Andrew Lam's Blog - Posts Tagged "language"

EDITOR'S NOTE: New America Media editor Andrew Lam has made his name as a journalist, but in his newest book, his past as a Vietnamese refugee reverberates through short stories about characters who fled Vietnam and made new lives in the Bay Area. NAM reporter Anna Challet spoke with him about the collection, Birds of Paradise Lost (Red Hen Press, 2013), published this month.


Anna Challet: Birds of Paradise Lost is your first book of fiction - how did you come to publish a fiction collection after so many years of working as a journalist?

Andrew Lam: I've been writing short stories for twenty years now, on and off ever since I was in the creative writing program at San Francisco State University. Though I later found a career as a journalist and an essayist, fiction is my first love and I never left it, even though there was no easy way to make a living from it. The collection is a labor of love and devotion, and whenever I found free time from my journalism work, I'd work on one story or another, or at least sketch out my characters, and research various issues related to my characters' dilemmas. After twenty years and thirty stories, thirteen pieces were finally selected and the collection was born. So far, the blurbs from [authors] Maxine Hong Kingston, Gish Jen, Robert Olen Butler, Oscar Hijuelos, Sandip Roy and others, have been most encouraging.

AC: You've written many personal essays and non-fiction pieces about coming to the United States from Vietnam. How does it feel to bring that experience into the lives of your fictional characters?

AL: Well, I always say that writing non-fiction versus writing fiction is a bit like architecture versus abstract painting. In non-fiction you have to stay true to historical events, be they personal or national ... In fiction, it's as if you enter a dream world that you created, but your characters have their own free will. They don't do what you want them to do - they get into trouble, do drugs, fight over petty things, and do outrageous things that you wouldn't want your children to do. In other words, you can only provide the background, the seeds - in my case the background of the Vietnamese refugee. When a well-rounded character takes over, he doesn't lecture you about his history and how he is misunderstood. He lives his life, does things that are unexpected, and makes you laugh and cry because of his human flaws and foibles.

AC: How did you come up with the title?

AL: It's the title of one of the thirteen stories in the book, and it's a story that deals with death and hatred and self-immolation. In the story, the narrator's best friend commits self-immolation in Washington, D.C. and leaves a note that says he hates the Vietnamese communist regime and wants his death to call attention to communist cruelty. But he also leaves his friends back in San Jose, California, reeling from his death. Was it a patriotic act? A passing tourist captures a picture of the man on fire, and the flame reminds the narrator of the bird of paradise - both like a bird and a flame, a phoenix of sorts.

AC: English is your third language, after Vietnamese and French. How is it that you've come to write in English - your "stepmother tongue?"

AL: You know, I have a funny story to tell about English and how I came to fall in love with the language. When I came to the United States in 1975 I was eleven, and within a few months my voice broke. I was desperate to fit in and spoke English all the time. Trouble was, in my household it was a no-no to speak English because somehow it is disrespectful to call parents and grandparents "you" - impersonal pronouns are offensive in Vietnamese. But I couldn't help it. I recited commercials like a parrot and I got yelled at quite often. My older brother one night said, "You speak so much English when you're not supposed to, that's why your vocal chords shattered. Now you sound like a duck." I thought it was true. I went from this sweet-voiced Vietnamese kid who spoke Vietnamese and French to this craggy-voiced teenager. I thought, "Wow, English is like magic." It not only shattered my voice, it changed me physiologically. I believed this for months ... There's magic in the language. I never fell out of the enchantment.

AC: Many of the characters in your stories seem to be preoccupied with time - telling the future ("The Palmist"), being unable to let go of the past ("Bright Clouds Over the Mekong"), living in constant fear of what surprise the present moment might bring ("Step Up and Whistle"). Do you often find yourself writing about characters who struggle in dealing with time?

AL: I hadn't thought of it in that way, but it's true that the past is ever present in the characters' lives in Birds of Paradise Lost. Perhaps it can't be helped. So many of them either experienced trauma - fleeing Vietnam, watching someone be killed - or inherited trauma from those who fled Vietnam, that the past is always flowing into the present. The future is of course the possibility of an absolution, the possibility that they can conquer this haunting aspect of the past so that they can begin to heal. Not all of them do, of course, just like in real life.

AC: What are your thoughts on being identified as a writer of immigrant literature? Given that you've written so much about the Vietnamese diaspora over the past twenty years, how do you think the concept of immigrant literature is changing in the United States?

AL: I think in a larger sense, immigrant narrative is comprehensive and speaks to the core of human experience. Isn't the first story told in the West about the Fall? Adam and Eve were immigrants too from somewhere, a lost Eden, a paradise lost. We all now are so mobile, so nomadic ... That experience of losing home, longing for home, that yearning for meaning and rootedness and identity in a floating world, it's what often makes an immigrant story into an American story ... Today, more people are crossing various borders in order to survive, thrive, change their lives. Even if you don't cross the border, with demographic shifts, the border sometimes crosses you ... America's story is largely an immigrant story. That hasn't changed since the Pilgrims ate their first turkey some four hundred years ago, and they were the original boat people.




AC: As an immigrant, what do you think of the current debate over immigration in this country?

AL: It's unfortunate that the country of immigrants has turned its back on immigrants. The atmosphere after 9/11 is toxic. In the war on terrorism, the immigrant is often the scapegoat. He becomes a kind of insurance policy against the effects of the recession. By blaming him, the pressure valve is regulated in times of crisis ... What we have now is a public mindset of us versus them, and an overall anti-immigrant climate that is both troubling and morally reprehensible. Missing from the national conversation are voices of pro-immigration reformers and civil rights leaders, who can speak on behalf of those who have no voice. Where are the leaders who can speak to the idea that it is not alien to American interests, but very much in our socioeconomic interests - not to mention our spiritual health - to integrate immigrants, that our nation functions best when we welcome newcomers and help them participate fully in our society?

I am glad to see the wheels are moving at last toward comprehensive immigration reform after last year's election. I am glad that immigrants themselves are speaking up. I am hopeful that the pendulum swings toward seeing immigrants in favorable terms once more.

All three of my books, "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora," "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres," and "Birds of Paradise Lost," are immigrant narratives -their dreams, their traumas, their struggles - and I write them with the confidence that these stories, written from the heart, will belong, in time, to America.


Andrew Lam was recently interviewed by Michael Krasney on the National Public Radio (NPR) program, Forum. To listen, click here.

For years, on my writing desk sat a framed little card, yellow with age, and it told of my American beginning. It's a picture of a sloop, and under it the word "Sailboat" is written, Mr. Kaeselau, my first teacher in America, gave it to me along with a deck of similar cards many decades ago when I was in seventh grade, and fresh from Vietnam.

The only English I knew back home was "no money, no honey," and "Ok, Salem." I learned it from the loud Saigon prostitutes who walked the tamarind tree-lined boulevards near the Independence Palace - across from which stood my school where I was taught Vietnamese and French.

Back then I thought English was a rather terse and ugly-sounding language -- you don't have to say much to get your points across, but speak it too long you risk hurting your throat. In America that fear became true. A few months after having arrived to San Francisco, my voice started to break. The youngest in my family, I went from a sweet sounding child speaking Vietnamese to a craggy sounding teenager speaking broken English. "You sound like a hungry duck," my older brother would say every time I opened my mouth and everyone laughed.

But not Mr. Kaeselau, who took me bowling with some other students and sometimes drove me home. He had a kind face and a thick mustache that was quite expressive, especially when he smiled and wiggled his eyebrows up and down like Groucho Marx. He gave me A's (which didn't count) before I could put a complete sentence together, "to encourage me," as he would say. At lunchtime, I was one of a handful of privileged kids who were allowed to eat in his classroom and play games -- speed, monopoly -- and read comic books or do homework. It was a delightful sanctuary for the small kids and the "nerds," who would sometimes get jumped by the schoolyard bullies.

For a while I was his echo. "Sailboat," he would say while holding the card up in front of me, and "sailboat" I would repeat after him, copying his inflection and facial gestures. "Hospital," he would say. And "hospital," I would yell back, a little parrot.

Within a few months, I began to speak English freely, though haltingly, and outgrew the cards. I began to banter and joke with my new friends. I acquired a new personality, a sunny, sharp-tongued kid, and often Mr. Kaesleau would shake his head in wonder at the transformation.

How could he have known that I was desperately in love with my new tongue?


The author, on the left, with his cousin in Daly City, CA, 1976.

I embraced it the way an asphyxiated person in a dark cellar who finally managed to unlock an escape hatch. At home, in the crowded refugee apartment my family shared with my aunt's family, we were a miserable bunch. We wore donated clothes, bought groceries with food stamps and our ratty sofa with its matching loveseat came from a nearby thrift shop.

I remember the smell of fish sauce wafting in the air and adults' voice reminiscing of what's gone and lost. Vietnamese was spoken there, often only in whispers and occasionally in exploded exchanges when the crowded conditions became too much to bear. Vietnam ruled that apartment. It ruled in the form of two grandmothers praying in their separate corners. It ruled in the form of muffled cries of my mother late at night. It ruled in the drunken shouts of an aunt whose husband up and left her and their four children.

In that house, overwhelmed by sadness and confusion, I fell silent. When my father, who had escaped Vietnam a few days after us and managed to final joined us in San Francisco a few months later, things improved. Within two years we even took our first vacation to Lake Tahoe and Disneyland and in another, we will have moved to our first house in America, our humble American dream.

But by then I had practically stopped speaking Vietnamese all together, becoming as mother said, "A little American." It could not be helped. There was something in English that was in stark contrast with Vietnamese. The American "I" stands alone where the Vietnamese "I" is always a familial limitation, the speaker is bound by his ranking and relations to the listener. In Vietnamese there is very little use for impersonal pronouns. One is son, daughter, father, uncle and so on and it is understood only in the context of the communal and familial whereas the American "I" -- as in I think, I feel, I know, I disagree -- encourages personal expression.

It would take me a long, long time before I would embrace my Vietnamese again, balancing the American "I" with the Vietnamese "we," but that, as they say, is another story.

In our refugee home, speaking English was a no-no even if speaking English had already for me becoming second nature. And sometimes, at dinnertime, I would spontaneously sing out a tv jingle with my craggy voice: "My baloney has a first name. It's OSCAR. My baloney has a second name..." The entire family would look at me as if I were a being possessed. Needless to say, my parents constantly scolded me.

Then one day my brother said with a serious voice. "Mom and dad told you not to speak English all the time, and you didn't listen, now look what happen. You shattered your vocal cord. That is why you sound like a duck."

Since no one bothered to tell me about the birds and the bees, I fully believed him. I was duped for what seemed like a long time. But I remember being of two minds: while I mourned the loss of my homeland, I, at the same time, marveled at how speaking a new language could actually change me. After all, I was at an age where magic and reality still shared a porous border, and speaking English was to me like chanting magical incantations. It was indeed reshaping me from inside out. I was enchanted by the English language, its power of transformation, and that enchantment, I am happy to report, had never gone away.

When I graduated from junior high, I came to say goodbye to Mr. Kaeslau and he gave me the cards to take home as mementos, knowing full well that I didn't need them anymore. That day, a short day, I remember taking a shortcut over a hill and on the way down, I tripped and fell. The cards flew out of my hand to scatter like a flock of playful butterflies on the verdant slope. Though I skinned my knee, I laughed. Then, as I scampered to retrieve the cards, I found myself yelling out ecstatically the name of each image on each one of them -- "School," "Cloud," "Bridge," "House," "Dog," "Car" -- as if for the first time.

Then I looked up and saw, far in the distance, San Francisco's downtown, its glittering high rises resembling a fairy-tale castle made of diamonds, with the shimmering sea dotted with sailboats as backdrop.

"City," I said, "my beautiful city." And the words rang true; they slipped into my bloodstream and suddenly I was overwhelmed by an intense hunger. I wanted to swallow the beatific landscape before me. For it was then that I intuited that, through my love for the new language, and through the act of describing and the naming of things, I, too, sounding like a hungry duck, could stake my claims in the New World.


Andrew Lam is an editor with New America Media and the author of three books, Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres, and his latest, Birds of Paradise Lost, a collection of short stories about Vietnamese refugees struggling to rebuild their lives in the Bay Area. Also read his tribute to his teacher in "A Teacher's Reach"

 

Growing up, author Andrew Lam struggled to make sense of his Vietnamese identity at home and his American identity at school.  

“Writing and reading was a way to begin to understand how I could marry this night and day dichotomy,” Lam says. “It’s possible to use the written language to express one’s self and make two polar worlds bridge and connect.”

Growing up “in between cultures,” South Korean author Krys Lee and Mauritian author Ananda Devi also say that literature and language have been a bridge linking their multicultural and multilingual backgrounds.

“It opens up your ideas, your thoughts, your way of looking at the world and at the same time makes identity and language a core component of who you are,” Devi says.

 

Ananda Devi, Krys Lee, and Andrew Lam at the University of Oklahoma's 2013 Neustadt Festival BanquetCredit Laura Hernandez / World Literature Today

 

Lee says that literature is not just a path to discover cultural and racial identity. Rather, she says that literature is valuable tool for any person searching for identity and place. 

“The title of my book, Drifting House, was very much a place where we all inhabit. Not just people of different cultures,” says Lee, “but people who don’t feel as if they belong to their society, or as if their family is somehow theirs and not theirs. I think we all have the experience of some kind of estrangement.”

In this sense, Lee, Lam, and Devi say that literary work from around the world provides a way for people to experience the culture and lessons of another place.   Implied cultural meaning, however, can be lost in translation. 

“[Literature] is very hard to translate unless you have lived in both places because the cultural references will be missed,” Lee says.

Although translated work may fail to convey certain meaning, “it’s the next best thing to reading it in the original language,” Devi says. “The way to go into a place, or to the heart of a place is through literature.”

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FULL TRANSCRIPT 

SUZETTE GRILLOT, HOST: Andrew Lam, Krys Less, Ananda Devi, welcome to World Views.

ANDREW LAM, KRYS LEE, ANANDA DEVI: Thank you.

GRILLOT: So Andrew let me start with you. Your background is Vietnamese. You're Vietnamese-American. And you've written essays about Vietnamese identity in the United States. Tell us about how one can really reflect their culture and identity through the written word. 

LAM: It's from reading. I grew up confused, mostly because I spoke English better than Vietnamese. Yet when I go home it is a refugee Vietnamese language culture. And when I'm in school it is an American culture. In my household my name is Yung. In school my name is Andrew. I go as if from one country to another within the same day. And I had always found that really strange, yet my Andrew persona seems to be the only one that survives in English, in the daytime. And writing and reading was a way to begin to understand how I can marry this night and day kind of dichotomy. And I found that it was language, from reading other people's experiences that you can begin to bridge what you didn't think was bridgeable. I had a hard time explaining just talking to my friends at school what I was like at home, or [explaining] my culture back in Vietnam. But when you started writing and reading other text that had that similar experience, you begin to realize it's possible to use the written language to express one's self and somehow make the two polar worlds bridge and connect.

GRILLOT: Andrew that's very interesting. Krys, you are of South Korean descent. How does what Andrew is talking about in terms of his confusion in living these two different lives at one time and how literature helped him kind of bridge that gap, does that resonate with you at all in your experience?

LEE: Certainly. The story is very familiar as is the way I experience my childhood in America as well.  Growing up in a very conservative, Christian, Korean family where my mother didn't speak any English at all. But I was one of a returning group of people who has gone back to their homeland. And I live in South Korea now and have spent more than half my life out of America to this point. And I found that returning comes with, creates a different kind of story in the sense that the confusion is really no longer there because both of them - both these countries and both these worlds- are mine and yet they aren't. You end up somewhere in between the two. But I kind of embrace that in between. I think even the title of my book. Drifting House, which was the title, was very much a place where we all inhabit. Not just people of different cultures, but people who don't feel as if they belong to their society, or somehow feel as if their family is somehow theirs and not theirs. I think we all have the experience of some kind of estrangement. Culture and race is one way to look at it, but there's so many other ways that we experience this phenomenon. So I think of myself as a kind of drifting house, and home is wherever you happen to be at that moment and you make it yours. 

GRILLOT: Very interesting. And Ananda, I would like to bring you in on this discussion. Although you're from Mauritius, right? But you write in two different languages - French and English. You've won many awards. You've written fiction, but you also engage in socio-anthropological studies. What you're hearing here from Krys and Andrew, how does this reflect what you experience and in what you've studied in terms of the sociological, anthropological issues of identity and culture and how it transcends borders and is expressed in literature? But also as someone who is growing up and coming from a multicultural background and working in different languages - all three of you working in different languages. What do you have to say about that?

DEVI:  Well I absolutely agree that coming from this multicultural background at the same times as it opens up your ideas, your thoughts, your way of looking at the world and at the same time makes identity and language a core component of who you are and a core questioning because all your life you're constantly questioning yourself about where your place is, if you have a place in society. For example, today I find it very difficult to say what my mother tongue is because the language that my mother used to speak to me from birth onwards is a South Indian language. My great-grandparents emigrated from India to Mauritius, but as I was growing up in a multi-lingual society I went to school in a completely Westernized education. French and English were the two languages that I learned. So from the age of five onwards I was only speaking French at home, so my parents started speaking French to me as well, sort of for integration purposes. But then I lost a little. So in a way I have creole, which is the lingua franca of Mauritius, but it's part of the story. I have French. I cannot say it's my mother tongue, but it's the tongue of my heart because it's the language in which I write. I write very, very little in English. It's mostly fifteen books I've written now in French. And I have this aunt where Togo is and my mother has since passed away so in a way there will always be that void of where it is. So writing, in a way, fills it, because you're constantly questioning yourself but also peopling yourself with others. You're filling that void and I felt that finally literature has become my mother tongue. But at the same time I have always felt that literature, books have two components. One is the form, language style. And one is the substance. And what I write about is very much fed by my anthropological, socio-anthropological studies. Coming from Mauritius, which is in the Indian Ocean and east of Africa, Madagascar. So I was growing up at the time of independence, the fight for independence. So all this history, this very torn apart history of the ancient history of slavery, of indentureship, plus the fight for independence and colonialism do feed into my work. So the two of them come together through those two components. 

GRILLOT: It's fascinating to hear what all of you are saying about, as Ananda was talking about, a 'void' or as Krys was talking about an 'in between.' Living kind of between cultures or being comfortable with that in-between world.. These multiple identities that all of you have developed as being multicultural and working in different languages and living in different places. But I'd like to relate that to this notion of literature and translation. Those of us who largely read one language, as many US citizens do, that we derive a tremendous benefit from being able to read the works that you're referring to in translation. The works that were produced first in Vietnamese or Korean or French. And then presented to us in translation and vice versa. Those that were written by American authors or those English speaking authors that are then translated into other languages. Is there something that can get lost in that translation? In terms of these identities that you're talking about and the social and cultural messages that are really important and come across in native languages. Is it difficult to translate those and fully comprehend them? Or is there just so far that we can go but at least we get that far? 

LEE:  Well, I'm translating a book right now for Houghton Mifflin and I've translated a lot of poetry as well. And when I see the world of translators around me in Korea, I think what does have more risk of getting lost - in some ways you're going to lose something inevitably - but it's less often the sociological context or the world of the novel or the poem than it is the voice of the novel or the poem. And that has a lot to do with [asking] is the translator a person who understands the sensibility of the language? Both languages - Korean and English, or Farsi and in English? And that seems to be more important in some ways. There are some things that, you know, if it seems that the world is less accessible or harder for a reader outside of that culture to contextualize, I think within the world at least it's usually implied and occasionally they're going to be using footnotes. But it's often actually the voice, particularly some books that are very difficult to translate with regional accents or a history that is almost inaccessible in some ways because it assumes greater knowledge. Those works are often not translated or often have a very difficult time being translated. And that's the real pity. The attempts aren't made because it's so difficult. 

GRILLOT: Does that sound like something you would identify with, Andrew? How do you translate that feeling of confusion and finding where you belong?

LAM:  It's very hard to translate unless you have lived in both places, because the cultural references will be missed. On the other hand, I've read and watched movies that are dubbed. Having understood both languages I get really frustrated when the translation is so bad that you feel like it's completely misunderstood. But there's a side story to all this. Very few books actually get translated. There are a ton of beautiful, wonderful materials that don't get read in the United States simply because they are deemed not commercial or not sellable enough. The real pity is we think we are reading the world, but we are reading very little of the world. That's the sad part. Being cosmopolitan, being someone who multilingual, i feel so enriched and blessed to be able to read in other languages in which I can immerse [myself] in the full aspect of that culture. And I think there are really things that are lost in translation.

GRILLOT: That's what's the bottom line. What's really critical is being able to immerse yourself fully into that other culture and another language, like you've been able to do Ananda. 

DEVI:  Yes, and I must say that translators who've translated my work or who I've worked with are usually people who are passionate about their work. So they will try everything to bring together both this content and the voice. And they do fantastic work because they really put themselves into it. Poetry is the most difficult thing to translate. Very often poets translate poets. But even those who translate novels are very, very passionate about it. So it is a pity that there's not more work in translation being published in the states. It's the next best thing from reading it in the original language. Even if something is lost, you're gaining much more. Unfortunately in America it's, as Andrew was saying, there's very, very little work in translation that's published and read, whereas in Europe it's the opposite. There's a very, very large corpus of work in translation. So I think fiction brings a worldview that is, at the same time it's a built and an imaginary worldview, but there's a core of truth of it that you can't get when you use iTunes five-minute news items everyday on the news. The way to go into a place, to the heart of a place is through literature.

GRILLOT: All of you have inspired me so much. I’m ready to go pick up a book now that we're done. Ananda, Krys, and Andrew, thank you so much for joining us onWorld Views.

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