As a writer, it’s rare to get thoughtful reactions to my work yet it’s been a blessing since my book Perfume Dreams came out. Here are a few essays written by students at the New School in NY.. beautiful, heartfelt, and sophisticated…

Thanks Randy Fertel for sending them..

1.In our class, the role of storytelling for the exile has thus far seemed limited to helping him adapt and helping him make sense of trauma, but a third role, that storytelling can create exile for the storyteller, has been part of our curriculum since our reading of The Scarlet Letter, and then with Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The Sun Also Rises. Hawthorne, Joyce, Twain, and Hemingway, like Lam, created a state of exile for themselves through their writing, beyond imposed exile. The writer suffers this mixed blessing-curse: in his ability to express painful truths he creates a division between himself and society, and between him and loved ones.

Andrew Lam, in his essays, writes his biography the way other authors wrote themselves into their fictional characters. His exile must be profound. This is what I long to ask of him, about his duel exile, from Vietnam, and from his family. This is what struck me as most painfully sad about his story, perhaps because I read his essays during a time of personal tragedy and loss.

So, to Andrew, I ask the questions I could not ask last week: Why do you write? Are you compelled because you can, and you do so well? Is it because you believe the truth must be told? Do you sense a difference in the world since you have added your story? If you could have maintained your filial bonds by trading silence at home with your voice outside, would you have done so? Would you have put down your pen?

You are described as “puckish” in the introduction to Perfume Dreams. Our class would like to give you our own label and call you “Trickster.” You deserve the honor of the title, to be sure. You confuse the distinction between boundary lines, you talk of no home, you view everything with an all-seeing eye, you embrace grandmothers and teenagers and broken refugees in your journey, you lick the ear of a friend in protest of her carelessness, you disrupt this world with your words and cause people to reconsider the state of things.

But I hesitate in giving you this title. Something tugs at my heart to know that you, unlike Trickster, have idyllic origins, that you sat at the feet of your grandparents and listened to them recite poetry to each other, that you were lifted and embraced by your laughing father when he returned home in a helicopter, that you drifted down the Perfume River in your mother’s arms, listening to your father tell stories.

I am always in awe at the suffering of artists, that they may speak the unspeakable. You seem to have sacrificed much for your words. For that, I, your reader, am grateful. I am glad your smile has become not sad but knowing. I read those final words of the book and try to consider what I know about life and death to help me in my grief. I know nothing, maybe, and also everything. If I trust this knowledge I find strength.

2. Suzanne
Before our meeting with Andrew Lam tonight, I thought I would address the roles of storytelling outlined in Question #1. My job, of course, was made easier by how much he shared about his writing life.

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.

As a child refugee, new to America, storytelling certainly helps Lam negotiate the foreign environment. He plays the role of child storyteller: “My popularity was partly because I told family stories, wartime stories. Vietnam was the first television war and even children in America knew something, if only vaguely, about it. It gave me an entry to the American imagination…” (36). Lam uses stories to appear knowledgeable about something bigger and more worldly than the classroom, while necessarily adopting the style of his peers in order to do so. His reputation back at home is unflattering.

“The blabbermouth aired family laundry for a place in the sun” (36). Lam’s familiarly childish method backfires, however, when he goes so far as to put on his father’s uniform, aping the former hero, becoming a life-sized illustration. Here is where storytelling becomes a source of a new form of exile, from family, even as Lam draws closer to feeling at home in his new world. “I felt I had crossed some invisible line and a part of me was offended by my own profanity” (38). At this moment, Lam realizes his separation from his father is caused by, characterized by, and ultimately cemented by the language of stories. By shaping his past into stories, with the intention of entertainment and assimilation, Lam has lost a direct connection to that past.

Learning the English language is crucial to Lam’s success as a storyteller. At home, however, English is not welcome. On speaking English in a Vietnamese household, Lam writes, “The exterior landscape belongs to America, strange and nonsensical, not their true home. Inside, many Vietnamese refugees tend to raise their children with stern rules – the way they themselves were raised back home. Vietnamese is spoken, with familial personal pronouns…lacing every sentence to remind the speakers and the listeners of their status in the Confucian hierarchical scheme of things” (56). Children like Lam end up in between – living in one language outside, and another inside. The natural divide gives rise to tension, and language is something of a weapon on both sides. Lam uses English to cut his father’s power; his father uses Vietnamese to remind Lam of the need for loyalty. “Speak Vietnamese or don’t speak at all” (37). (It is interesting that he does not write in Vietnamese even now, continuing “not to speak at all” in a sense.)

Despite the divide sprung from the language of stories, Lam decides to pursue storytelling formally. The divide is thus deepened. “It occurred to me then that for children of Asian immigrants who covet an expressive, creative life, there is often a hidden price more costly than the regular fares…and it is one that wafts with the faint odor of dishonor…If he is to strive into the wilderness called the world of arts and literature, then he is to strive alone…I kept my distance” (41). Lam joyfully finds his voice and purpose in writing. Yet that writing is linked to journeying beyond, as if repeating the past as a refugee. It makes you wonder; was Lam destined to be a writer, or did becoming a refugee transform him into a language wanderer? As he said to us tonight, and I’m paraphrasing, talent and experience are different…experiencing tragedy does not necessarily make one destined to be a writer. So perhaps he sees himself as a writer first, before Vietnamese, American, or refugee?

By becoming a journalist in particular, Lam notably tells the stories of others. And in so doing, he continues to grapple with the strangeness of such a position. Of the Good Guys tale, Lam writes, “I am also aware that I will somehow benefit from their tragedy…I, the one who has a public voice, am about to gain a measure of notoriety as the teller of their sensational tale. Irrational as it may be, I feel like a cannibal” (59). Lam is a natural choice for covering the story, as he is the appropriate and willing visitor to Vietnamese refugee camps. His Vietnamese background and language, the past he tried to shed through an American childhood, ironically give him license to enter that past again in order to write about it. But the way is unclear. “Was I an activist, an interpreter, or a journalist? So many people with so many stories and I was the only receptacle for their tragedies” (83).

In response to Tuyet, who wishes Lam to marry her and rescue her from the camp, he writes, “Instead of doing the story I was sent to Hong Kong to do, I would end up married to it. It was not a narrative that I had imagined for myself…I had yearned to be free from the past. This was why I had become a writer, wasn’t it? Or, was this – the past, the war, its aftermath – the story I was ready to tell and, by saying yes to Tuyet, willing to live with for the rest of my life?” (87)

This is Lam’s ultimate question as a storyteller. What is the story he is trying to tell? And how can he remain close enough to it to do it justice, while far enough from it to retain perspective and health? He stated tonight that, “The more I tell of history, the more distant I feel from that history.” Still, according to Lam, telling is better than not telling. Language is crucial in recovery from trauma, and clearly a ground upon which to decide how to move forward and what to bring with you while you do. (Lam says of the refugees who face Chinese interpreters who had no adept Vietnamese language skills, “The people aren’t allowed to tell their stories” (80) and they suffer for it.) True, there are consequences to storytelling – a destiny of traveling in between, a distance from family and past – but the story itself is too crucial to fear the consequences. It seems that Lam himself is the story he’s trying to tell. “I am evidence that the outside world exists” (130).
Sarah M.

3. “Anything is bearable as long as you can make a story out of it” (45). Stories connect the past with the present and help the teller to navigate a new environment. Stories can also distance the teller from his past and blur traditional roles and boundaries. Andrew Lam demonstrates that storytelling can have different functions and results. Perfume Dreams encompasses numerous stories: Andrew’s personal incidents, his family’s struggles, and the collective experiences of the Vietnamese people.
Andrew used stories to navigate through his exiled life and to create a new and distinct identity as an American teenager. He utilized his family’s war stories as a popularity tool. His exotic Vietnamese heritage and his exposure to the war intrigued his American peers who anxiously awaited his next violent war tale. Andrew exemplified the immigrant’s dual imperatives: to find the usable past and make it new. Trivializing and exaggerating his father’s stories, Andrew used his past to create a new identity. He states, “I found that I had a sense of timing and could give a twist to the stories my father told to make them more interesting or dramatic” (37). He was the quirky, funny Vietnamese kid with the great stories. However, by putting on his father’s sacred general’s uniform, Andrew went too far. Andrew removed himself from his father’s voice and the stories’ true traumatic meaning. As a teenager, Andrew wanted that distance from his past. Assimilation into American culture left no room for his Vietnamese history, except when it lent itself to his popularity quest. By telling his family’s stories, he ultimately exiled himself from his Vietnamese past.

Later in his life, Andrew realized that storytelling left him with a sense of displacement, of not belonging to any particular group. As a teenager, telling war stories exiled him from his family who felt he “aired their dirty laundry” by exposing their past.

However, without these stories, his popularity crutch and the connection to his peers would vanish. Even with the stories, Andrew would never be totally American. He existed in an identity limbo not fully Vietnamese, but not completely American. Andrew’s experience as a journalist in the Hong Kong Detention Center triggered a re-examination of his role and identity. He traveled to the Center as a journalist, hoping to bring back refugees’ stories. Upon arriving, he realized that these “boat people” viewed him as the savior who would take their stories to the American masses. Andrew admits he was not prepared for this role: “So many people with so many stories and I was the only receptacle for their tragedies” (83).

Previously, Andrew had always identified himself as a refugee, forced to flee Vietnam after the war. After hearing the “boat people’s” stories, he no longer considered his relatively easy transition from Vietnam to America to constitute refugee status. He is a successful Vietnamese-American, living the American Dream in California. While in Hong Kong, he missed America and his life back in California. After absorbing these refugees’ tragic stories, he felt guilty for his somewhat charmed and easy life. They were his native countrymen, yet he was not able to relate to their experiences. Last night, Andrew said that perhaps he was able to tell these stories because of his outsider status.

Those who directly experienced the atrocities were too traumatized to find their voice: to experience tragedy, does not make one a storyteller. Because Andrew was spared much of the terror and hardship the boat people experienced, he was able to narrate their stories. This suggests that one must be somewhat removed from the situation or story being told; one must have a position in both the audience’s and the victim’s respective worlds. It becomes the storyteller’s job to liaise these two independent existences.

Now, as a writer and storyteller, Andrew embraces his various, often conflicting, identities. He accepted his role and undertook the task of joining both his Vietnamese and American selves. He realizes that he does not have to be one or the other; true American experiences are often the fusion of many identities. After all, America’s history is based on being an immigrant country. Andrew took his usable past, reworked it, and made it new: Perfume Dreams illustrates his growth as a storyteller. He is no longer the naïve boy making up fantastic stories, yet he is not the Vietnamese savior. He is aware of his limitations but writes with a knowledge and clarity that only one who has experienced both sides of life’s coin can understand.
John (from LA)

4. My post addresses Andrew Lam as Trickster.
“Yes Andrew. You really must read Trickster.” That is what I kept thinking to myself as the joking exchanges between Randy and Andrew about the trickster figure occurred. So much of this text coincided with the ideas of the trickster that I sometimes wondered if “Trickster” was the core basis for this text, but on the contrary it was the personal experience of Andrew Lam that forms this work.

Although there is much I’d like to say, I would rather let the text speak for itself.

“If one cannot escape one’s history one ought to embrace it fully, dear Remigo. But by embrace I do not mean to dwell in the losses or to live in the constant state o mourning or, worse still, to be bound by lost glories. The more mature response to one’s tragedy is not hatred nor resentment but spiritual resilience with which one can, again and again, struggle to transcend one’s own biographical limitations. History is trapped in me, indeed, but history is also mine to work out, to disseminate, to discern and appropriate, and finally to transform into aesthetic self-expression.” (Page 45)

This brief paragraph, seemed to me, to be the core of Andrew’s work. But not just Andrew’s work; it states the key goal of the trickster figure and, for me, this course. The trickster is a person always on the road. Andrew as an exile embraces his identity as person on the road—much like the entrepreneur Phuong Ang in “Viet Kieu”. As such they are able to weave between, and throughout both, if not multiple, cultures and judge (and critique) them from a perspective members solely within the cultures cannot.

But, as we discussed in class, just because one has this “on the road” experience, does not mean they are automatically tricksters. Some who arrive from the road choose to bundle and close their doors. Andrew mentions this when he discusses the inside and outside lives of immigrants. Inside is the truth; outside the pretense for their new environment. “Love, Money, Prison, Sex, Revenge” is essentially about this point. In it, Andrew recognizes, “while I myself might have learned to walk the strange Vietnamese-American hyphen, it continues to hurl other young and hapless Vietnamese down into a dark and bottomless pit.” (57)

On Tuesday night, Andrew stated that he no longer feels hyphenated. It seems that Andrew has matured to a point where he no longer feels as someone standing on the precipice of two words, but has accepted his role as someone who walks the line. Regardless of where he is now, it is important to note, that a trickster can never be trickster, or rather, a journey person, can never understand their role, without self-awareness. This self-awareness calls the trickster to step back from his surroundings and not let themselves be sucked in by it, but instead take it into him. Only by using the workable past can the trickster become the culture hero.

Andrew does this just this.

“History is trapped in me, indeed, but history is also mine to work out, to disseminate, to discern and appropriate and finally to transform into aesthetic self-expression.”

4. Life in exile can be ultimate freedom when one is surrounded by ideas and places that do not wholly define him as a human being. Through his storytelling—his weaving together of languages, ideas, time, people, etc.—Andrew Lam embraces exile as enlightenment. As an immigrant, he is aware of survival techniques and how to assimilate within new worlds.

As a reverberating reflection of war and terror and lost innocence, Andrew holds with him a seriousness about life embedded in joy and laughter. He is aware, but distant from both his childhood home in Vietnam, and his adult life in America. There is a religious concept that speaks to being in the world, but not of it. In his storytelling, Andrew transcends a world full of division and limits, of war and soldiers, of land and boarders.

Equating the act of his writing to his mother’s morning prayers, Andrew says, “Each morning I write. I long for freedom. I yearn for memory. And only this morning as I type these words does it occur to me that mine too, strangely enough, is a kind of filial impulse, an effort to reconcile between spring and autumn, between my agricultural past and my cosmopolitan future. Still, I shudder at the irony” (16). The world Andrew embodies is one of observation and reflection; his world fuses and blurs the lines of disparity and joy, love and hate, good and evil. He does this by using his past to aide the telling his present. In his telling, he heals himself and the world around him.

“My sense of home these days seems to have less to do with geography than imagination and memories. Home is portable if one is in commune with one’s soul” (15). Andrew tells his stories to explain his world to others and perhaps to solidify it for himself. His world is not Vietnam and it’s not America; yet it is both of these lands and more. Andrew finds his home through writing, through telling his stories and the stories of otherwise forgotten people. He finds his home through honesty and personal experience—experience he had built upon by exposing himself as much as possible to his new lands, new languages, new people and cultures. There is a sadness in Andrew’s stories because they tell of a lost innocence; a child’s naïve and genuine wonder of a forever-wholesome and whom-like existence. But there is also hope along every utterance in Andrew’s words that stems directly from the act of telling.

In his Letter to a Young Refugee, he preaches to the young, scared child. “For though the story of how you suffered, how you lost you home, your loved ones, and how you triumphed is not new, it must always be told. And it must, but all means, be heard. It is the only light we ever have against the overwhelming darkness” (22).
Abby

5. Andrew Lam positions himself at the nexus of two sets of very interesting margins; the cultural transplant raised with both an ‘American’ sensibility and roots in Vietnamese culture and at the forefront of ‘new media.’ As most of us know, new media represents the shift from traditional journalism and print forms to an interactive, do-it-yourself, relativistic form of cultural expression (often via digital means).

As Lam exemplifies, one margin seems to lend itself naturally to another, in that when one can slip through into various forms of expression, language, cultural representations, one can also apply this kind of ‘multi-tasking’ to the creative and professional fields as well. Lam’s perspective as an exile is naturally fractured, multi-layered, culturally complex. This is exactly the kind of information new media is interested in not only providing, but provoking.

In an early study of new media, W. Russell Neuman states: “We are witnessing the evolution of a universal interconnected network of audio, video, and electronic text communications that will blur the distinction between interpersonal and mass communication and between public and private communication.”

The lines between home and away are blurred, the sense of personal trauma and public cultural commentary begin to merge. Perhaps the idea of new media is actually just a renewed return to what has always been an aspect of human existence; the act of storytelling.

The meaning of exile has always been expressed and linked closely with the act of storytelling, in that it is the narrative of the journey away from home that offers a point of entry for all of us to sense exile. The exile invents stories, finds a willing audience for his stories, meets people that he creates as characters for the stories, threading it all together as his own personal narrative, sometimes regardless of its relation to fact. For the exile, like Lam, it isn’t the facts of the experience that are of ultimate use, it is the cultivation of one’s identity as an exile, the process of taking in and being without. Thus, especially in the modern sense, we can see the exiled condition as that which pertains to an original divorce from reality (home), a subsequent turning inward that abstracts home, and an emergence outward to give voice to the usable past. The narrative, the act of storytelling, trumps life (and trauma), thus is less and less informed by actual events and more influenced by ideas of events, actions, movements.

Lam’s position as a current exile, telling his story from the perspective of the global village, using the means of new media, is a perfect vantage point to see what might come of the exile’s story in the future. Perhaps it might invoke Dostoevsky’s words, as he imagines that “soon we shall