Lyn Nguyen recently spoke with Brian Caswell about Only the heart.

Why did you start writing?

I wrote for pleasure all my life but I also wrote to be published after teaching. I started to write books for the kids I was teaching and I did all my teaching, apart from one year at Marrickville, in Canley Vale and St Johns Park. I found it very difficult to find books about kids in a multicultural setting. They were all about inner city kids, or about bush kids because that's where the authors lived and so they were writing about what they knew. For me, it was natural to look at issues in a multicultural society because that's where I live, in Sydney's South west, and that's where I was teaching.

Only the Heart looks right inside Vietnamese culture.

Exactly, and that's why the book was never written. I wanted to write it ten years earlier, while I was teaching in Canley Vale, and that's before I'd written any book but I couldn't because of all the problems of cultural identity. I didn't have the cultural authenticity to make it work.

Why did you want to tell the story?

I wanted to tell what led to the influx of refugees from Indo-China, what led to people being willing to risk death, to leave the place where their families had lived for generations. What I wanted to do was tell Anglo-Australians about this group of people who were living among them as citizens, who they didn't understand at all, and who were subject to the 'Pauline Hansons' of the world. That started almost the moment the kids stepped off the boats. The stories of several families living in one house and, 'watch out for your dog', and all of that were rife. My reason for writing Only the Heart was to dispel some of the mythologies and personalise the story, of a people who had been dehumanised by prejudice and hatred.

It had to be authentic and be told in a way that would communicate to teenagers, to say here are human beings who have lived through a terrible ordeal because they chose to, because they had a drive for the dream. This is their dream, to explain the dream, to explain the journey, to explain the culture to a certain extent, to people who knew none of these three things, basically, was my drive because I'd taught in schools where I'd seen the way assimilation can work.

How did you get to write the book then?

I got a grant to study screen writing at film school. While I was there I met David Phu Anh Chiem. We started talking and we haven't stopped, basically because we realised instantaneously that we had a rapport because we both had the same project in mind. He is a filmmaker, he is not an author, and so he wanted to make the film of this story and I wanted to make the book. He couldn't write the story on his own and I couldn't write it on my own, but the reasons we had for doing it were complementary in fact.

Is the story based on David's personal experiences then?

About 40% of the story is actually David's story. He came out as an eight year old boy on a boat. The other 60% is gleaned from people I've met through teaching, or people from his family, or people he knows personally or stories that have been told in his circle. So every incident in the whole book is authentic, including the fire. We've thrown all these incidents together and created faces for the incidents through the Vo family and hopefully they create an authentic story of that whole refugee experience.

Were David's reasons for telling the story the same as yours?

Yes, but another driving force, which is particularly interesting, coming from a Vietnamese viewpoint, was to tell the story to this generation of Vietnamese kids whose parents never talked to them about this, who did not know their own history because they were too young, or they were not born when the whole thing took place, and whose parents were so traumatized by their experiences that they never talked about it. One really encouraging thing is we get letters from Vietnamese kids who were born here, who not only say 'I never knew', but also say, 'My parents never talked about this'. So they're learning their parents' story and that's been a real bonus.

The book does not really deal with the political issues surrounding the Vietnam War, does it?

No, one thing we tried to suggest was, these people were not running away from a political system, they were running away because the way of life they wanted was not the way of life they were being offered, so rather than accept the destruction of their dream, they were willing to risk themselves, and in fact their family and children, to achieve the dream for their children and not necessarily for themselves, which is what the dream is about.

Are there any symbols which portray this?

Yes, if you look at Grandfather and the takeover of the store with the speakers, the speakers are the most potent symbol of the destruction of the dream. You know that sort of propaganda, the new regime taking over from the old regime and making it impossible, and the threat to that whole way of life which the speakers represent. The picture on the cover of the book is actually David's family's store where they lived. Grandfather gave up and died because he'd worked all his life for the dream, for his son and his offspring, and then all of a sudden it's not there and he's too old to begin the dream again.

The style of writing in Only the Heart is unusual. What influenced you to write this way?

The audience is basically a teenage audience and they are a video generation. I've been writing for ten years, refining a narrative technique that tells a literary story, and in fact quite often a complex, multilayered literary story that begins where the reader is, which is in a video medium. This narrative technique, I call 'lamination', which is laying scene upon scene. In the process you're looking through all the scenes until you see a three dimensional overview of the story.

When you're writing stories about large subjects I've found the best way to deal with that is to personalise the aspects of the story through a number of representative characters and give each of them a voice, give each of them a point of view and tell the story in a round, and then shift from their individual points of view to the omniscient overview.

In film terms it's like having the close up, the pan shot and the wide angle shot. The third person voice is the wide angled shot, the close up is the first person voice and by switching between the two you're using a film technique.

What influence did David have on this?

David's a film director and when he edited the book, he edited it like a film.

We did an edit well before it got to the editorial stage and the edit we did was a film edit. It was cutting room floor stuff, it was right at the scene and cut, cut, cut until what you had was the essence of the scene, and you could do in two pages what we might have done in ten pages of original prose.

David works on the filmmaker's adage which is, 'you get in as early as you can and get out as early as you can from every scene'. The other one is, 'if you've said it once, you don't need to say it twice'.

Looking at Toan, as a character, he's more of an observer in the novel, where everything is happening around him. Is that because of his age?

You hit on the central problem of writing this book since there are two stories, ten years apart, which happen to the same characters. The characters of Story One are vastly different to the characters of Story Two, so what we decided to do was to intercut the stories. The teenage character is juxtaposed with the same character at eight years old. You create the empathy from the very beginning, but because of that, what we needed was a character who was basically an observer, in the teenage sphere who could remember being an observer in the childhood sphere.

Although the story is shared mainly between Linh and Toan, the voice of the primary narrator is really Toan, which is understandable because a lot of his personality is David's. Linh's voice even in the first person, is making commentary on what Toan has already observed to a large extent, or what is observed by the omniscient narrator. Toan is outside of the trauma to a great extent. His grandfather dies, it upsets him greatly. His aunt dies, which upsets him, but not as much as it upsets her two daughters. His cousin is the one caught in the flames, not him, she's the one that goes off with the gang, not him. His girlfriend is the one involved in the gang and he's involved in the plan to release her, but he is not involved with the gang directly himself. So all the time he lives in this charmed cocoon with the trauma of the trip, the trauma of the escape, the trauma of the fire, the trauma of the gang. He is a charmed character. All the way through he has this charmed life, which makes him to be the ideal observer. He's not so emotionally involved so we get the subjective/ objective view from him and the totally objective view from the narrator.