Tintin en Californie

Andrew Lam is among the most cheerful people I have known. One is easily attracted to his nature as to sunlight. Some of Andrew’s cheerfulness is discipline. Some of his humor is darkness.

Andrew Lam witnessed the fall of Saigon. What the child saw was that everything can fall down. His essays in this volume are about the consequences of tragedy, and sobriety is imposed upon them. But behind them, or behind Andrew, is some comic resolution to survive. That much I can say.

There is something puckish about Andrew—I mean this in precisely the Shakespearian sense—something impish, something sprightly, some goblin fascination with foolish mortality marks his regard. Puckish, too, in his relish of the world, and, once more, puckish in his contemplative aspect; his long, dispassionate regard of impermanence.

Some people who have seen what Andrew has seen would foreswear humor or recoil from it thereafter. Whereas Andrew has cultivated wit—repartee, sarcasm, irony, the writer’s knowledge that words can be constructed so as to topple on cue. It may be that Andrew is comic in English, but not otherwise. Or is that even possible?

Andrew once told me of his affection for the adventures of Tintin, the French comic book series. (“When I am blue, I re-read those stories in French, as I read them when I was a boy, and dreamed of the world.”)

Tintin, an adolescent boy with a cresting curl on the top of his head, is a “famous reporter”; wears a trench coat; travels to exotic locales— to Russia, to the Congo, to Tibet—rendered by the artist, Hergé, in a Japan-influenced style that is characteristically French. Tintin takes with him his suitcase, his dog, Milou, and a salty sea captain.

You would think someone so violently separated from home by history would be forever in quest of a permanent address. But Andrew Lam craves movement. Perhaps it is a simple equation. Perhaps because his youth was characterized by impermanence, impermanence has come to represent youth.

In an essay on National Public Radio, Andrew described for listeners the occasion of his having to renew his American passport. The man of forty felt regret at relinquishing his old passport photograph, thus relinquishing the beauty of the twenty year old depicted there. Finally, the older man exchanges youth because he values more the boast of experience.

On the morning I write these words in California, Andrew is at a writer’s conference in Sydney. A couple of months ago, he emailed a digital photograph of himself (alongside a distressed-looking camel) from North Africa. A few weeks after that, Andrew was on board United Airlines’ inaugural flight from San Francisco to Saigon, the city the communists have renamed Ho Chi Minh City.

Two years ago, Andrew took an American television crew to his childhood home—an abandoned, shuttered, still-beautiful villa. Andrew’s commentary for the film is Proustian in its consideration of fluid time, fluid nature, fluid history.

Along with various other complexities, Andrew Lam carries with him three languages—Vietnamese, French, and English. He is nostalgic about French—which was, he says, “my real childhood language—my real childhood.”

“In a strange way, Vietnamese and English moved on with me to America, but French stayed behind in the villa and the garden of Dalat and the schoolyard of the Lycée Yersin.”

In Andrew’s memory there are haughty, aristocratic grandmothers, and there is—still neatly arranged on his bed—the blue uniform of his colonial education. There are servants. Courtyards. Helicopters.

Andrew Lam’s father was a high-ranking general in the South Vietnamese army. Despite the privilege and comforts of the haute-bourgeoisie that surrounded the family, Andrew knew his father was in constant danger. As Saigon fell, General Lam refused to abandon Vietnam unless, until, news of the South’s surrender was announced on the radio.

Andrew did not know if he would see his father again when, on April 28, 1975, with his mother and sister and one of his grandmothers, Andrew fled Vietnam. Andrew was eleven years old.

In the next panel, as in a comic book, Andrew is on the other side of the horizon. There are huge cumulous clouds and there is sunlight on a rayon wall—“a village of tents”. He is in a refugee camp in Guam, eating a ham sandwich and drinking milk—“my first American meal.”

After Guam, Tintin is transported to California, to an American junior high school. Andrew Lam is bewildered as well as bemused by the amiable chaos of the American classroom. After the formalities of the lycée, he finds himself faced with having to learn disrespect. It takes one year of American schooling for Andrew to learn to stop bowing to his teacher.

With the pleasure that is, as much as anything, his motif, Andrew will rehearse for you a lunatic lyric from his American childhood:

My baloney has a first name, It’s O-S-C-A-R; My baloney has a second name, it’s M-E-Y-E-R.

Andrew learned American English from such ditties.

I can imagine Andrew Lam’s family, newly-arrived from Vietnam, in a northern California suburban house. Television fills the silence at dinner.

So different was this language of America—so glib, so loud—
broadcasting “love” at every opportunity.

Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Meyer wiener, That is what I’d really like to be. ‘Cause if I were an Oscar Meyer wiener, Everyone would be in love with me.

“So different,” Andrew remarks, “from all the chopstick cultures. My mother has never said to me, ‘I love you.’ Or: ‘You are so dear to me.’ Behavior is everything, not words. My mother tells me she loves me by cooking my favorite fish for dinner. And I express my love back to her by eating the fish.”

During those high school years, Andrew lost his grasp on Vietnamese. Mouthfuls of consonants began to reform his tongue, his teeth, his lips. Andrew became a confident speaker of American English. The most telling mark of his progress was this: “I was able to make kids laugh . . .”

In college, Andrew began to think about writing. There was family precedent for taking up the artist’s life. A poet-uncle survives in Hanoi. One of his grandfathers learned to play the violin in Paris, “before coming home to die of an opium overdose at the age of thirty-four. Ah, there are so many things I cannot write in essays.”

What things, Andrew?

“About ghosts. Sexuality. Religion. Unlike my fiction, my essays are not simply egotistical. They are written from a sense of responsibility.”

When Andrew Lam began to write for a living, he wrote as a journalist—a journalist with literary flair. At Pacific News Service, Andrew filed a newspaper essay in which he rehearsed for readers his memory of the smell of barbequed dog. Andrew believed he was writing securely within a Swiftian vein, but more swift was the disapproval of American readers.

One of my first memories of Andrew is of the young man I heard laughing over a reader’s appalled response to that article. That was the first time I heard the laugh—the sublime, high-humored scorn of the monkey-god. There was no discernable humor in the young man’s eyes. The sound was most like the defiant laughter of the child who has willfully tumbled a tower of blocks.

Andrew writes publicly only in English. He says, “When I started writing, it was never to the Vietnamese, but to the outsider.” It is a difficult race to run, to be the first or among the first of one’s dewey-decimal kind to have a strong public voice.

But as he grew older, Andrew realized a responsibility to address a new generation of U.S. born Vietnamese who were without his memory of war and loss.

This generational distance strikes Andrew most forcefully when he returns to Vietnam and meets teenagers for whom the war—his war—is as distant as some grandfather’s incoherent mumble: “I ask a teenager on the street of Saigon what she thinks of the war.”

“Which war, uncle?”

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Andrew’s favorite among Tintin’s adventures is “Tintin au Tibet”, wherein Tintin rescues a Chinese boy whose plane has crashed in the Himalayas.

“Reading out the dialogue of this story has such a calming effect on me. I feel connected to my childhood in Vietnam which, in turn, was connected, through Tintin, to a larger world. . . ”

So let us imagine Andrew Lam, the author of these essays, a citizen of that larger world, seeking the consolation of his childhood companion— the brave and resourceful Tintin, famous reporter, so far from home.

Perfume Dreams is available on Amazon and at heydaybooks.com