam’s use of melodramatic language, adjectives and metaphors always return the novel to what it is: a historical romance set in a flashpoint of time familiar to boomers, glad they weren’t there and didn’t have to make any of the choices faced by the characters in this novel.

Chen meets his wife Cecilia, for example, while he is studying in Hong Kong – his father has sent him. Feeling out of place at first “the tumult was soon energizing.” And it is at school that he meets Cecilia – out of his league, but captivated by the “perfect arc of her neck and by the slight pout which rested naturally upon her lips.”  “She met his eyes briefly, then released him” is fit for most bodice rippers. Or conversely, “She fixed his eyes so immediately he was unable to turn away. How could he have known that these were the eyes of a cat who had found its mouse?”

Or when he first has sex with Jacqueline he tells her to lie down. “She did so, her thighs crossed like long beautiful scissors.”  Lam’s language is often clumsy and awkward. “He did not possess the words he needed. Finally their arms released one another.” Or “Ba Hai engaged in loud copulation with the foreman every afternoon.”

Lam seems most comfortable in writing about times of heightened sensation in this novel, particularly the violence of the war, defining characters by putting them under pressure.  The disemboweling of women and children while others are forced to watch is becoming a cliché (however real its origins) and many readers will have seen the immolation of Buddhist monks on television. However, these scenes and the representation of the Tet offensive are particularly compelling.

Rhetorical questions in fiction, non-fiction or poetry for that matter annoy me. I prefer questions best in dialogue when, imagine, there is someone other than the reader, the poser, or a phantasm to answer them.[3] While recovering from a severe beating Chen rationalizes his choices regarding his son. “Would he apologize? But for what? he thought indignantly. For sending Dai Jai to China? What more could he have done? Besides how could a father ask forgiveness of a son?”

The ratings

Rhetorical integrity (does the fiction convince the reader of itself):  6/10

This is a toss-up best left to the tastes of the reader. The form is a traditional (family) chronological narrative, a historical romance holding our interest because it presents a view of the Vietnam War from a Chinese perspective.  The novel fails to persuade when it relies on stereotypes, melodrama, and poor word choices.

Structure, and the suitability of the form to the content: 8/10

The book is divided in four sections, presenting a chronically logical story with a beginning, middle, and end, told in the third person.

Story/Plot/Narrative Strategies:  8/10

Expect descriptions of the novel as “a page turner” and “a ripping good yarn,” and it’s true to the extent that the novel is well structured and extremely well paced.

Surprise and refreshment (renewal or advancement of the form): 4/10

Nothing new here.

Character Development:  4/10

There is very little, and after the characters are established, none of them develop or change through the novel. The characters are more concerned about self-justification and the rationalization of their actions, never appearing to show any signs of self-awareness.

Use of Language (style, metaphors etc.):  3/10

The only place Lam seems to have a handle on this is in the description of violence. It is easy to wonder whether his background as an emergency room doctor has nurtured this ability. Otherwise, this is probably the worst failing of the novel as noted in the review.

Dialogue: 7/10

Lam faces particular challenges in presenting dialogue in English that characters could have originally spoken in one or two different Chinese dialects as well as Vietnamese.  Even so, the language seems more natural and less forced in conversation, until it is qualified in an awkward phrase.

Most rewarding critical reading approach:

This one is easy, a post-colonial reading with some Marxist fibre like flax in a good loaf, would provide strong opportunities for analysis on terms other than literary.

Total Rating:  40/70 or 57%

This may seem a little harsh, but only if compared to the expectations like those in the puff pieces planted by publicists and obliging writers at the National Post and The Globe and Mail who in their preview suggested it was “nearly a masterpiece.” To the Globe’s credit, their review this weekend was much more balanced.  It is a first novel, and it does have some significant strengths, maybe enough to sell the number of books the publisher expects.

Epilogue

There. Done. Victor checked the clock.  After two o’clock, and Sunday afternoon. Maybe just the right time for three fingers of scotch over just the right amount of ice.

Pouring, he wondered what his sister would think of his rating system, and whether she, who had marked many papers, would consider this a reversion to high school, a ridiculous exercise in reductionism. They had talked about doing this review together, but weren’t able to convince the publisher to give up a second copy for TWR. A shame really, because his sister was the most voracious and perceptive reader he knew.

Never mind what she thought about his first use of a rating system (by the time she had retired from teaching, grading had become a complex system of rubrics and matrices, and at their worst excuses for poor performance and bad writing) what he really wanted to know is what she would think of The Headmaster’s Wager.

Back at his mid-century modern, typically flimsy teak desk, he noted his dissatisfaction with reading a novel on Net Galley, especially when the bookmarks all disappeared. Happily, a printed ARC arrived before he needed to finish the review, and though he had to go through it another time with the usual dog-eared pages, sticky notes, underlines, and marginalia they were all there when he needed them. One of the perks of reviewing books like this was the ability to totally mark up a book while reading it for review, and then throwing it in the recycling bin when the actual hard cover was delivered with pristine pages, to be read another time, or more likely by his wife who preferred to make up her own mind rather than taking a reviewer’s advice.