Book Review

A Look Inside

Andrew Lam has been writing of the Vietnamese immigrant experience for quite some time now, and his book Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora is a collection of personal essays that have appeared in various publications over the past 15 years.

As a first-generation Vietnamese American, Lam is able to write about the full spectrum of the Vietnamese immigrant experience, ranging from memories of an idyllic childhood in Saigon to his family’s painful post-war exile in America. Lam’s insights into Asian American life are reflected in candid, witty anecdotes that reveal much about the difficulties of living in two cultures. In Child of Two Worlds, Lam recounts his experiences as a refugee youngster still struggling to master English. He writes: “Speaking English, I had a markedly different personality than when speaking Vietnamese. … No sorrow, no sadness, no cataclysmic grief clung to my new language.” In a later essay, Lam describes how knowledge of this “new language” inspired him to give up dreams of medical school to become a writer, much to his parents’ dismay. His writing life, he states, rests on “the task of marrying two otherwise dissimilar and, often, conflicting narratives.”

Lam’s most powerful writing focuses on the war’s effect on his family. Notes on a Warrior’s Son displays the wit, profundity and emotional honesty that have come to characterize his best writing. Lam describes how his father, a former general in the South Vietnamese army, contemplates suicide during the fall of Saigon, while Lam and his family are whisked away to Guam by helicopter. For a three-star general, suicide is the only option in a culture that emphasizes absolute loyalty to one’s country. In a strange twist of fate, however, his father decides not to commit suicide. Years later, contemplating his father’s decision, Lam writes:

“I’m glad he did not honor the Confucian ideals enough to die for them. I’m glad that love moved him as much as duty and honor did. … I think wanting to live to honor life itself — no matter how wretched, even at the cost of humiliation and loss of honor — takes a greater kind of courage.”

Yet Lam cannot bring himself to utter these words to his father in person. So he does the next best thing: he writes them. For Lam, writing is a “filial impulse,” a way to reconcile the tragedies of a war-torn era with the optimism of the American dream.

Paul Kim lives in Seattle, Wash. where he is a graduate student in the Korean Studies program at the University of Washington. He is currently at work on a book of poems.