Andrew Lam

Andrew Lam at Petra

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The Vietnamese-American writer. Andrew Lam, was born in South Vietnam, where he led a privileged life as the son of General Lâm Quang Thi of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. He attended Lycée Yersin in Dalat.  Lam left Vietnam with his family during the fall of Saigon in April 1975. His books, Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, which is about the problems of identity of a Vietnamese living in the United States, and East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres, have placed him at the forefront of literary creations by foreign exiles living in America. His first collection of short stories, Birds of Paradise, is due out next year. In addition to his highly praised books, Lam also has contributed more than 60 commentaries to NPR’s All Things Considered. His essays appear in on-line journals and blogs and in dozens of newspapers across the country, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Baltimore Sun, the Atlanta Journal, and the Chicago Tribune. And he has written essays for magazines including Mother Jones, The Nation, San Francisco Focus, Proult Journal, In Context, Utne Magazine, California Magazine.  Widely anthologized, his short stories are taught in many universities and colleges and have appeared in literary journals including Manoa Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Nimrod International, Michigan Quarterly West, Zyzzyva, Transfer Magazine, Alsop Review, and Terrain. Lam’s awards include the Society of Professional Journalist “Outstanding Young Journalist Award” (1993) and “Best Commentator” in 2004, The Media Alliance Meritorious awards (1994), The World Affairs Council's Excellence in International Journalism Award (1992), the Rockefeller Fellowship in UCLA (1992), and the Asian American Journalist Association National Award (1993; 1995). He was honored and profiled on KQED television in May 1996 during Asian American heritage month. Lam was a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University during the academic year 2001-02, studying journalism. He has lectured widely at many universities and institutions, including Harvard, Yale, Brown, UCLA, USF, UC Berkeley, University of Hawaii, William and Mary, Hong Kong, and Loyola university. He was featured in the documentary “My Journey Home,” which aired on PBS nationwide on April 7, 2004, and in which a film crew followed him back to his homeland Vietnam.  In 2010 he co-produced a segment for the Jim Lehrer News Hour on Vietnamese Americans in Vietnam. And in May, 2011, he was a presenter at the national conference of the Association of Asian American Studiees in New Orleans. He will join expert in exile Literature and Vietnam War literature, Randy Fertel, in a discusison of The Literature of Exile in the Global Village during
Words & Music, 2011.

PRAISE FOR ANDREW LAM'S WORK

Perfume Dreams is, to me, a storybook. Lam’s words, even the title, give me the chills. There are ghosts at work in this book, figures and objects and charred photographic remains. They move from page to page, essay to essay, rearing up repeatedly. The thick passport. The umbilical cord. The general’s old uniform. Lam knows how to craft a compelling story. Interestingly, within a book of stories, the act of storytelling itself is a subject of Lam’s interest. He grapples with the nature of storytelling: its guidance toward understanding the past, its limitations, its potential pitfalls, and ultimately its importance in his life…as his life.
—Randy Fertel, author of The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak, A New Orleans Family Memoir

There may be braver writers on our chaotic new continent, there may be more beautiful prose on Borders Books’ memoir shelf. But it’s not likely. Andrew Lam delivers gold in Perfume Dreams. His muse may be unkind, his music may make me cry like an abandoned baby boy — but oh my, this man can talk story. In fewer than 150 pages, he tells his bright Yank story, he tells his father’s burdened Viet story, even his motherland’s tortured history. And like all profound story tellers, his voice illumines a dark place — "that treacherous space," as he calls it "between the traditional ‘We’ and the ambitious American ‘I.’”
—Asian Reporter

In his collection of 21 personal essays, East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres, Andrew Lam explores not only how the East and West have respectively changed but how they are changing in conjunction with each other. The cofounder of New American Media possesses a talent for details that lure you in page after page no matter the topic - from Naruto to tiger bone soup to talking to Ghosts. In this follow-up to his award-winning Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, Lam creates an anthology that is part memoir, part meditation and part cultural revelation.
—Audrey Magazine

Andrew Lam's collection of essays, very cleverly entitled East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres, is a timely ode to the growing Eastern influences on Western, particularly American, cultural traditions. But even more, it is a moving recollection of how Lam himself, as Eastern as could be when he arrived in San Francisco as an 11-year old refugee from the fall of Saigon, fell under the influences of the West. Lam covers the big three "e"s of everyday life -- entertainment, education, and eating -- and discusses how Western and Eastern takes on these all-importance endeavors play back and forth against each other, everything from action movies to comics and manga, to the deliciously described Pho stew, prepared worldwide now but a salient and significant memory from Lam's Vietnamese childhood. Lam takes on the education question with brave gusto, pitting the Eastern tradition of respect for the teacher, self-effacement, and community against American individualism, egotism (the self-esteem movement in education that may be leaving whole generations with inflated egos and unfulfilled potential), and freedom (he is grateful for the career of writer, a bliss he never could have discovered if he had stayed in Vietnam or on the medical career course proscribed to him by his parents). Lam writes with honesty, wit, and excitement -- this man is never bored by what he covers in his works. For him words are sacred, and are to be spent only in recording what is deserving of remembrance. Much as his mother lights the daily incense in honor of deceased relatives, Lam writes his daily words in honor of all the interesting ideas, people, activities, sights, smells, and sounds that make up his marvelous world. How lucky for us that he shares his words, and his world.
—Nina Sankovitch, Readallday.org