Characters across Le’s collection are perpetually in motion, fleeing oppressive regimes, violent pasts, failed relationships, or lives that no longer seem bearable. However, The Boat repeatedly challenges the idea that changing one’s surroundings can also change one’s identity. While its characters cross borders, oceans, and continents, they remain shaped by memories, loyalties, and losses that cannot simply be abandoned. The stories argue that escape is rarely an act of erasure. Instead, the past continues to inhabit the present, making every new beginning also a confrontation with what has been left behind. 

Several characters attempt to escape their cultural or familial identity through creative or professional reinvention, only to discover how persistent the past remains. In “Love and Honor…,” the narrator, a Vietnamese Australian writer in Iowa, consciously avoids his heritage in his work. His friend notes that instead of exploiting “the Vietnamese thing,” he writes about “lesbian vampires and Colombian assassins, and Hiroshima orphans” (10). This deliberate artistic choice is a form of escape, an attempt to forge an identity separate from the “ethnic lit” box he feels pressured to fill. However, the arrival of his father, a survivor of the Mỹ Lai massacre, forces a direct confrontation with this legacy. The narrator’s attempt to write his father’s story becomes an attempt to bridge the emotional chasm between them, but his father ultimately burns the manuscript, asserting that the trauma is his alone to remember or forget. The narrator cannot escape his history through art; he is reminded that it is a fundamental part of him, whether he chooses to write about it or not.

In other stories, the dream of a new location as a sanctuary is portrayed as a fantasy that cannot withstand the harsh realities of a character’s circumstances. Juan Pablo, the teenage assassin in “Cartagena,” clings to an idealized image of the Caribbean coast as a paradise of freedom and beauty. His friend Luis, who has been there, describes it as a place where “everything is nothing like here” (30). This vision of Cartagena is a mental escape from the brutal violence and moral decay of his life in Medellín. However, he remains trapped by his duties as a sicario and his sense of obligation to his mother and his friend Hernando. His reality is defined by the immediate cycle of violence, not a distant, idealized shore. Similarly, in “Tehran Calling,” Sarah travels to Iran to flee the heartbreak of a recent breakup. She hopes the radical change in scenery will provide a distraction and a new sense of purpose. Instead, the unfamiliar political landscape only magnifies her emotional isolation. Although the circumstances surrounding the two characters are very different, both discover that physical distance offers little relief from unresolved inner conflicts. Their attempts to escape become journeys that expose, rather than resolve, what continues to haunt them.

Even the most literal and desperate attempts at physical escape are shown to be incomplete, as the psychological and emotional weight of what is left behind travels with the characters. The title story, “The Boat,” depicts the harrowing physical journey of refugees fleeing Vietnam, but the voyage itself becomes saturated with memory. As the boat drifts into the “fields of the dead” (233), the whispered voices of refugees who drowned before them turn the ocean into a vast memorial where history refuses to remain buried. For Mai, the journey is inseparable from memories of the parents she has left behind, particularly her father, whose time in a Communist re-education camp continues to shape her thoughts throughout the voyage. Even as land finally appears on the horizon, the death of Truong demonstrates that arrival cannot erase what has been sacrificed to reach it. Across the collection, Le does not deny that people can survive, relocate, or begin again—even in some of the most dangerous situations. Instead, he suggests that every new beginning carries the emotional weight of what preceded it. Escape may change a person’s circumstances, but it can never completely sever the bonds of memory, identity, and loss that continue to define who they are.