Andrew Lam's Blog - Posts Tagged "identity"

By Noelle Brada-Williams

Award-winning author and New American Media editor Andrew Lam discusses his work, contemporary journalism, the complexity of cultural exchange, and what he hopes to see when his work is read in a classroom.


Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies: I first met you in person when you came to San Jose State to read from Perfume Dreams in April 2007. As we were leaving the reading, a woman asked you for a good place to eat Vietnamese food in San Jose. I was horrified that someone would essentialize this San Francisco-based writer as a native informant for her culinary desires. As I contemplated tackling her, you very calmly suggested several restaurants and even mentioned that you were working on a book on food. Is that a common experience for you?

ANDREW LAM: It is. I usually don't take offense. I do find, however, that it is annoying when assumedly smart, worldly editors would make that same mistake about me. As a writer, I am capable of writing about many subjects beyond the area of my own cultural background and have done so. I've written about other countries and their troubles- Japan, Thailand, Greece, etc. But when I am asked to write something, or when I am interviewed for something, it is only about Vietnam and the Vietnamese Diaspora.

That is the crutch of being an ethnic writer - one is seen as a cultural ambassador from that community, and then a writer. The only way to break out of that mold is to be big enough in the literary circle so that one can address issues beyond one's biographical limitations.

AALDP: Journalists are often expected to cover a certain beat and to thus be an expert on a particular area, while creative writers frequently assert the uniqueness of their voices or perspectives rather than their representation of a whole group. Alexander Chee in Asian American Literary Review last year comes to mind. Do you feel that these identifications are valid?

AL: I think that used to be more valid than it is now. Part of the reason has to do with the fact that the media world has gone through a major shake up and fewer newspapers exist and while some still practice traditional journalism, that space between reporter and commentator (or essayist) is blurring. Reporters have opinions, after all, and the idea that Fox network seems to spearhead with great success is because people want their supposed reporters to have opinions. The Comedy Channel proves that journalism can in fact be practiced with humor and lots of running jokes and gags and biting observations. So while we still need reporters in the traditional sense, I feel many now are moving sideways across the various spectra of journalism. I myself write news analyses, do straight-forward reporting, and write op-eds. I never feel that I need to restrain myself to one genre. I think as long as I am fair and balanced, and honest with my own biases, I fit in with the new media.

AALDP: This next question also feels old-fashioned now that you have me thinking about
Fox News: how do you negotiate between being a fiction writer and being a journalist?

AL: Not an easy task. I often compare journalism to fiction as architecture is to abstract painting. In the former, one needs to have all the logic and facts at hand.

One needs to build a strong frame and foundation. One needs all the supporting arguments and examples planned out. In the latter, one immerses oneself into the imaginary - but just as real - world, and one needs to step back to let characters grow into well rounded people with their own will. One needs to accept them and then describe them. One needs to feel deeply, empathize deeply. It's very different.

For me, writing nonfiction has become routine. It is still difficult to do creative nonfiction and ideas sometimes refuse to clarify themselves, but overall the process is not daunting. Doing fiction on the other hand, requires lots of time, and solitude, both of which I don't always have since I work as a journalist and editor. Fiction writing can be a foreboding task. Yet the unfinished story calls out for attention and when neglected, characters show up in dreams, in reveries, as if asking: "When are you going to come back to let the drama play out?" They nag at the soul.

AALDP: In your essay “California Cuisine of the World,” in East Eats West, you discuss how Asian food culture has been embraced by the mainstream, at least in California. You write, “private culture has—like sidewalk stalls in Chinatown selling bok choys, string beans, and bitter melons—a knack of spilling into the public sphere, becoming shared convention” (81). You use this image of the private spilling into the public sphere at least two other times in your most recent collection. Do you think of this in terms of loss or gain—as nostalgic loss of the personal and private space or as triumphant claiming of the mainstream as one’s own?

AL: There is something gained and lost in any exchange and it's inevitable. It's a kind of cosmic law of creation. Often immigrants bring their traditional practices with them - think Chinese railroad workers who introduced bamboo and acupuncture with them in the 1800s - and they are always astounded at how quickly those private practices get adopted and transformed by others as well as by their descendants. If I do feel a certain visceral sense of loss seeing pho soup being made by non-Vietnamese I am also generous enough to know how much my cosmopolitan life is so much the richer because other cultures have been integrated into my own life. I think without that sense of generosity one cannot navigate in this complex world of ours. One would have to hide and retreat behind the walls of Little Saigon and Chinatown and treat the larger world as unknown territory.

AALDP: The title for your book, East Eats West, reminds me of listening to Richard
Rodriguez speak in the 1990’s. He talked about interviewing a white supremacist about
the man’s views on Mexican immigrants while the man ate a burrito. He described the
encounter in highly sexualized terms of the supremacist eating the “other.” Do you see
the mainstream popularity of Asian cuisine as a marker of the rising cultural power of
Asians or Asian Americans, or is it just cultural appropriation?

AL: The verb “eat” is so loaded. One can swallow the other, and one can also be swallowed by the other, or be transformed by having ingested something powerful. I play with the idea that both is happening at the same time, which is the essence of my collection of personal essays: It is the story of how a refugee boy from Southeast Asia swallowed America - its myriads of food and movies and language and literature and humor - and is in turn transformed by it. Conversely the other transformation is also happening. Since my arrival in America, I have watched the American landscape be transformed increasingly by the forces of immigration from Asia.

As to your question, in the ‘80s we were terribly afraid of the rise of Japan and consequently we became enthralled with Japanese culture - even as hate crimes against Asians became endemic and that famous case of the murder of Vincent Chin (mistaken for a Japanese) united Asian Americans. I remember falling in love with sushi and Japanese anime in the ‘80s. Others I knew were learning Japanese. Nowadays, it's Korean and Chinese cultures that are becoming global phenomena.

In MBA programs, one is strongly advised to speak another language, and usually it's Mandarin. "You know your cultural heritage is a major success when someone else is selling it back to you,” a friend of mine quipped after I noted the irony that Steven Spielberg produced Kung Fu Panda, which became an all-time box-office hit in China. Kung fu and pandas are both part of China’s heritage, but it probably requires the interpretation of an outsider to make you see your own cultures in new ways.

Cultural appropriation happens both ways as well. Hong Kong used to steal Hollywood blind until they started making really original inventive films and then it was Hollywood that started copying Hong Kong. It cannot be helped. There's a lot of exciting things that can happen when things are "appropriated" because they also get reinvented in the process and newness - ideas, tastes, sounds, movements - come out of that "stealing." All writers "borrow" too from their favorite writers and then find their own voice as they grow. Again, I'd say be generous and see that nothing is really original in the first place. The idea of cultural preservation seems to me a little odd. Cultures that need to be preserved are not fluid and are pickled, as it were. The real culture is what is reinvented to fit the present time, the present palate.

AALDP: I went to high school in Orange County and graduated in 1985—ten years and a
month after the fall of Saigon. The class valedictorian, David Nguyen, was perhaps the
most confident person I have ever met. I have certainly seen Vietnamese Americans of
the 1.5 generation do amazing things in a relatively short space of time after coming to
the United States, but what amazes me about your family’s story is the fact that not only
your generation but your father managed to achieve so much in such a short time: an
MBA and an institutionally and economically powerful position. How did he manage to
do this as an older man and recent immigrant?

AL: My father, Thi Quang Lam, is something of a super-achiever. He was a three star general in the South Vietnam Army (ARVN) and studied French philosophy. Then he spent twenty-five years in the Army. In America he also wrote three books on the Vietnam War in English (then translated them back into Vietnamese for the community). He wrote his first two while working as a bank executive and raising a family of three kids. He just finished his third at 77 last year. He always mourned the fact that he came to the US in his mid 40s instead of mid 20s- because he would have gotten a PhD at the very least and not an MBA.

One of his secrets to success in America is a military trained discipline – which never left him even though he was forced to leave it, his beloved army, at the end of the Vietnam War, which unraveled in 1975. In America he studied nightly, he got up at 5 in the morning to do homework, and exercise. He went to night school while working full time. When he got his MBA, he moved toward writing his memoir and analyses of the Vietnam War, giving details from the South Vietnamese General’s perspective. That sense of duty is chased with an iron will and became key to his success. I can still see it: my father sitting straight back, ramrod, at his desk for hours on end.

Even after retirement, he went on to teach high schools for seven years, and he taught Math, French, Physics. With a third degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do, he even broke bricks in class to demonstrate he was not lying about discipline. He’s quite a self-actualized person in many ways, perhaps an exception for his generation in the US. But his generation was full of brilliant people who never got a chance to achieve their potentials because of the many wars that took place in our homeland. So many were drafted and killed. In fact, that’s one of Vietnam’s greatest tragedies the lost generations. It is no wonder Vietnamese parents in the US are so forceful about their children making it in America – they are haunted by the robbed opportunities experienced by their own generation and those of previous generations.

In Perfume Dreams, I talked about being a Viet Kieu – Vietnamese expat – in Vietnam and how people measured their lost potentials in my own transnational biographies. They touched me. They marveled at my passport and all the entry and exit stamps. I hear phrases like, “Had I escaped to California…” or “If I came to the US at your age, I would have …” all the time. Their bitterness is extra deep because they know so and so who left and achieved great success in the West. Vietnamese, if anything, are a driven, ambitious and competitive people who are cursed with bad luck for being in a place where the superpowers never left them alone to develop in peace.

AALDP: Although you wrote about your father in Perfume Dreams, I think your second
book actually made me think more about your father because of the powerful scene in
which you tell your family that you want to be a writer. That passage struck me as an
almost archetypal image of the parent-child dynamic with you mirroring your father’s
own iron will and writing ambitions even as you distanced yourself from his expectations
for you.

In East Eats West you provide a great metaphor for the economic progress of your life: “I
left the working-class world where Mission Street ended and worked myself toward
where Mission Street began, toward the city’s golden promises—and it is in one of those
glittering glassy towers by the water that I live now” (28). Readers do not need to be
familiar with San Francisco’s housing market to get a sense of what an achievement this
is. How do you think your own class position has affected how you view American
culture? How does economic prosperity affect how one deals with issues of assimilation
or identity?

AL: I came from a privileged background, growing up speaking French, and with servants, chauffeurs, lycée and country club in Vietnam. Perhaps it’s why, having that experience, I am not particularly interested in wealth and status. I have no romantic notion about wealth and status. But I also remember what it was like to go from having an upper class status to being a refugee subsisting at the end of Mission Street in Daly City with other refugee families, and surviving on food stamps and the kindness of various religious charities. In other words, I have been both rich and poor, and now, yes, I am established, with established friends and so on, and my position as writer and journalist enables me to travel the world.

Admittedly, all that makes me feel connected to the cosmopolitan world and people would often describe me as “worldly.” But I hesitate to bring class into discussion about my writing since it often makes human reality seem abstract. Looking at stories through the “class” lens often makes people jump from one ideological conclusion to another. Often enough it never gets to the real stories – the human stories regardless of your economic status– that I want to tell. Economics play a strong part of everyone’s life and yet it also restrains narrative to some ideological bend, which is not what I’m after.

Besides, cosmopolitanism isn’t part of some upper class experience anymore. The migrant who slips across borders learns new ways of speaking and of looking at the world. His children, growing up with two, even three languages in the household, navigate various cultural expectations all the time. People’s fascination seems to be transnational these days, especially among the young. Kids who want to learn Japanese because they watch anime for instance. There’s a Korean restaurant in Berkeley that’s owned and operated by Mexicans who once worked in Korea – we have become, in some way, the other.

AALDP: You have a very optimistic view of cultural hybridity in much of East Eats West. But when you mention all of the terms we now have for mixed race people, you also include terms that can be used pejoratively. Would you say that there is any negative impact from cultural hybridity? How would you characterize Vietnamese attitudes toward the Amerasian children born during and after the war? Do you have a sense of Vietnamese American attitudes toward racial and ethnic mixing?

AL: That’s quite a lot of questions woven into one. I have been accused in the past of painting a rosy picture of East-West relations, especially in the area of cultural exchanges. It is not that I am not unaware of the more sordid, exploitative side of that equation, but it is because I’m interested in what hasn’t been fully explored. Certainly as a reporter and news analyst I’ve written quite a bit on the problems of globalization – racism, exploitation, human trafficking, unfair trading practices, copyrights infringement, accelerated environmental degradation, human rights abuse and so on. But in East Eats West, I wanted to explore what is barely being touched upon –the space where East and West intersect. And I’m not interested in the parameters that the pessimists would insist upon, where the conversation should take place within certain egalitarian ideals. After all, I am westernized by experience and choice, and am Eastern by original inheritances and my marvelous Vietnamese childhood. Part of that enormous complexity came from terrible tragedies – colonization, war, exodus, life in exile. You can be bitter about it, or you can pick and choose, integrating what’s workable into your own life. It’s all about how you synthesize the differences.

Yes, there are terrible combinations of hybridity that shouldn’t even be repeated. Some food combinations are a disaster. But that said, if one frowns on the mixing, the openness to inter-exchanges, one is missing out on the energy that is fusing the major part of the 21st century.

AALDP: I first became familiar with your work through my teaching. First the two short stories anthologized in Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose (1998) and later Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora (2005). How do you feel about your writing being used in the classroom? Is that a space you envision at all when you write? What would you want students to take away from your texts?

AL: A good essay can be as much a visceral experience as it is one in which ideas are transferred. I want readers to feel what it is like to lose a country and all the cultures and societies and customs that went along with it, then have to learn a new language, a new set of behavior, and reinvent a new self, then thrive – that’s the story I want people not only to understand, but experience. But I’d be happy if students went away from reading Perfume Dreams and East Eats West understanding that identities are not fixed in stone, and that after having gone through epic losses one also gains something as well, and new ways of looking at one’s self in place of history.

Perfume Dreams is sadder because it’s closer to the refugee experience, but East Eats West is more celebratory, it’s a regard of life when East and West not only met but became intertwined, creating a hybrid space, as it were, from which new ideas emerged. It is both an internal space, within me, and a cultural and political force of the 21st century.

AALDP: Is there anything you definitely wouldn’t want teachers and students to do with
your texts?

AL: Well, I hope they don’t burn them. But seriously, I think that people often see my work as particularly ethnic and on one level that’s fine. On another, however, I put a lot of effort into playing with language, and structure –and one thing I hope they do pay attention to is the various literary styles in which the essays were written – ranging from the reportorial, to the highly personal, to the little vignettes. I am always thrilled when my work is taught in a literature class because it seems to break some personal barrier for me – to be recognized as a writer in English and not just as an ethnic writer.

AALDP: I have anxiously been awaiting a collection of your short stories. Now I understand Birds of Paradise is due out next year. Will this collect your previously published fiction or will it be pieces we have not seen before?

AL: Many have been published in recent years. But there will be unpublished work as well.

AALDP: Will it include some of my favorite stories such as “Grandma’s Tales” and “Show and Tell?”

AL: I hope so but I fear they might be "eliminated" depending on the tastes of the
editor. But never fear, there are other pieces that might thrill you as well.

By Noelle Brada-Williams

Award-winning author and New American Media editor Andrew Lam discusses his work, contemporary journalism, the complexity of cultural exchange, and what he hopes to see when his work is read in a classroom.


Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies: I first met you in person when you came to San Jose State to read from Perfume Dreams in April 2007. As we were leaving the reading, a woman asked you for a good place to eat Vietnamese food in San Jose. I was horrified that someone would essentialize this San Francisco-based writer as a native informant for her culinary desires. As I contemplated tackling her, you very calmly suggested several restaurants and even mentioned that you were working on a book on food. Is that a common experience for you?

ANDREW LAM: It is. I usually don't take offense. I do find, however, that it is annoying when assumedly smart, worldly editors would make that same mistake about me. As a writer, I am capable of writing about many subjects beyond the area of my own cultural background and have done so. I've written about other countries and their troubles- Japan, Thailand, Greece, etc. But when I am asked to write something, or when I am interviewed for something, it is only about Vietnam and the Vietnamese Diaspora.

That is the crutch of being an ethnic writer - one is seen as a cultural ambassador from that community, and then a writer. The only way to break out of that mold is to be big enough in the literary circle so that one can address issues beyond one's biographical limitations.

AALDP: Journalists are often expected to cover a certain beat and to thus be an expert on a particular area, while creative writers frequently assert the uniqueness of their voices or perspectives rather than their representation of a whole group. Alexander Chee in Asian American Literary Review last year comes to mind. Do you feel that these identifications are valid?

AL: I think that used to be more valid than it is now. Part of the reason has to do with the fact that the media world has gone through a major shake up and fewer newspapers exist and while some still practice traditional journalism, that space between reporter and commentator (or essayist) is blurring. Reporters have opinions, after all, and the idea that Fox network seems to spearhead with great success is because people want their supposed reporters to have opinions. The Comedy Channel proves that journalism can in fact be practiced with humor and lots of running jokes and gags and biting observations. So while we still need reporters in the traditional sense, I feel many now are moving sideways across the various spectra of journalism. I myself write news analyses, do straight-forward reporting, and write op-eds. I never feel that I need to restrain myself to one genre. I think as long as I am fair and balanced, and honest with my own biases, I fit in with the new media.

AALDP: This next question also feels old-fashioned now that you have me thinking about
Fox News: how do you negotiate between being a fiction writer and being a journalist?

AL: Not an easy task. I often compare journalism to fiction as architecture is to abstract painting. In the former, one needs to have all the logic and facts at hand.

One needs to build a strong frame and foundation. One needs all the supporting arguments and examples planned out. In the latter, one immerses oneself into the imaginary - but just as real - world, and one needs to step back to let characters grow into well rounded people with their own will. One needs to accept them and then describe them. One needs to feel deeply, empathize deeply. It's very different.

For me, writing nonfiction has become routine. It is still difficult to do creative nonfiction and ideas sometimes refuse to clarify themselves, but overall the process is not daunting. Doing fiction on the other hand, requires lots of time, and solitude, both of which I don't always have since I work as a journalist and editor. Fiction writing can be a foreboding task. Yet the unfinished story calls out for attention and when neglected, characters show up in dreams, in reveries, as if asking: "When are you going to come back to let the drama play out?" They nag at the soul.

AALDP: In your essay “California Cuisine of the World,” in East Eats West, you discuss how Asian food culture has been embraced by the mainstream, at least in California. You write, “private culture has—like sidewalk stalls in Chinatown selling bok choys, string beans, and bitter melons—a knack of spilling into the public sphere, becoming shared convention” (81). You use this image of the private spilling into the public sphere at least two other times in your most recent collection. Do you think of this in terms of loss or gain—as nostalgic loss of the personal and private space or as triumphant claiming of the mainstream as one’s own?

AL: There is something gained and lost in any exchange and it's inevitable. It's a kind of cosmic law of creation. Often immigrants bring their traditional practices with them - think Chinese railroad workers who introduced bamboo and acupuncture with them in the 1800s - and they are always astounded at how quickly those private practices get adopted and transformed by others as well as by their descendants. If I do feel a certain visceral sense of loss seeing pho soup being made by non-Vietnamese I am also generous enough to know how much my cosmopolitan life is so much the richer because other cultures have been integrated into my own life. I think without that sense of generosity one cannot navigate in this complex world of ours. One would have to hide and retreat behind the walls of Little Saigon and Chinatown and treat the larger world as unknown territory.

AALDP: The title for your book, East Eats West, reminds me of listening to Richard
Rodriguez speak in the 1990’s. He talked about interviewing a white supremacist about
the man’s views on Mexican immigrants while the man ate a burrito. He described the
encounter in highly sexualized terms of the supremacist eating the “other.” Do you see
the mainstream popularity of Asian cuisine as a marker of the rising cultural power of
Asians or Asian Americans, or is it just cultural appropriation?

AL: The verb “eat” is so loaded. One can swallow the other, and one can also be swallowed by the other, or be transformed by having ingested something powerful. I play with the idea that both is happening at the same time, which is the essence of my collection of personal essays: It is the story of how a refugee boy from Southeast Asia swallowed America - its myriads of food and movies and language and literature and humor - and is in turn transformed by it. Conversely the other transformation is also happening. Since my arrival in America, I have watched the American landscape be transformed increasingly by the forces of immigration from Asia.

As to your question, in the ‘80s we were terribly afraid of the rise of Japan and consequently we became enthralled with Japanese culture - even as hate crimes against Asians became endemic and that famous case of the murder of Vincent Chin (mistaken for a Japanese) united Asian Americans. I remember falling in love with sushi and Japanese anime in the ‘80s. Others I knew were learning Japanese. Nowadays, it's Korean and Chinese cultures that are becoming global phenomena.

In MBA programs, one is strongly advised to speak another language, and usually it's Mandarin. "You know your cultural heritage is a major success when someone else is selling it back to you,” a friend of mine quipped after I noted the irony that Steven Spielberg produced Kung Fu Panda, which became an all-time box-office hit in China. Kung fu and pandas are both part of China’s heritage, but it probably requires the interpretation of an outsider to make you see your own cultures in new ways.

Cultural appropriation happens both ways as well. Hong Kong used to steal Hollywood blind until they started making really original inventive films and then it was Hollywood that started copying Hong Kong. It cannot be helped. There's a lot of exciting things that can happen when things are "appropriated" because they also get reinvented in the process and newness - ideas, tastes, sounds, movements - come out of that "stealing." All writers "borrow" too from their favorite writers and then find their own voice as they grow. Again, I'd say be generous and see that nothing is really original in the first place. The idea of cultural preservation seems to me a little odd. Cultures that need to be preserved are not fluid and are pickled, as it were. The real culture is what is reinvented to fit the present time, the present palate.

AALDP: I went to high school in Orange County and graduated in 1985—ten years and a
month after the fall of Saigon. The class valedictorian, David Nguyen, was perhaps the
most confident person I have ever met. I have certainly seen Vietnamese Americans of
the 1.5 generation do amazing things in a relatively short space of time after coming to
the United States, but what amazes me about your family’s story is the fact that not only
your generation but your father managed to achieve so much in such a short time: an
MBA and an institutionally and economically powerful position. How did he manage to
do this as an older man and recent immigrant?

AL: My father, Thi Quang Lam, is something of a super-achiever. He was a three star general in the South Vietnam Army (ARVN) and studied French philosophy. Then he spent twenty-five years in the Army. In America he also wrote three books on the Vietnam War in English (then translated them back into Vietnamese for the community). He wrote his first two while working as a bank executive and raising a family of three kids. He just finished his third at 77 last year. He always mourned the fact that he came to the US in his mid 40s instead of mid 20s- because he would have gotten a PhD at the very least and not an MBA.

One of his secrets to success in America is a military trained discipline – which never left him even though he was forced to leave it, his beloved army, at the end of the Vietnam War, which unraveled in 1975. In America he studied nightly, he got up at 5 in the morning to do homework, and exercise. He went to night school while working full time. When he got his MBA, he moved toward writing his memoir and analyses of the Vietnam War, giving details from the South Vietnamese General’s perspective. That sense of duty is chased with an iron will and became key to his success. I can still see it: my father sitting straight back, ramrod, at his desk for hours on end.

Even after retirement, he went on to teach high schools for seven years, and he taught Math, French, Physics. With a third degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do, he even broke bricks in class to demonstrate he was not lying about discipline. He’s quite a self-actualized person in many ways, perhaps an exception for his generation in the US. But his generation was full of brilliant people who never got a chance to achieve their potentials because of the many wars that took place in our homeland. So many were drafted and killed. In fact, that’s one of Vietnam’s greatest tragedies the lost generations. It is no wonder Vietnamese parents in the US are so forceful about their children making it in America – they are haunted by the robbed opportunities experienced by their own generation and those of previous generations.

In Perfume Dreams, I talked about being a Viet Kieu – Vietnamese expat – in Vietnam and how people measured their lost potentials in my own transnational biographies. They touched me. They marveled at my passport and all the entry and exit stamps. I hear phrases like, “Had I escaped to California…” or “If I came to the US at your age, I would have …” all the time. Their bitterness is extra deep because they know so and so who left and achieved great success in the West. Vietnamese, if anything, are a driven, ambitious and competitive people who are cursed with bad luck for being in a place where the superpowers never left them alone to develop in peace.

AALDP: Although you wrote about your father in Perfume Dreams, I think your second
book actually made me think more about your father because of the powerful scene in
which you tell your family that you want to be a writer. That passage struck me as an
almost archetypal image of the parent-child dynamic with you mirroring your father’s
own iron will and writing ambitions even as you distanced yourself from his expectations
for you.

In East Eats West you provide a great metaphor for the economic progress of your life: “I
left the working-class world where Mission Street ended and worked myself toward
where Mission Street began, toward the city’s golden promises—and it is in one of those
glittering glassy towers by the water that I live now” (28). Readers do not need to be
familiar with San Francisco’s housing market to get a sense of what an achievement this
is. How do you think your own class position has affected how you view American
culture? How does economic prosperity affect how one deals with issues of assimilation
or identity?

AL: I came from a privileged background, growing up speaking French, and with servants, chauffeurs, lycée and country club in Vietnam. Perhaps it’s why, having that experience, I am not particularly interested in wealth and status. I have no romantic notion about wealth and status. But I also remember what it was like to go from having an upper class status to being a refugee subsisting at the end of Mission Street in Daly City with other refugee families, and surviving on food stamps and the kindness of various religious charities. In other words, I have been both rich and poor, and now, yes, I am established, with established friends and so on, and my position as writer and journalist enables me to travel the world.

Admittedly, all that makes me feel connected to the cosmopolitan world and people would often describe me as “worldly.” But I hesitate to bring class into discussion about my writing since it often makes human reality seem abstract. Looking at stories through the “class” lens often makes people jump from one ideological conclusion to another. Often enough it never gets to the real stories – the human stories regardless of your economic status– that I want to tell. Economics play a strong part of everyone’s life and yet it also restrains narrative to some ideological bend, which is not what I’m after.

Besides, cosmopolitanism isn’t part of some upper class experience anymore. The migrant who slips across borders learns new ways of speaking and of looking at the world. His children, growing up with two, even three languages in the household, navigate various cultural expectations all the time. People’s fascination seems to be transnational these days, especially among the young. Kids who want to learn Japanese because they watch anime for instance. There’s a Korean restaurant in Berkeley that’s owned and operated by Mexicans who once worked in Korea – we have become, in some way, the other.

AALDP: You have a very optimistic view of cultural hybridity in much of East Eats West. But when you mention all of the terms we now have for mixed race people, you also include terms that can be used pejoratively. Would you say that there is any negative impact from cultural hybridity? How would you characterize Vietnamese attitudes toward the Amerasian children born during and after the war? Do you have a sense of Vietnamese American attitudes toward racial and ethnic mixing?

AL: That’s quite a lot of questions woven into one. I have been accused in the past of painting a rosy picture of East-West relations, especially in the area of cultural exchanges. It is not that I am not unaware of the more sordid, exploitative side of that equation, but it is because I’m interested in what hasn’t been fully explored. Certainly as a reporter and news analyst I’ve written quite a bit on the problems of globalization – racism, exploitation, human trafficking, unfair trading practices, copyrights infringement, accelerated environmental degradation, human rights abuse and so on. But in East Eats West, I wanted to explore what is barely being touched upon –the space where East and West intersect. And I’m not interested in the parameters that the pessimists would insist upon, where the conversation should take place within certain egalitarian ideals. After all, I am westernized by experience and choice, and am Eastern by original inheritances and my marvelous Vietnamese childhood. Part of that enormous complexity came from terrible tragedies – colonization, war, exodus, life in exile. You can be bitter about it, or you can pick and choose, integrating what’s workable into your own life. It’s all about how you synthesize the differences.

Yes, there are terrible combinations of hybridity that shouldn’t even be repeated. Some food combinations are a disaster. But that said, if one frowns on the mixing, the openness to inter-exchanges, one is missing out on the energy that is fusing the major part of the 21st century.

AALDP: I first became familiar with your work through my teaching. First the two short stories anthologized in Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose (1998) and later Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora (2005). How do you feel about your writing being used in the classroom? Is that a space you envision at all when you write? What would you want students to take away from your texts?

AL: A good essay can be as much a visceral experience as it is one in which ideas are transferred. I want readers to feel what it is like to lose a country and all the cultures and societies and customs that went along with it, then have to learn a new language, a new set of behavior, and reinvent a new self, then thrive – that’s the story I want people not only to understand, but experience. But I’d be happy if students went away from reading Perfume Dreams and East Eats West understanding that identities are not fixed in stone, and that after having gone through epic losses one also gains something as well, and new ways of looking at one’s self in place of history.

Perfume Dreams is sadder because it’s closer to the refugee experience, but East Eats West is more celebratory, it’s a regard of life when East and West not only met but became intertwined, creating a hybrid space, as it were, from which new ideas emerged. It is both an internal space, within me, and a cultural and political force of the 21st century.

AALDP: Is there anything you definitely wouldn’t want teachers and students to do with
your texts?

AL: Well, I hope they don’t burn them. But seriously, I think that people often see my work as particularly ethnic and on one level that’s fine. On another, however, I put a lot of effort into playing with language, and structure –and one thing I hope they do pay attention to is the various literary styles in which the essays were written – ranging from the reportorial, to the highly personal, to the little vignettes. I am always thrilled when my work is taught in a literature class because it seems to break some personal barrier for me – to be recognized as a writer in English and not just as an ethnic writer.

AALDP: I have anxiously been awaiting a collection of your short stories. Now I understand Birds of Paradise is due out next year. Will this collect your previously published fiction or will it be pieces we have not seen before?

AL: Many have been published in recent years. But there will be unpublished work as well.

AALDP: Will it include some of my favorite stories such as “Grandma’s Tales” and “Show and Tell?”

AL: I hope so but I fear they might be "eliminated" depending on the tastes of the
editor. But never fear, there are other pieces that might thrill you as well.

By Noelle Brada-Williams

Award-winning author and New American Media editor Andrew Lam discusses his work, contemporary journalism, the complexity of cultural exchange, and what he hopes to see when his work is read in a classroom.


Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies: I first met you in person when you came to San Jose State to read from Perfume Dreams in April 2007. As we were leaving the reading, a woman asked you for a good place to eat Vietnamese food in San Jose. I was horrified that someone would essentialize this San Francisco-based writer as a native informant for her culinary desires. As I contemplated tackling her, you very calmly suggested several restaurants and even mentioned that you were working on a book on food. Is that a common experience for you?

ANDREW LAM: It is. I usually don't take offense. I do find, however, that it is annoying when assumedly smart, worldly editors would make that same mistake about me. As a writer, I am capable of writing about many subjects beyond the area of my own cultural background and have done so. I've written about other countries and their troubles- Japan, Thailand, Greece, etc. But when I am asked to write something, or when I am interviewed for something, it is only about Vietnam and the Vietnamese Diaspora.

That is the crutch of being an ethnic writer - one is seen as a cultural ambassador from that community, and then a writer. The only way to break out of that mold is to be big enough in the literary circle so that one can address issues beyond one's biographical limitations.

AALDP: Journalists are often expected to cover a certain beat and to thus be an expert on a particular area, while creative writers frequently assert the uniqueness of their voices or perspectives rather than their representation of a whole group. Alexander Chee in Asian American Literary Review last year comes to mind. Do you feel that these identifications are valid?

AL: I think that used to be more valid than it is now. Part of the reason has to do with the fact that the media world has gone through a major shake up and fewer newspapers exist and while some still practice traditional journalism, that space between reporter and commentator (or essayist) is blurring. Reporters have opinions, after all, and the idea that Fox network seems to spearhead with great success is because people want their supposed reporters to have opinions. The Comedy Channel proves that journalism can in fact be practiced with humor and lots of running jokes and gags and biting observations. So while we still need reporters in the traditional sense, I feel many now are moving sideways across the various spectra of journalism. I myself write news analyses, do straight-forward reporting, and write op-eds. I never feel that I need to restrain myself to one genre. I think as long as I am fair and balanced, and honest with my own biases, I fit in with the new media.

AALDP: This next question also feels old-fashioned now that you have me thinking about
Fox News: how do you negotiate between being a fiction writer and being a journalist?

AL: Not an easy task. I often compare journalism to fiction as architecture is to abstract painting. In the former, one needs to have all the logic and facts at hand.

One needs to build a strong frame and foundation. One needs all the supporting arguments and examples planned out. In the latter, one immerses oneself into the imaginary - but just as real - world, and one needs to step back to let characters grow into well rounded people with their own will. One needs to accept them and then describe them. One needs to feel deeply, empathize deeply. It's very different.

For me, writing nonfiction has become routine. It is still difficult to do creative nonfiction and ideas sometimes refuse to clarify themselves, but overall the process is not daunting. Doing fiction on the other hand, requires lots of time, and solitude, both of which I don't always have since I work as a journalist and editor. Fiction writing can be a foreboding task. Yet the unfinished story calls out for attention and when neglected, characters show up in dreams, in reveries, as if asking: "When are you going to come back to let the drama play out?" They nag at the soul.

AALDP: In your essay “California Cuisine of the World,” in East Eats West, you discuss how Asian food culture has been embraced by the mainstream, at least in California. You write, “private culture has—like sidewalk stalls in Chinatown selling bok choys, string beans, and bitter melons—a knack of spilling into the public sphere, becoming shared convention” (81). You use this image of the private spilling into the public sphere at least two other times in your most recent collection. Do you think of this in terms of loss or gain—as nostalgic loss of the personal and private space or as triumphant claiming of the mainstream as one’s own?

AL: There is something gained and lost in any exchange and it's inevitable. It's a kind of cosmic law of creation. Often immigrants bring their traditional practices with them - think Chinese railroad workers who introduced bamboo and acupuncture with them in the 1800s - and they are always astounded at how quickly those private practices get adopted and transformed by others as well as by their descendants. If I do feel a certain visceral sense of loss seeing pho soup being made by non-Vietnamese I am also generous enough to know how much my cosmopolitan life is so much the richer because other cultures have been integrated into my own life. I think without that sense of generosity one cannot navigate in this complex world of ours. One would have to hide and retreat behind the walls of Little Saigon and Chinatown and treat the larger world as unknown territory.

AALDP: The title for your book, East Eats West, reminds me of listening to Richard
Rodriguez speak in the 1990’s. He talked about interviewing a white supremacist about
the man’s views on Mexican immigrants while the man ate a burrito. He described the
encounter in highly sexualized terms of the supremacist eating the “other.” Do you see
the mainstream popularity of Asian cuisine as a marker of the rising cultural power of
Asians or Asian Americans, or is it just cultural appropriation?

AL: The verb “eat” is so loaded. One can swallow the other, and one can also be swallowed by the other, or be transformed by having ingested something powerful. I play with the idea that both is happening at the same time, which is the essence of my collection of personal essays: It is the story of how a refugee boy from Southeast Asia swallowed America - its myriads of food and movies and language and literature and humor - and is in turn transformed by it. Conversely the other transformation is also happening. Since my arrival in America, I have watched the American landscape be transformed increasingly by the forces of immigration from Asia.

As to your question, in the ‘80s we were terribly afraid of the rise of Japan and consequently we became enthralled with Japanese culture - even as hate crimes against Asians became endemic and that famous case of the murder of Vincent Chin (mistaken for a Japanese) united Asian Americans. I remember falling in love with sushi and Japanese anime in the ‘80s. Others I knew were learning Japanese. Nowadays, it's Korean and Chinese cultures that are becoming global phenomena.

In MBA programs, one is strongly advised to speak another language, and usually it's Mandarin. "You know your cultural heritage is a major success when someone else is selling it back to you,” a friend of mine quipped after I noted the irony that Steven Spielberg produced Kung Fu Panda, which became an all-time box-office hit in China. Kung fu and pandas are both part of China’s heritage, but it probably requires the interpretation of an outsider to make you see your own cultures in new ways.

Cultural appropriation happens both ways as well. Hong Kong used to steal Hollywood blind until they started making really original inventive films and then it was Hollywood that started copying Hong Kong. It cannot be helped. There's a lot of exciting things that can happen when things are "appropriated" because they also get reinvented in the process and newness - ideas, tastes, sounds, movements - come out of that "stealing." All writers "borrow" too from their favorite writers and then find their own voice as they grow. Again, I'd say be generous and see that nothing is really original in the first place. The idea of cultural preservation seems to me a little odd. Cultures that need to be preserved are not fluid and are pickled, as it were. The real culture is what is reinvented to fit the present time, the present palate.

AALDP: I went to high school in Orange County and graduated in 1985—ten years and a
month after the fall of Saigon. The class valedictorian, David Nguyen, was perhaps the
most confident person I have ever met. I have certainly seen Vietnamese Americans of
the 1.5 generation do amazing things in a relatively short space of time after coming to
the United States, but what amazes me about your family’s story is the fact that not only
your generation but your father managed to achieve so much in such a short time: an
MBA and an institutionally and economically powerful position. How did he manage to
do this as an older man and recent immigrant?

AL: My father, Thi Quang Lam, is something of a super-achiever. He was a three star general in the South Vietnam Army (ARVN) and studied French philosophy. Then he spent twenty-five years in the Army. In America he also wrote three books on the Vietnam War in English (then translated them back into Vietnamese for the community). He wrote his first two while working as a bank executive and raising a family of three kids. He just finished his third at 77 last year. He always mourned the fact that he came to the US in his mid 40s instead of mid 20s- because he would have gotten a PhD at the very least and not an MBA.

One of his secrets to success in America is a military trained discipline – which never left him even though he was forced to leave it, his beloved army, at the end of the Vietnam War, which unraveled in 1975. In America he studied nightly, he got up at 5 in the morning to do homework, and exercise. He went to night school while working full time. When he got his MBA, he moved toward writing his memoir and analyses of the Vietnam War, giving details from the South Vietnamese General’s perspective. That sense of duty is chased with an iron will and became key to his success. I can still see it: my father sitting straight back, ramrod, at his desk for hours on end.

Even after retirement, he went on to teach high schools for seven years, and he taught Math, French, Physics. With a third degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do, he even broke bricks in class to demonstrate he was not lying about discipline. He’s quite a self-actualized person in many ways, perhaps an exception for his generation in the US. But his generation was full of brilliant people who never got a chance to achieve their potentials because of the many wars that took place in our homeland. So many were drafted and killed. In fact, that’s one of Vietnam’s greatest tragedies the lost generations. It is no wonder Vietnamese parents in the US are so forceful about their children making it in America – they are haunted by the robbed opportunities experienced by their own generation and those of previous generations.

In Perfume Dreams, I talked about being a Viet Kieu – Vietnamese expat – in Vietnam and how people measured their lost potentials in my own transnational biographies. They touched me. They marveled at my passport and all the entry and exit stamps. I hear phrases like, “Had I escaped to California…” or “If I came to the US at your age, I would have …” all the time. Their bitterness is extra deep because they know so and so who left and achieved great success in the West. Vietnamese, if anything, are a driven, ambitious and competitive people who are cursed with bad luck for being in a place where the superpowers never left them alone to develop in peace.

AALDP: Although you wrote about your father in Perfume Dreams, I think your second
book actually made me think more about your father because of the powerful scene in
which you tell your family that you want to be a writer. That passage struck me as an
almost archetypal image of the parent-child dynamic with you mirroring your father’s
own iron will and writing ambitions even as you distanced yourself from his expectations
for you.

In East Eats West you provide a great metaphor for the economic progress of your life: “I
left the working-class world where Mission Street ended and worked myself toward
where Mission Street began, toward the city’s golden promises—and it is in one of those
glittering glassy towers by the water that I live now” (28). Readers do not need to be
familiar with San Francisco’s housing market to get a sense of what an achievement this
is. How do you think your own class position has affected how you view American
culture? How does economic prosperity affect how one deals with issues of assimilation
or identity?

AL: I came from a privileged background, growing up speaking French, and with servants, chauffeurs, lycée and country club in Vietnam. Perhaps it’s why, having that experience, I am not particularly interested in wealth and status. I have no romantic notion about wealth and status. But I also remember what it was like to go from having an upper class status to being a refugee subsisting at the end of Mission Street in Daly City with other refugee families, and surviving on food stamps and the kindness of various religious charities. In other words, I have been both rich and poor, and now, yes, I am established, with established friends and so on, and my position as writer and journalist enables me to travel the world.

Admittedly, all that makes me feel connected to the cosmopolitan world and people would often describe me as “worldly.” But I hesitate to bring class into discussion about my writing since it often makes human reality seem abstract. Looking at stories through the “class” lens often makes people jump from one ideological conclusion to another. Often enough it never gets to the real stories – the human stories regardless of your economic status– that I want to tell. Economics play a strong part of everyone’s life and yet it also restrains narrative to some ideological bend, which is not what I’m after.

Besides, cosmopolitanism isn’t part of some upper class experience anymore. The migrant who slips across borders learns new ways of speaking and of looking at the world. His children, growing up with two, even three languages in the household, navigate various cultural expectations all the time. People’s fascination seems to be transnational these days, especially among the young. Kids who want to learn Japanese because they watch anime for instance. There’s a Korean restaurant in Berkeley that’s owned and operated by Mexicans who once worked in Korea – we have become, in some way, the other.

AALDP: You have a very optimistic view of cultural hybridity in much of East Eats West. But when you mention all of the terms we now have for mixed race people, you also include terms that can be used pejoratively. Would you say that there is any negative impact from cultural hybridity? How would you characterize Vietnamese attitudes toward the Amerasian children born during and after the war? Do you have a sense of Vietnamese American attitudes toward racial and ethnic mixing?

AL: That’s quite a lot of questions woven into one. I have been accused in the past of painting a rosy picture of East-West relations, especially in the area of cultural exchanges. It is not that I am not unaware of the more sordid, exploitative side of that equation, but it is because I’m interested in what hasn’t been fully explored. Certainly as a reporter and news analyst I’ve written quite a bit on the problems of globalization – racism, exploitation, human trafficking, unfair trading practices, copyrights infringement, accelerated environmental degradation, human rights abuse and so on. But in East Eats West, I wanted to explore what is barely being touched upon –the space where East and West intersect. And I’m not interested in the parameters that the pessimists would insist upon, where the conversation should take place within certain egalitarian ideals. After all, I am westernized by experience and choice, and am Eastern by original inheritances and my marvelous Vietnamese childhood. Part of that enormous complexity came from terrible tragedies – colonization, war, exodus, life in exile. You can be bitter about it, or you can pick and choose, integrating what’s workable into your own life. It’s all about how you synthesize the differences.

Yes, there are terrible combinations of hybridity that shouldn’t even be repeated. Some food combinations are a disaster. But that said, if one frowns on the mixing, the openness to inter-exchanges, one is missing out on the energy that is fusing the major part of the 21st century.

AALDP: I first became familiar with your work through my teaching. First the two short stories anthologized in Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose (1998) and later Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora (2005). How do you feel about your writing being used in the classroom? Is that a space you envision at all when you write? What would you want students to take away from your texts?

AL: A good essay can be as much a visceral experience as it is one in which ideas are transferred. I want readers to feel what it is like to lose a country and all the cultures and societies and customs that went along with it, then have to learn a new language, a new set of behavior, and reinvent a new self, then thrive – that’s the story I want people not only to understand, but experience. But I’d be happy if students went away from reading Perfume Dreams and East Eats West understanding that identities are not fixed in stone, and that after having gone through epic losses one also gains something as well, and new ways of looking at one’s self in place of history.

Perfume Dreams is sadder because it’s closer to the refugee experience, but East Eats West is more celebratory, it’s a regard of life when East and West not only met but became intertwined, creating a hybrid space, as it were, from which new ideas emerged. It is both an internal space, within me, and a cultural and political force of the 21st century.

AALDP: Is there anything you definitely wouldn’t want teachers and students to do with
your texts?

AL: Well, I hope they don’t burn them. But seriously, I think that people often see my work as particularly ethnic and on one level that’s fine. On another, however, I put a lot of effort into playing with language, and structure –and one thing I hope they do pay attention to is the various literary styles in which the essays were written – ranging from the reportorial, to the highly personal, to the little vignettes. I am always thrilled when my work is taught in a literature class because it seems to break some personal barrier for me – to be recognized as a writer in English and not just as an ethnic writer.

AALDP: I have anxiously been awaiting a collection of your short stories. Now I understand Birds of Paradise is due out next year. Will this collect your previously published fiction or will it be pieces we have not seen before?

AL: Many have been published in recent years. But there will be unpublished work as well.

AALDP: Will it include some of my favorite stories such as “Grandma’s Tales” and “Show and Tell?”

AL: I hope so but I fear they might be "eliminated" depending on the tastes of the
editor. But never fear, there are other pieces that might thrill you as well.

By Noelle Brada-Williams

Award-winning author and New American Media editor Andrew Lam discusses his work, contemporary journalism, the complexity of cultural exchange, and what he hopes to see when his work is read in a classroom.


Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies: I first met you in person when you came to San Jose State to read from Perfume Dreams in April 2007. As we were leaving the reading, a woman asked you for a good place to eat Vietnamese food in San Jose. I was horrified that someone would essentialize this San Francisco-based writer as a native informant for her culinary desires. As I contemplated tackling her, you very calmly suggested several restaurants and even mentioned that you were working on a book on food. Is that a common experience for you?

ANDREW LAM: It is. I usually don't take offense. I do find, however, that it is annoying when assumedly smart, worldly editors would make that same mistake about me. As a writer, I am capable of writing about many subjects beyond the area of my own cultural background and have done so. I've written about other countries and their troubles- Japan, Thailand, Greece, etc. But when I am asked to write something, or when I am interviewed for something, it is only about Vietnam and the Vietnamese Diaspora.

That is the crutch of being an ethnic writer - one is seen as a cultural ambassador from that community, and then a writer. The only way to break out of that mold is to be big enough in the literary circle so that one can address issues beyond one's biographical limitations.

AALDP: Journalists are often expected to cover a certain beat and to thus be an expert on a particular area, while creative writers frequently assert the uniqueness of their voices or perspectives rather than their representation of a whole group. Alexander Chee in Asian American Literary Review last year comes to mind. Do you feel that these identifications are valid?

AL: I think that used to be more valid than it is now. Part of the reason has to do with the fact that the media world has gone through a major shake up and fewer newspapers exist and while some still practice traditional journalism, that space between reporter and commentator (or essayist) is blurring. Reporters have opinions, after all, and the idea that Fox network seems to spearhead with great success is because people want their supposed reporters to have opinions. The Comedy Channel proves that journalism can in fact be practiced with humor and lots of running jokes and gags and biting observations. So while we still need reporters in the traditional sense, I feel many now are moving sideways across the various spectra of journalism. I myself write news analyses, do straight-forward reporting, and write op-eds. I never feel that I need to restrain myself to one genre. I think as long as I am fair and balanced, and honest with my own biases, I fit in with the new media.

AALDP: This next question also feels old-fashioned now that you have me thinking about
Fox News: how do you negotiate between being a fiction writer and being a journalist?

AL: Not an easy task. I often compare journalism to fiction as architecture is to abstract painting. In the former, one needs to have all the logic and facts at hand.

One needs to build a strong frame and foundation. One needs all the supporting arguments and examples planned out. In the latter, one immerses oneself into the imaginary - but just as real - world, and one needs to step back to let characters grow into well rounded people with their own will. One needs to accept them and then describe them. One needs to feel deeply, empathize deeply. It's very different.

For me, writing nonfiction has become routine. It is still difficult to do creative nonfiction and ideas sometimes refuse to clarify themselves, but overall the process is not daunting. Doing fiction on the other hand, requires lots of time, and solitude, both of which I don't always have since I work as a journalist and editor. Fiction writing can be a foreboding task. Yet the unfinished story calls out for attention and when neglected, characters show up in dreams, in reveries, as if asking: "When are you going to come back to let the drama play out?" They nag at the soul.

AALDP: In your essay “California Cuisine of the World,” in East Eats West, you discuss how Asian food culture has been embraced by the mainstream, at least in California. You write, “private culture has—like sidewalk stalls in Chinatown selling bok choys, string beans, and bitter melons—a knack of spilling into the public sphere, becoming shared convention” (81). You use this image of the private spilling into the public sphere at least two other times in your most recent collection. Do you think of this in terms of loss or gain—as nostalgic loss of the personal and private space or as triumphant claiming of the mainstream as one’s own?

AL: There is something gained and lost in any exchange and it's inevitable. It's a kind of cosmic law of creation. Often immigrants bring their traditional practices with them - think Chinese railroad workers who introduced bamboo and acupuncture with them in the 1800s - and they are always astounded at how quickly those private practices get adopted and transformed by others as well as by their descendants. If I do feel a certain visceral sense of loss seeing pho soup being made by non-Vietnamese I am also generous enough to know how much my cosmopolitan life is so much the richer because other cultures have been integrated into my own life. I think without that sense of generosity one cannot navigate in this complex world of ours. One would have to hide and retreat behind the walls of Little Saigon and Chinatown and treat the larger world as unknown territory.

AALDP: The title for your book, East Eats West, reminds me of listening to Richard
Rodriguez speak in the 1990’s. He talked about interviewing a white supremacist about
the man’s views on Mexican immigrants while the man ate a burrito. He described the
encounter in highly sexualized terms of the supremacist eating the “other.” Do you see
the mainstream popularity of Asian cuisine as a marker of the rising cultural power of
Asians or Asian Americans, or is it just cultural appropriation?

AL: The verb “eat” is so loaded. One can swallow the other, and one can also be swallowed by the other, or be transformed by having ingested something powerful. I play with the idea that both is happening at the same time, which is the essence of my collection of personal essays: It is the story of how a refugee boy from Southeast Asia swallowed America - its myriads of food and movies and language and literature and humor - and is in turn transformed by it. Conversely the other transformation is also happening. Since my arrival in America, I have watched the American landscape be transformed increasingly by the forces of immigration from Asia.

As to your question, in the ‘80s we were terribly afraid of the rise of Japan and consequently we became enthralled with Japanese culture - even as hate crimes against Asians became endemic and that famous case of the murder of Vincent Chin (mistaken for a Japanese) united Asian Americans. I remember falling in love with sushi and Japanese anime in the ‘80s. Others I knew were learning Japanese. Nowadays, it's Korean and Chinese cultures that are becoming global phenomena.

In MBA programs, one is strongly advised to speak another language, and usually it's Mandarin. "You know your cultural heritage is a major success when someone else is selling it back to you,” a friend of mine quipped after I noted the irony that Steven Spielberg produced Kung Fu Panda, which became an all-time box-office hit in China. Kung fu and pandas are both part of China’s heritage, but it probably requires the interpretation of an outsider to make you see your own cultures in new ways.

Cultural appropriation happens both ways as well. Hong Kong used to steal Hollywood blind until they started making really original inventive films and then it was Hollywood that started copying Hong Kong. It cannot be helped. There's a lot of exciting things that can happen when things are "appropriated" because they also get reinvented in the process and newness - ideas, tastes, sounds, movements - come out of that "stealing." All writers "borrow" too from their favorite writers and then find their own voice as they grow. Again, I'd say be generous and see that nothing is really original in the first place. The idea of cultural preservation seems to me a little odd. Cultures that need to be preserved are not fluid and are pickled, as it were. The real culture is what is reinvented to fit the present time, the present palate.

AALDP: I went to high school in Orange County and graduated in 1985—ten years and a
month after the fall of Saigon. The class valedictorian, David Nguyen, was perhaps the
most confident person I have ever met. I have certainly seen Vietnamese Americans of
the 1.5 generation do amazing things in a relatively short space of time after coming to
the United States, but what amazes me about your family’s story is the fact that not only
your generation but your father managed to achieve so much in such a short time: an
MBA and an institutionally and economically powerful position. How did he manage to
do this as an older man and recent immigrant?

AL: My father, Thi Quang Lam, is something of a super-achiever. He was a three star general in the South Vietnam Army (ARVN) and studied French philosophy. Then he spent twenty-five years in the Army. In America he also wrote three books on the Vietnam War in English (then translated them back into Vietnamese for the community). He wrote his first two while working as a bank executive and raising a family of three kids. He just finished his third at 77 last year. He always mourned the fact that he came to the US in his mid 40s instead of mid 20s- because he would have gotten a PhD at the very least and not an MBA.

One of his secrets to success in America is a military trained discipline – which never left him even though he was forced to leave it, his beloved army, at the end of the Vietnam War, which unraveled in 1975. In America he studied nightly, he got up at 5 in the morning to do homework, and exercise. He went to night school while working full time. When he got his MBA, he moved toward writing his memoir and analyses of the Vietnam War, giving details from the South Vietnamese General’s perspective. That sense of duty is chased with an iron will and became key to his success. I can still see it: my father sitting straight back, ramrod, at his desk for hours on end.

Even after retirement, he went on to teach high schools for seven years, and he taught Math, French, Physics. With a third degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do, he even broke bricks in class to demonstrate he was not lying about discipline. He’s quite a self-actualized person in many ways, perhaps an exception for his generation in the US. But his generation was full of brilliant people who never got a chance to achieve their potentials because of the many wars that took place in our homeland. So many were drafted and killed. In fact, that’s one of Vietnam’s greatest tragedies the lost generations. It is no wonder Vietnamese parents in the US are so forceful about their children making it in America – they are haunted by the robbed opportunities experienced by their own generation and those of previous generations.

In Perfume Dreams, I talked about being a Viet Kieu – Vietnamese expat – in Vietnam and how people measured their lost potentials in my own transnational biographies. They touched me. They marveled at my passport and all the entry and exit stamps. I hear phrases like, “Had I escaped to California…” or “If I came to the US at your age, I would have …” all the time. Their bitterness is extra deep because they know so and so who left and achieved great success in the West. Vietnamese, if anything, are a driven, ambitious and competitive people who are cursed with bad luck for being in a place where the superpowers never left them alone to develop in peace.

AALDP: Although you wrote about your father in Perfume Dreams, I think your second
book actually made me think more about your father because of the powerful scene in
which you tell your family that you want to be a writer. That passage struck me as an
almost archetypal image of the parent-child dynamic with you mirroring your father’s
own iron will and writing ambitions even as you distanced yourself from his expectations
for you.

In East Eats West you provide a great metaphor for the economic progress of your life: “I
left the working-class world where Mission Street ended and worked myself toward
where Mission Street began, toward the city’s golden promises—and it is in one of those
glittering glassy towers by the water that I live now” (28). Readers do not need to be
familiar with San Francisco’s housing market to get a sense of what an achievement this
is. How do you think your own class position has affected how you view American
culture? How does economic prosperity affect how one deals with issues of assimilation
or identity?

AL: I came from a privileged background, growing up speaking French, and with servants, chauffeurs, lycée and country club in Vietnam. Perhaps it’s why, having that experience, I am not particularly interested in wealth and status. I have no romantic notion about wealth and status. But I also remember what it was like to go from having an upper class status to being a refugee subsisting at the end of Mission Street in Daly City with other refugee families, and surviving on food stamps and the kindness of various religious charities. In other words, I have been both rich and poor, and now, yes, I am established, with established friends and so on, and my position as writer and journalist enables me to travel the world.

Admittedly, all that makes me feel connected to the cosmopolitan world and people would often describe me as “worldly.” But I hesitate to bring class into discussion about my writing since it often makes human reality seem abstract. Looking at stories through the “class” lens often makes people jump from one ideological conclusion to another. Often enough it never gets to the real stories – the human stories regardless of your economic status– that I want to tell. Economics play a strong part of everyone’s life and yet it also restrains narrative to some ideological bend, which is not what I’m after.

Besides, cosmopolitanism isn’t part of some upper class experience anymore. The migrant who slips across borders learns new ways of speaking and of looking at the world. His children, growing up with two, even three languages in the household, navigate various cultural expectations all the time. People’s fascination seems to be transnational these days, especially among the young. Kids who want to learn Japanese because they watch anime for instance. There’s a Korean restaurant in Berkeley that’s owned and operated by Mexicans who once worked in Korea – we have become, in some way, the other.

AALDP: You have a very optimistic view of cultural hybridity in much of East Eats West. But when you mention all of the terms we now have for mixed race people, you also include terms that can be used pejoratively. Would you say that there is any negative impact from cultural hybridity? How would you characterize Vietnamese attitudes toward the Amerasian children born during and after the war? Do you have a sense of Vietnamese American attitudes toward racial and ethnic mixing?

AL: That’s quite a lot of questions woven into one. I have been accused in the past of painting a rosy picture of East-West relations, especially in the area of cultural exchanges. It is not that I am not unaware of the more sordid, exploitative side of that equation, but it is because I’m interested in what hasn’t been fully explored. Certainly as a reporter and news analyst I’ve written quite a bit on the problems of globalization – racism, exploitation, human trafficking, unfair trading practices, copyrights infringement, accelerated environmental degradation, human rights abuse and so on. But in East Eats West, I wanted to explore what is barely being touched upon –the space where East and West intersect. And I’m not interested in the parameters that the pessimists would insist upon, where the conversation should take place within certain egalitarian ideals. After all, I am westernized by experience and choice, and am Eastern by original inheritances and my marvelous Vietnamese childhood. Part of that enormous complexity came from terrible tragedies – colonization, war, exodus, life in exile. You can be bitter about it, or you can pick and choose, integrating what’s workable into your own life. It’s all about how you synthesize the differences.

Yes, there are terrible combinations of hybridity that shouldn’t even be repeated. Some food combinations are a disaster. But that said, if one frowns on the mixing, the openness to inter-exchanges, one is missing out on the energy that is fusing the major part of the 21st century.

AALDP: I first became familiar with your work through my teaching. First the two short stories anthologized in Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose (1998) and later Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora (2005). How do you feel about your writing being used in the classroom? Is that a space you envision at all when you write? What would you want students to take away from your texts?

AL: A good essay can be as much a visceral experience as it is one in which ideas are transferred. I want readers to feel what it is like to lose a country and all the cultures and societies and customs that went along with it, then have to learn a new language, a new set of behavior, and reinvent a new self, then thrive – that’s the story I want people not only to understand, but experience. But I’d be happy if students went away from reading Perfume Dreams and East Eats West understanding that identities are not fixed in stone, and that after having gone through epic losses one also gains something as well, and new ways of looking at one’s self in place of history.

Perfume Dreams is sadder because it’s closer to the refugee experience, but East Eats West is more celebratory, it’s a regard of life when East and West not only met but became intertwined, creating a hybrid space, as it were, from which new ideas emerged. It is both an internal space, within me, and a cultural and political force of the 21st century.

AALDP: Is there anything you definitely wouldn’t want teachers and students to do with
your texts?

AL: Well, I hope they don’t burn them. But seriously, I think that people often see my work as particularly ethnic and on one level that’s fine. On another, however, I put a lot of effort into playing with language, and structure –and one thing I hope they do pay attention to is the various literary styles in which the essays were written – ranging from the reportorial, to the highly personal, to the little vignettes. I am always thrilled when my work is taught in a literature class because it seems to break some personal barrier for me – to be recognized as a writer in English and not just as an ethnic writer.

AALDP: I have anxiously been awaiting a collection of your short stories. Now I understand Birds of Paradise is due out next year. Will this collect your previously published fiction or will it be pieces we have not seen before?

AL: Many have been published in recent years. But there will be unpublished work as well.

AALDP: Will it include some of my favorite stories such as “Grandma’s Tales” and “Show and Tell?”

AL: I hope so but I fear they might be "eliminated" depending on the tastes of the
editor. But never fear, there are other pieces that might thrill you as well.

East and West far apart when it comes to egos
Created: 2012-5-9
Author:Andrew Lam


IN the age of Twitter, Skype, YouTube and Google, the space between East and West seems to compress and shrink.

But in the area of self-perception, there remains a psyche gap that can often be as wide as the Pacific Ocean.

Take Heejun Han, an immigrant from South Korea who became one of the top 10 singers on "American Idol"this year that began with more than 100,000 contestants. Though his last performance garnered a standing ovation by all three judges, he was self-deprecating. "Do I really belong here? Do I really deserve this spot?" he was quoted in an interview as saying.

Anyone else with this kind of media spotlight would take advantage of it but not Han. "I don't want to be a star," he said on stage. He later said, "I'm just a guy, an ordinary guy who happened to be on `American Idol'."

Six years ago, Virginia Heffernan wrote in The New York Times about Lim Jeong-Hyun, another Asian musician. Lim, a business student in Seoul, was popularly known as Funtwo on YouTube, where his rock rendition of Pachelbel's Canon has turned him into a global phenomenon with millions of followers.

Someone in the West with this kind of media spotlight and Internet following would hire an agent and make a CD. But Lim told Heffernan, "I am always thinking that I'm not that good a player and must improve more now." He rated his playing around 50 or 60 out of 100.

Heffernan called his "anti-showmanship" "distinctly Asian," adding that "sometimes an element of flat-out abjection even enters into this act, as though the chief reason to play guitar is to be excoriated by others," she noted.

Asian modesty

Yet both Han and Lim's self-effacing modesty is reassuringly Asian, echoing the famous Chinese saying: "Who is not satisfied with himself will grow."

Two decades ago in a classic study, psychologists Harold Stevenson and James Stigler compared academic skills of elementary school students in China, Japan and the United States.

It showed a yawning gap in self-perception between East and West. Asian students outperformed their American counterparts, but when they were asked to evaluate their performances, American students evaluated themselves significantly higher than those from Asia. "In other words, they combined a lousy performance with a high sense of self-esteem," noted Nina H. Shokraii, author of "School Choice 2000: What's Happening in the States," in an essay called "The Self Esteem Fraud."

Since the '80s, encouraging self-esteem has become a movement widely practiced in public schools, based on the belief that academic achievements come with higher self-confidence.

Shokraii disputed that self-esteem is necessary for academic success. "For all of its current popularity, however, self-esteem theory threatens to deny children the tools they will need in order to experience true success in school and as adults," she wrote.

A quarter of a century later, a comprehensive study from San Diego State University released in 2007 maintained that too much self-regard has resulted in college campuses full of narcissists.

Researchers said two-thirds of the students had above-average scores on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory evaluation, 30 percent more than when the test was first administered in 1982.

Researchers like San Diego State University professor Jean Twenge worried that narcissists "are more likely to have romantic relationships that are short-lived, to be at risk for infidelity, lack emotional warmth, and to exhibit game-playing, dishonesty, and over-controlling and violent behaviors."

The author of "Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled - and More Miserable Than Ever Before," Twenge blamed the self-esteem movement for the rise of the Facebook generation.

Has the emphasis on self-confidence gone too far in America?

Twenge seemed to think so. She pointed to the French tune "Frere Jacques" in preschool, for example. French children may still sing it as "Brother Jack! You're sleeping! Ring the bells!"

But in America the once innocuous song is sometimes converted to: "I am special! I am special! Look at me! No surprise that the little train that could is exhausted: It's been laden with super-sized American egos.

That Asian Americans dominate higher education in the last few decades in America is also worth noting.

Less than 6 percent of the country's population, Asian Americans typically make up 10 percent to 30 percent of enrollment in the best colleges. In California, Asians form the majority of the University of California system. And at the University of California, Berkeley, Asian freshmen have reached the 46 percent mark this year.

Also worth noting is that of the Asian population in the United States, two out of three are immigrants, born in a continent where self-esteem is largely earned through achievements, self-congratulatory behaviors discouraged, and more importantly, humility is still something of a virtue.

In the East, the self is best defined in its relation to others - person among persons - and most valued and best expressed only through familial and communal and moral deference. That is far from the self-love concept of the West - where one is encouraged to look out for oneself, and truth seems to always originate in a minority of one.

In much of modernizing Asia, of course, individualism is making inroads. The Confucian culture that once emphasized harmony and unity at the expense of individual liberty is now in retreat.

Spiritual discipline

But if there's a place in Asia that still vigilantly keeps the ego in check, if not suppressed, it's the classroom.

In Asia, corporal punishment is still largely practiced. Self-esteem is barely a concept, let alone encouraged.

Though not known to foster creativity, an Asian education with its emphasis on hard work and cooperation, critics argue, still largely provides the antidote to the culture of permissiveness and disrespect of authority of the West.

In the West, the word kung fu is known largely as martial arts. It has a larger meaning in the East: spiritual discipline and the cultivation of the self.

A well-kept bonsai is good kung fu, so is a learned mind and so, for that matter, is the willingness to perfect one's guitar playing.

East and West may be commingling and merging in the age of globalization, but beware - that ubiquitous baseball cap that Funtwo is wearing on YouTube can mislead - it houses very different mentalities in Asia - for when it comes to the perception of self, East and West remain far apart.

Andrew Lam is an editor of New America Media and the author of "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres" and "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora." His book of short stories, "Birds of Paradise," is due out in 2013.

A while back, when I was visiting my mother's ancestral village in Thai Binh province in northern Vietnam, it occurred to me that, after a barrage of questions from distant relatives, not once did anyone ask that common question in America: "So, what do you do?" Instead the questions were familial and personal: "How is your mother?" "Do you own a car?"

"Are you married?" When I volunteered my profession -- "I am a journalist" -- I was met with polite nods and smiles. A guaranteed conversation-starter back in the United States went nowhere among my mother's distant kin, who were mostly farmers. "You know, for magazine and newspapers," I added, muttering. "I get to travel to many places and everything."

One old woman with blackened enamel teeth (an old practice considered to be beautiful) patted my cheek and said, "You know, don't travel so much. You should marry and settle down." Then at her insistence I went and lit incense at the graves of my great-grandparents and mumbled a silent prayer while half of the village watched in approval.

The idea of work as an identity and vocation is still new in many parts of the world. Vietnam, for one, is a country where, despite recent changes toward modernity, 80 percent of the population still lives in rural areas. Work for them is arduous and repetitive, really nothing to talk about. In fact, the Vietnamese colloquial word for work is "keo cay," which literally means "to pull the yoke."

"What do you do?" is a meaningless question in a region when everyone has his feet in the mud, his back bent, his skin scorched by an unforgiving sun.

Yet as an immigrant to America, I am all too aware how a strong work ethic ultimately helps newcomers succeed. In America, where mobility weakens blood ties, work is still a highly honorable thing, a point around which strangers can connect. Hard work was a vehicle that took my family out of poverty and deposited us in that much-coveted, five-bedroom suburban home with a pool in the back yard. And ambition transformed my cousins, siblings and me into engineers, businessmen, doctors and journalist -- successful American professionals. What we do has become an enormous source of pride, not only for ourselves, but for our family and clan.

Immigrants' strong work ethic built the American dream, which in turn merges with the old Protestant work ethic, which built America. To have vision is to move forward: He sees in the boarded-up store a sparkling new restaurant; she looks at the pile of shirts to be sewn in the sweatshop and sees her children going to Harvard. For those who want to do, and do well, America is still the place to be.

A cliche to the native-born, the American dream nevertheless seduces the sedentary Vietnamese, among countless others, to travel halfway around the world. America kisses her hard, and in the morning she awakes to find, to her own amazement, that she can readily pronounce mortgage, escrow, aerobic, tax shelter, GPA, MBA, MD, BMW, Porsche, overtime and stock options.

Gone is the cyclical nature of her provincial thinking, and lost is her land-bound mentality. She can envision the future.

There is a price to pay for having ambition, however. Already, second-generation Vietnamese in America are feeling that deterioration of clanship, the loss of the insularity that their parents' generation valued and upheld. Indeed, somewhere along our highly mobile and cosmopolitan lifestyles, that close network that held the first generation together is thinning out a generation later. So much so that, increasingly, we take our identity from what we do and less from who we know or who we are related to.

Back in my mother's ancestral village, however, as I sat and watched my kinfolk gather their crops and sing, I found enviable their sense of communal love and insularity. It's back-breaking work, but you live and die by the land, and you are never left alone -- someone is guaranteed to take care of you, for such is the collective ethos of that world.

Yet despite my claim of kinship, despite the fact that my ancestors are buried there, I felt myself essentially a stranger in the village.

One young woman came and sat down with me near the end of the visit. She was a good student, she told me. She dreamed of life in the big city. There was nothing in the village for her. She imagined herself doing well in Hanoi. And then perhaps, if she did well, who knows, she might even go abroad.

"To America," she said in a dreamy voice.

Listening to her, I was struck by the enormous gap between hard work and ambition. An immigrant with a cosmopolitan vision dancing in his or her head can move away from a rural past quickly and fiercely.

From the far end of the road that led out of that village, I wanted to warn her of loneliness, of the journey's unrequited longings, of my yearnings for a more connected, insular world.

But I mentioned none of that. Instead, I felt a different kind of kinship with the young woman, one not based on blood ties."So," I asked her, "What do you plan to do when you get there?"


Andrew Lam is an editor of New America Media and the author of East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres and Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora. His book of short stories, Birds of Paradise, is due out in 2013.

Story tools

New America Media, News Analysis, Andrew Lam, Posted: Sep 02, 2012

A tragic and disturbing story from last week involved tweeting. A young woman who was being stalked tweeted her impending doom a few days before her murder. "So scared right now," and "I got me an uglyass stalker" were some of her tweets. Then, closer to her death, she tweeted, "This can't be happening..." In essence, she was broadcasting events leading to her demise.

In the same week, a teenager in a suburb of Baltimore posted murder-suicide references onFacebook before taking a shotgun to school and wounding one of his classmates on the first day of class.

Going back a month or so, there was another horrific story about a teenager who lost an arm to an alligator in Florida while swimming with his friends. He heroically fought the reptile and managed to get away, minus one limb. But the story didn’t seem fully realized without involving social media, and apparently the victim felt the same. According to ABC News, before going into surgery to close up his wound, he asked his friend "to snap a photo of him in the trauma unit and post it on Facebook."

The examples, of course, are endless. Yet they all seem to suggest that man's 21st century response to dramatic events is not necessarily just to simply interact with it, but to also record it. If communication technology was created to enhance our daily lives, something has dramatically shifted along the way: More and more, we are altering our behaviors in service of the digital world.

So many of us now have been raised on video games, cell phones and iPods. We’ve spent a large bulk of our lives in chat rooms, on Skype and posting videos to YouTube, to the extent that we’ve become news reporters and newsmakers, without even making much of an effort. We announce our actions and, in some cases, our impending demise online without giving it much thought. We have been so conditioned to invest our emotional life in the virtual space that it has become second nature. What’s more, many of us have learned to split our attention, with one eye on the electronic mirror and the other on reality.

Indeed, more and more, we are beginning to believe that we do not fully exist without some sort of electronic imprint in the virtual world, a digital projection of ourselves, a validation of our existence.

Pipiatum ergo sum? I tweet, therefore I am? 

Wafaa Bilal, a photography professor at NYU, a couple years ago went a step further andimplanted a camera in the back of his head as part of an art project. The camera broadcast a live stream of images to a museum in Qatar. On his skull, the real and the digital converge, and the real is photographed for the benefit of the digital.

The trend is "self-tracking," according to the Economist, and a market for these devices is rapidly emerging. There are wireless devices that can track people's physical activities, while other devices can take measurements of brainwave activity at night, to chart users sleep patterns online.

"People around the world are now learning how to leverage the incredible power inherent in the URL to create what is essentially a parallel universe of digital identities," noted Robert Young, an Internet entrepreneur. But in this new industry, he observed, "the raw materials for the 'products' are the people... the key is to look at self-expression and social networks as a new medium and to view the audience itself as a new generation of 'cultural products.'”

Perhaps it's too early to tell the long-term effects of an oversaturated information age on human evolution. But according to the New York Times, "Scientists say the constant use of computers and cellular telephones is causing a significant, evolutionary shift in our brain's wiring."

But one of the most troubling consequences of devoting so much attention to the virtual world is the death of empathy. Clifford Nass, a communications professor at Stanford, told the New York Times that empathy is essential to the human condition. However, given the virtualization of the real world, and tendency for many to multitask, "we are at an inflection point," he said. "A significant fraction of people's experiences are now fragmented."

Which may very well explain a story that involves professor Bill Nye, popularly known as "the Science Guy" on TV a couple years ago. He collapsed on stage out of exhaustion as he prepared to give a lecture. But instead of rushing to the stage to help him, the LA Times and other media reported, many students in the audience took out their cell phones, snapped photos, texted andtweeted the event.

Or consider this now famous story involving YouTube. On March 30, 2008, a group of teenagers in Florida lured one of their own peers to one of the girl's homes and videotaped her beating. With one girl behind the camera to record the episode, and two boys guarding the door, the rest mercilessly beat the young woman into a concussion. It was for a dual purpose: to "punish" the victim for allegedly "trash talking" about them on MySpace, and to post the footage on YouTube. The most telling line during the beating, however, was when the young woman behind the camera yelled out: "There's only 17 seconds left. Make it good."

Seventeen seconds left, that is, in a 10-minute slot - the maximum time one can post a video segment on YouTube. The time frame and the incident prompted a journalist to quip, "Well, Warhol was only off by five minutes."

10-Minutes of Fame

What makes that incident unusual is not the violent act itself - girl fights have been well reported, after all - but that the girls' actions were dictated not by a pure act of revenge but by a kind of exhibitionism rarely seen before. Stranger still is that, increasingly, the electronic world dictates exactly how an action should be carried out. The collective beating of the young woman, for instance, was directed to intensify as the video neared its 10 minute mark. (Did their beating lose steam, one wonders, when the camera stopped rolling?)

This modern mindset has given psychologists and anthropologists enough material to study what they call the "disinhibitive effect" on the Internet. Road Rage is quickly giving way to Net Wrath. Like actors who are trained to lose their reservations on stage, many now take daring risks for the virtual world - nevermind that they might have repercussions in the real one. They show it all, or do something enormously bizarre or violent, to garner lots of hits, lots of eyeballs.

Andy Warhol may have been off by five minutes, but he was otherwise frighteningly prophetic. A future in which everyone can be famous for about 10 minutes has indeed arrived. We have all become actors, filmmakers and reporters. We begin to believe that we are not fully ourselves, that we are not viable in the new system, unless we make some sort of electronic imprint, some sort of projection of ourselves, in the virtual world. Diaries, once locked away and hidden, have now gone electronic in the form of blogs and vlogs. The real event to some may no longer be as important as its virtual image, which can be relived online.

No one doubts that communication technology has enhanced humankind in marvelous ways. But it comes with a price. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was a seminal work and a warning that the discovery of electricity could create a monster at the cusp of the industrial revolution, and that punishments awaited those who dared steal powers from the Gods. The Wachowski brothers' extraordinary movie The Matrix, made at the end of the 20th century, in which humans are enslaved and permanently trapped in a simulated reality, was in a way the same warning. Man in the 21st century has transcended geographical and even biological constraints, and found the power to translate himself in various media across the globe. But as a result he is seriously fragmented.

The hero in this new myth necessarily needs to become a prophet. For his is the arduous task of reintegrating the various fragments of the self, hearing the symphony in the cacophony, seeing the human in the digital -- or else, man will suffer being trapped forever, in the halls of mirrors.


Andrew Lam is an Editor at New America Media and the author of "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres" and "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora." His book of short stories, "Birds of Paradise Lost," is due out in 2013.

Follow Andrew Lam on Twitter: www.twitter.com/andrewqlam

 

SAN FRANCISCO -- For a period of a month sometime ago I became a vegetarian. Some people won't eat meat because they think it's cruel to animals, or because of health concerns. My reason is a little different: it is love.

I simply wanted to honor my grandmother's memory by not eating meat. A devout Buddhist, grandma spent a large part of her life as a vegetarian, and some of my fondest childhood memories in Vietnam were sharing a meal with her.

In fact, as a child, I learned how to appreciate food not from fancy dishes my mother regularly whipped up, but from the simple meals my grandmother prepared. In her presence a piece of crunchy green pickled eggplant was incredibly delicious, and fried tofu dipped in sweetened soy sauce delectable. Often dinner with grandma would come with ghost stories and fairy tales she knew from her childhood in rural North Vietnam. And considering that grandma was the matriarch of our large clan with 42 grandchildren, I had felt extraordinarily privileged to dine alone with her.

After dinner, it would be time for prayers. I would help her light incense and candles and put up plates of fruits for offerings to Buddha and our ancestors. For an hour or so, she would chant and beat on a wooden fish, a percussion instrument made of a hollow wooden block originally used by Buddhist priests to beat rhythm when chanting scriptures.

Grandma passed away more than a decade ago. Now I am an adult living in cosmopolitan San Francisco, and incense smoke, wooden fish, vegetarian suppers and ghost stories are the rituals of a distant past.

But then one morning it occurred to me that I could no longer recall the sound of my grandmother's voice and it left me feeling bereft. So I decided to become a vegetarian for a month. It's something grandma would do as a way to honor those who died before her. And I could do no less.

In a city famous for its dining experience, this was not easy. I turned down several dinner parties for fear of offending the hosts. I avoided walking by restaurants where enticing aromas wafted in the air. My best friend wondered if I was going through a mid-life crisis. And gossip in my circle had it that I had shaved my head and was about to join a Buddhist monastery.

In truth, I wanted to break my resolve many times.

What got me through that month-long diet was this particular memory of my grandmother. Confined to a wheelchair in her last few years in a convalescent home in San Jose, Calif., and suffering from senility, she had largely forgotten who I was. But not what she was about.

I see again her trembling hand as she poked at the mash potato and green beans on her plate at lunchtime one afternoon, avoiding the meatloaf in the middle. Frail and sickly, she nevertheless meticulous kept a lunar calendar on which Buddhist holidays were honored by Buddhist sutras recitation and consumption of vegetarian meals. It was her way, and grandma followed it through to the very end.

And so for a month last year I, too, followed her way. I fried tofu, steamed vegetable, cooked rice and prepared soy sauce. I lit incense for the departed. invited friends who wanted to taste vegetarian food. And as we ate, I told them ghost stories I knew as a child.

Then one late evening, while dining alone and in solemnity, the lyrical sound of her laughter suddenly came back to me. I savored Grandma's favorite pickled eggplant. I remembered the dead.



New America Media Editor, Andrew Lam, is author of "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora" which won a Pen American Award in 2006, and "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres", which was listed as one of top 10 Indies by Shelf Unbound Magazine. His next book,"Birds of Paradise Lost" is due out in 2013. He has lectured widely at many universities.

Reviewer:
Heather Winthrop
Source:
blogster.com

As a child I grew up reading books like John Bellairs’ The House with a Clock in It’s Walls,J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time series. These were so much more than ordinary books, they were portals to alternate realities containing dark magic, ghouls, ghosts, giant arachnids, ogre’s, time travel, quests, secret meetings, clandestine societies, and the ultimate adventures. The books were also a way to distance myself from things in my life that were less than fantastic in nature; my parent’s divorce, my Dad’s screaming, my mother’s apathy, my sister’s birth and thus my newfound invisibility.


I needed to read like most people need air to breathe; so, I read in the bathtub, while walking, during recess, after dinner. In moments of isolation when I was without friends, those stories were the best companions I could’ve ever hoped for; they never criticized, told me that my clothes were too shabby, never excluded me because I was “weird”. The stories embraced me, and I embraced them in return. Rather than reading and learning being a task that I was forced to engage in, it took on a new component of joyfulness and escapism. Reading liberated me from my prison.

The stories that I read however, were not without a darker side; sometimes the “good guys” died, and sometimes the lesson was sacrifice. While I always enjoyed Disney movies growing up, I began to realize that the stories they portrayed often stood in stark contrast to the realities of life; good does not always, if often, triumph over evil, sometimes you identify with the “bad guy”, or maybe it is difficult to distinguish the hero from the sea of faces, perhaps he/she isn’t very heroic. I don’t mean to sound like a jaded cynic, but don’t these stories have embedded in them a false set of hopes which are completely out of synch with reality?


Beauty and the Beast: beauty is on the inside; please tell that to the multi-billion dollar industry built on telling the public to be dissatisfied with themselves, and subsequently purchase products to “fix” their “problems”. Aladdin: you can be poor, but if you continue to do the right thing (while starving to death, and attempting to avoid having your hand cut off), someday, someone will reward you for it (monetarily), and all of your problems will be solved. Cinderella: continue to put up with abusive treatment, and work as a slave, and eventually someone (a rich nobleman) will come to rescue you from your troubles, because after all, your foot is the right size. I realize that many of these stories have been derived from old folktales and fables only to be Disney-ized, but, the list goes on and on. There must be a reason that Disney made so many of these movies with themes that, while charming, are also so incongruent with reality.The stories that Disney based his films on were often much darker tales, sometimes with gruesome details, and usually not with happy endings. Andrew Lam described just such tales, as told by his grandmother, in the essay Tragedy and the New American Childhood.


Mr. Lam says, “In Grandma’s stories, noble deeds are rarely rewarded happily ever after, broken love is the norm, and those who do good can be, and often are, punished.”(p.111) I think it is perhaps the Western idea that history is disposable, that makes it so easy for us to slap a happy ending on a tale and forget about it. In other parts of the world, history which is hundreds of years old is easily recalled by any individual you question on the street; what was this conflict about? Who were the players? What was the resolution? You only have to watch Jaywalking with Jay Leno, to observe that Americans know very little about current events, let alone the history of their country or its foreign affairs.

Perhaps America is haunted by ghosts of the past, the physical, spiritual embodiment of a history we would prefer to forget, but which it nevertheless, is essential for us to remember and learn from. “America looks to the future, and not the past; it is moved by the ideas of progress and opportunity,” Lam says in regards to our rampant cultural/historical case of American amnesia, but, what is lost in that process? As America, and the immigrants who’ve come to make up America forget their traditions, forget their homelands, and slowly cede their identities for modern conveniences, we seem to be a culture which will be bound to the restless spirits of the past, longing to tell their stories to a new audience, a new generation, who will, perhaps listen.


As I read the story about Andrew Lam’s Grandmother being wrapped in a “golden blanket” of butterflies, I began to imagine them forming lustrous, jeweled wings, and carrying her up to the heavens, and the afterlife.


I think most people, like myself feel truncated, or cut off from their ancestors. Maybe that is a bias based on my upbringing, but I was raised in relatively non-religious household, where the dead were simply presumed to be gone, out of reach; a collection of rapidly fading memories and photographs. This story gave me comfort, and reminded me that life is about transformation; indeed I felt that the entire collection of stories in East Eats West was based around the theme of transformative realization, reinvention of oneself, and in a metaphorical sense, reincarnation.


This is a process, which I believe is universal, however it is definitely one that becomes catalyzed by the addition of going to a country where you are unable to speak the language, being forced to abandon everything you know in favor of the unknown; being a tree, uprooted from its native soil and climate.


I think what Andrew Lam has endeavored to do with his collection of essays (and been very successful at doing) is to, like the Manga that he describes in Tragedy and the New American Childhood, reshape the stories which will influence the new American narrative. His stories will give hope to those who don’t or can’t identify with the Disney fantasy/farce, the life of privilege and happy endings. He has crafted an honest collection of stories to guide those of us who have become disenchanted with a life removed from nature and spirituality, and consumed by greed and materialism.

Maybe I identified with the stories in this collection more than I should; after all, I look like your typical white, suburban, 30 something female. I’m not Asian. I’ve never been transplanted from my homeland to a foreign country. I grew up listening to classic rock, going to public school, having a surly attitude towards authority, and atypical American disinterest in politics as well as ignorance of our foreign affairs. However, when I looked inside this book, I found, mirrored within its pages, the image of a book-worm, a lover of stories, an outcast who fought desperately to obtain his place and his footing while balancing between simultaneously converging and clashing hemispheres. I saw a frightened kid, who had to pick up the pieces of his shattered, transplanted life, reconstruct those pieces, and craft them into stories to help himself, and others like him deal with the traumas that war, death, poverty, and displacement inflict on innocent children.


As a child you are not expected to learn, but, rather to regurgitate; to be a parrot. As you get older, that expectation thankfully dissipates and if you are a storyteller, you are finally free to create magic, slay beasts, right wrongs, or show that the “good” guys don’t always finish on top. Being a storyteller is the opportunity to recreate the world, to inspire people, to expose injustices; it is a powerful role that should not be taken on flippantly. I think the art of storytelling is something Andrew Lam learned from his Grandmother, and subsequently, his Father. It was a gift in their family which was passed on through three generations, and perhaps someday, a gift that Lam will leave to his children. As I finished reading the stories within East Eats WestI could not help imagining two butterflies, the spirits of Andrew’s Grandmother and Grandfather, landing on his shoulders, as if to say hello andshow him their approval.

Reviewer:
Heather Winthrop
Source:
blogster.com

As a child I grew up reading books like John Bellairs’ The House with a Clock in It’s Walls,J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time series. These were so much more than ordinary books, they were portals to alternate realities containing dark magic, ghouls, ghosts, giant arachnids, ogre’s, time travel, quests, secret meetings, clandestine societies, and the ultimate adventures. The books were also a way to distance myself from things in my life that were less than fantastic in nature; my parent’s divorce, my Dad’s screaming, my mother’s apathy, my sister’s birth and thus my newfound invisibility.


I needed to read like most people need air to breathe; so, I read in the bathtub, while walking, during recess, after dinner. In moments of isolation when I was without friends, those stories were the best companions I could’ve ever hoped for; they never criticized, told me that my clothes were too shabby, never excluded me because I was “weird”. The stories embraced me, and I embraced them in return. Rather than reading and learning being a task that I was forced to engage in, it took on a new component of joyfulness and escapism. Reading liberated me from my prison.

The stories that I read however, were not without a darker side; sometimes the “good guys” died, and sometimes the lesson was sacrifice. While I always enjoyed Disney movies growing up, I began to realize that the stories they portrayed often stood in stark contrast to the realities of life; good does not always, if often, triumph over evil, sometimes you identify with the “bad guy”, or maybe it is difficult to distinguish the hero from the sea of faces, perhaps he/she isn’t very heroic. I don’t mean to sound like a jaded cynic, but don’t these stories have embedded in them a false set of hopes which are completely out of synch with reality?


Beauty and the Beast: beauty is on the inside; please tell that to the multi-billion dollar industry built on telling the public to be dissatisfied with themselves, and subsequently purchase products to “fix” their “problems”. Aladdin: you can be poor, but if you continue to do the right thing (while starving to death, and attempting to avoid having your hand cut off), someday, someone will reward you for it (monetarily), and all of your problems will be solved. Cinderella: continue to put up with abusive treatment, and work as a slave, and eventually someone (a rich nobleman) will come to rescue you from your troubles, because after all, your foot is the right size. I realize that many of these stories have been derived from old folktales and fables only to be Disney-ized, but, the list goes on and on. There must be a reason that Disney made so many of these movies with themes that, while charming, are also so incongruent with reality.The stories that Disney based his films on were often much darker tales, sometimes with gruesome details, and usually not with happy endings. Andrew Lam described just such tales, as told by his grandmother, in the essay Tragedy and the New American Childhood.


Mr. Lam says, “In Grandma’s stories, noble deeds are rarely rewarded happily ever after, broken love is the norm, and those who do good can be, and often are, punished.”(p.111) I think it is perhaps the Western idea that history is disposable, that makes it so easy for us to slap a happy ending on a tale and forget about it. In other parts of the world, history which is hundreds of years old is easily recalled by any individual you question on the street; what was this conflict about? Who were the players? What was the resolution? You only have to watch Jaywalking with Jay Leno, to observe that Americans know very little about current events, let alone the history of their country or its foreign affairs.

Perhaps America is haunted by ghosts of the past, the physical, spiritual embodiment of a history we would prefer to forget, but which it nevertheless, is essential for us to remember and learn from. “America looks to the future, and not the past; it is moved by the ideas of progress and opportunity,” Lam says in regards to our rampant cultural/historical case of American amnesia, but, what is lost in that process? As America, and the immigrants who’ve come to make up America forget their traditions, forget their homelands, and slowly cede their identities for modern conveniences, we seem to be a culture which will be bound to the restless spirits of the past, longing to tell their stories to a new audience, a new generation, who will, perhaps listen.


As I read the story about Andrew Lam’s Grandmother being wrapped in a “golden blanket” of butterflies, I began to imagine them forming lustrous, jeweled wings, and carrying her up to the heavens, and the afterlife.


I think most people, like myself feel truncated, or cut off from their ancestors. Maybe that is a bias based on my upbringing, but I was raised in relatively non-religious household, where the dead were simply presumed to be gone, out of reach; a collection of rapidly fading memories and photographs. This story gave me comfort, and reminded me that life is about transformation; indeed I felt that the entire collection of stories in East Eats West was based around the theme of transformative realization, reinvention of oneself, and in a metaphorical sense, reincarnation.


This is a process, which I believe is universal, however it is definitely one that becomes catalyzed by the addition of going to a country where you are unable to speak the language, being forced to abandon everything you know in favor of the unknown; being a tree, uprooted from its native soil and climate.


I think what Andrew Lam has endeavored to do with his collection of essays (and been very successful at doing) is to, like the Manga that he describes in Tragedy and the New American Childhood, reshape the stories which will influence the new American narrative. His stories will give hope to those who don’t or can’t identify with the Disney fantasy/farce, the life of privilege and happy endings. He has crafted an honest collection of stories to guide those of us who have become disenchanted with a life removed from nature and spirituality, and consumed by greed and materialism.

Maybe I identified with the stories in this collection more than I should; after all, I look like your typical white, suburban, 30 something female. I’m not Asian. I’ve never been transplanted from my homeland to a foreign country. I grew up listening to classic rock, going to public school, having a surly attitude towards authority, and atypical American disinterest in politics as well as ignorance of our foreign affairs. However, when I looked inside this book, I found, mirrored within its pages, the image of a book-worm, a lover of stories, an outcast who fought desperately to obtain his place and his footing while balancing between simultaneously converging and clashing hemispheres. I saw a frightened kid, who had to pick up the pieces of his shattered, transplanted life, reconstruct those pieces, and craft them into stories to help himself, and others like him deal with the traumas that war, death, poverty, and displacement inflict on innocent children.


As a child you are not expected to learn, but, rather to regurgitate; to be a parrot. As you get older, that expectation thankfully dissipates and if you are a storyteller, you are finally free to create magic, slay beasts, right wrongs, or show that the “good” guys don’t always finish on top. Being a storyteller is the opportunity to recreate the world, to inspire people, to expose injustices; it is a powerful role that should not be taken on flippantly. I think the art of storytelling is something Andrew Lam learned from his Grandmother, and subsequently, his Father. It was a gift in their family which was passed on through three generations, and perhaps someday, a gift that Lam will leave to his children. As I finished reading the stories within East Eats WestI could not help imagining two butterflies, the spirits of Andrew’s Grandmother and Grandfather, landing on his shoulders, as if to say hello andshow him their approval.