But, at the same time, he feels welcomed and at home in the English language. He both delights in it and is in awe of it: “There is a sense of capacity and openness to osmosis and outside input that I think is extraordinary. It’s so adaptable and flexible and polysemous. It’s way bigger than I could ever get a grip on, which is exciting to me.”

His spoken Vietnamese is not fluent, and he doesn’t read it or write it. But “I have the rhythm and tone of what I would call my mother tongue [the family spoke Vietnamese at home], my native language, and I can still feel that playing itself out when I express myself in English whether I’m speaking or writing.”

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He still has lots of family in Vietnam but hasn’t been there for many years. His relationship with the country is complicated by what he calls reticences on all levels

“And it’s politically complicated in a way. Going back to Vietnam you are still being confronted with some of the after effects of the reasons why my parents left back in the ’70s.”

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The Boat was published in Vietnam, but parts of it were changed without Le being consulted, and he doesn’t think it likely 36 Ways would be translated into a different language. “It would be a completely different beast, which is kind of exciting if it were to happen.”

The earliest germ of the material in 36 Ways came more than 20 years ago. The concerns with representation and identity eventually seen in The Boat’s seven stories were agitating Le well before. “I probably would never have imagined that 20-plus years on, these issues would remain so pressing and so alive. I think I had a naive hope that we were sorting through some of these ... I don’t think anyone would say that’s the case.”

He largely wrote poetry before concentrating on prose when he joined the famous fiction program at Iowa Writers Workshop. Doing so, stripped away any excuses he had not to write: “There was a positive coercion where you were kind of announcing ‘I’m going to try to be a writer’, which from my upbringing in Australia was something that I kept under cover.”

36 Ways, he says, was never meant to be a book. He was writing a shortish piece for the 25th anniversary edition of Watermark, an anthology of Vietnamese American writing. Doing so brought up many of those ideas he had been thinking about and jotting down for years.

It seems not all his publishers were enamoured with the idea of a book of poetry appearing while they had been expecting his long-anticipated novel. Le had to fight for the book, although not with his Australian publisher he’s quick to point out.

“And that has felt really in tune with what the book is doing too in as much as it’s me fighting for authority, for expressive authority, for cultural permission, for the fullness of selfhood and interiority and possibility.”

But what about that novel? Since The Boat, many readers have been licking their lips at the prospect of more fiction from Le. He started it when The Boat appeared in 2008, and is quick to point out that it’s not finished. But he’s still excited by it because if he weren’t, that would be “the death knell for where I’m going”.

And even before The Boat he had abandoned a big novel. “That wasn’t without a painful and drawn-out period of trying to salvage it, trying to streamline it or change it into something that I could stand behind. I have zero regrets about dropping that book as I don’t consider my body of work as only the things that have been published. So for me that book is really important in my personal reckoning and corpus.”

Now the “new” novel is asking him to reckon with it in a way, he says, that feels ever more tricky and difficult. “That’s where the charge is, I guess, and that’s what’s interesting me.”

So, I say, dare I ask ...?

“You daren’t,” he says immediately. “I hope that it’s on the sooner side rather than the later.”

Nam Le is a guest at Sorrento Writers Festival (sorrentowritersfestival.com.au) and Sydney Writers’ Festival (swf.org.au). 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem is published by Scribner at $26.99.

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