I wrote this piece – still a draft – for a textbook on personal essay…
thought i should share …

Finding A Voice, Finding A Future

I’ve written short stories, poems, and news analyses. But the personal essay remains my preferred medium. The writer’s voice, when honest and frank, provides an emotional intimacy with the reader no other genres can. In my case—a refugee who fled from a war-torn country and became an American writer who travels the world—the personal often bares witness to the historical, as rivers are to the sea. The essay, indeed, can be all at once familiar, conversational, and reportorial. It can persuade without seemingly trying to. And, arguably, there is as much drama in a personal essay as in any piece of fiction.

Even before I could speak a full English sentence, even before I could distinguish “bear” from “bare,” I wanted to tell my story. Fresh from the Guam refugee camp, I tried my best with hand gestures and a few words, and when words and gestures failed, with color chalks and the blackboard during recess. I’d tell my seventh grade classmates about my childhood in Vietnam—my helicopter rides as an army brat, the Tet celebrations full of relatives and friends, the smell of ripened rice fields at dusk—what I would never experience again.

I was a shy boy. But in America, that was no longer true. I instinctively knew what I could not articulate: That I was not fully part of the New World unless I could bring my full biography—what I lost, what was robbed from me and my family at the end of the Vietnam war—to bare.

It was frustrating at first. I learned to read Vietnamese at four and French at seven. But my first few months in America I didn’t understand much. All I could muster were “No understand!“ and “I don’t know!“ So I bought a used typewriter and typed out the novel The Wind in the Willows and then copied newspapers articles. I learned how to type and read at the same time.

In the morning in the shower, I would practice my English. I would annunciate certain words learned the day before and listen to their vibrations. “Business,“ I would pronounce. “Stress!“ I would shout. “Necessary!“ I could almost see the words with their sharp edges and round arches taking shape in the steamy air. I would try my best to rule over them.

Did I know then that I would grow up to a writer and essayist? No. But I did find the sound of my American voice intriguing. I was going through puberty when I came to America, and I distinctly heard from my own voice the promises of newness, a future. In college, timidly at first, I began to write down my Vietnamese memories. I began to fancy myself a writer.

Many years passed…

I think of that tongue-tied child at the blackboard in seventh grade drawing pictures of helicopters and rice paddies trying to tell his story. He’s found his medium; but he’s still doggedly at it.

Andrew Lam is the author of Perfume Dreams