Strange Enough to Be True

In his 2006 Giller Prize–winning collection of linked short stories, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, Vincent Lam introduced a cameo character, Percival Chen, the tuxedo-clad headmaster of a private English academy in Saigon, sleeping off a hangover after a debauched night of gambling and whoring. In Lam’s first novel, The Headmaster’s Wager, Chen reappears as the fully fleshed-out protagonist, inspired by the author’s larger-than-life (and large-as-fiction) Chinese grandfather.

As a teenager growing up in Ottawa, Lam absorbed dramatic family stories of the expatriate Chinese community in Saigon during the Vietnam War, and dreamt of writing a book. A decade ago, still only in his twenties, he started a first draft only to realize he was not emotionally ready; after shifting to short stories—drawn on his often harrowing, real-life experiences as an emergency room physician at Toronto’s East General Hospital—he shot to sudden literary...