Book Review | Vincent Lam's The Headmaster's Wager

A book review of Vincent Lam's The Headmaster's Wager I wrote for Schema Magazine (for the blog post, click on this link):


When I received my review copy of Vincent Lam's epic tome, The Headmaster's Wager, I immediately dropped everything important in my life to read it—it cost me the better part of an afternoon. You can say that I've been waiting my whole life for a Sino-Vietnamese epic of this kind to be written. I was extremely excited that a talented Sino-Vietnamese author has finally written this story, one who has been enjoying great success in the mainstream publishing industry (Lam won the Giller in 2006 for his debut short story collection Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures). And in the telling this story, Lam holds nothing back.

Lam takes on the challenge of narrating a historical epic of an elite overseas Chinese community who lived and prospered throughout the successive waves of colonization in Vietnam. And talk about colonial turnovers to the nth degree: for the longest time the Chinese were in charge, then the French, then the Japanese, and then, the story we're most familiar with, the Americans. Fictional treatments of the Vietnam War, if not told from the Vietnamese point of view, have mostly been told from the American side. The Headmaster's Wager takes us through all the historical developments that lead up to the Vietnam War from the perspective of Percival Chen, a Chinese headmaster of Saigon's most prestigious English language academy, and the view isn't flattering.

Percival is a detestable character. He is a gluttonous, opportunistic, alcoholic womanizer who gets whatever he wants because his hands are lodged deep in the pockets of many corrupt government officials. He's also an unapologetic racist. Though he and his father before him have been lucky enough to escape famine and poverty to live and prosper in Gold Mountain, what they have come to call Vietnam, he steadfastly refuses to 'go native' because he believes the Vietnamese are racially and culturally inferior, an ethnic pride that lands his son into serious political trouble.

In the end, Lam offers up a humanizing portrait of a Chinese patriarch who has struck gold in life only to lose everything to save his son. And just when his misfortunes could not possibly get any lower, Lam's protagonist places everything on the line, on the ultimate wager. After all, this is a story of a compulsive gambler, who after losing everything dear to him, wins the heart of a stunning métisse woman (his half Vietnamese, half French lover) and gains a replacement son. This is, indeed, a story of second chances, but even cats have only nine lives. From his first downfall, you will want to rip through the rest of the novel to find out how Lam's protagonist miraculously manages, yet again, to land back on his feet—and along the way, you'll receive doses of romance, terror, suspense, and sorrow. It's one of those thrilling novels—rare for most historical fiction—that you can't put down, that you won't stop reading, that you must finish in one sitting—I'd bet on it.