This piece will be part of a new collection of essays on East-West relations..

By Andrew Lam

Sitting on my writing desk is a framed little card, yellow now with age, and it tells of my American beginning. It’s a picture of a sloop, and under it the word “Sailboat” is written. Mr. Kaesleau, my first teacher in America, gave it to me along with a deck of similar cards many decades ago when I was in 7th grade, and fresh from Vietnam.

The only English I knew back home was “no money, no honey,” and “Ok, GI.” I think I learned it from the noisy Saigon prostitutes who walked the tamarind tree-lined boulevards near the Independence Palace – across from which stood my school where I was taught Vietnamese and French.

Back then I thought English was a rather terse and ugly-sounding language – you don’t have to say much to get your points across, but speak it too long you risk hurting your throat. In America that fear became true. A few months after having arrived to San Francisco, my voice started to break. The youngest in my family, I went from a sweet sounding child speaking Vietnamese to a craggy sounding teenager speaking broken English. “You sound like a hungry duck,” my older brother would say every time I opened my mouth and everyone laughed.

But not Mr. Kaesleau, who took me bowling with some other students and sometimes drove me home. He had a kind face and a thick mustache that was quite expressive, especially when he smiled and wiggled his eyebrows up and down like Groucho Marx. He gave me A’s (which didn’t count) before I could put a complete sentence together, “to encourage me,” as he would say. At lunchtime, I was one of a handful of privileged kids who were allowed to eat in his classroom and play games – speed, monopoly – and read comic books or do homework. It was a delightful sanctuary for the small kids and the “nerds,” who would sometimes get jumped by the schoolyard bullies.

For a while I was his echo. “Sailboat,” he would say while holding the card up in front of me, and “sailboat” I would repeat after him, copying his inflection and facial gestures. “Hospital,” he would say. And “hospital,” I would yell back, a little parrot.

Within a few months, I began to speak English freely, though haltingly, and outgrew the cards. I began to banter and joke with my new friends. I acquired a new personality, a sunny, sharp-tongued kid, and often Mr. Kaesleau would shake his head in wonder at the transformation.

How could he have known that I was desperately in love with my new tongue?

I embraced it the way an asphyxiated person in a dark cellar who finally managed to unlock an escape hatch. At home, in the crowded refugee apartment my family shared with my aunt’s family, we were a miserable bunch. We wore donated clothes, bought groceries with food stamps and our ratty sofa with its matching loveseat came from a nearby thrift shop.

I remember the smell of fish sauce wafting in the air and adults’ voice reminiscing of what’s gone and lost. Vietnamese was spoken there, often only in whispers and occasionally in exploded exchanges when the crowded conditions became too much to bear. Vietnam ruled that apartment. It ruled in the form of two grandmothers praying in their separate corners. It ruled in the form of muffled cries of my mother late at night. It ruled in the drunken shouts of an aunt whose husband up and left her and their four children.

In that house, overwhelmed by sadness and confusion, I fell silent. When my father, who had escaped Vietnam a few days after us and managed to final joined us in San Francisco a few months later, things improved. Within two years we even took our first vacation to Lake Tahoe and Disneyland and in another, we will have moved to our first house in America, our humble American dream.

But by then I had practically stopped speaking Vietnamese all together, becoming as mother said, and not in an affectionate way, “A little American.” It could not be helped. There was something in English that was in stark contrast with Vietnamese. The American “I” stands alone where the Vietnamese “I” is always a familial limitation, the speaker is bound by his ranking and relations to listeners. One is son, daughter, father, uncle and so on and it is understood only in the context of the communal whereas the American “I” – I think, I feel, I know – encourages personal expression.

It would take me a long, long time before I would embrace my Vietnamese again, balancing the American “I” with the Vietnamese “we,” but that, as they say, is another story.

In our refugee home, speaking English was a no-no even if speaking English had already for me becoming second nature. And sometimes, at dinnertime, I would spontaneously sing out a tv jingle with my craggy voice: “My baloney has a first name. It’s OSCAR. My baloney has a second name…” The entire family would look at me as if I were a being possessed. Needless to say, my parents constantly scolded me.

Then one day my brother said with a serious voice. “Mom and dad told you not to speak English all the time, and you didn’t listen, now look what happen. You shattered your vocal cord. That is why you sound like a duck.”

Since no one bothered to tell me about the birds and the bees, I fully believed him. I was duped for what seemed like a long time. But I remember being of two minds: while I mourned the loss of my homeland, I, at the same time, marveled at how speaking a new language could actually change me. After all, I was at an age where magic and reality still shared a porous border, and speaking English was to me like chanting magical incantations. It was indeed reshaping me from inside out.



When I graduated from junior high, I came to say goodbye to Mr. Kaesleau and he gave me the cards to take home as mementos, knowing full well that I didn’t need them anymore. That day, a short day, I remember taking a shortcut over a hill and on the way down, I tripped and fell. The cards flew out of my hand to scatter like a flock of playful butterflies on the verdant slope. Though I skinned my knee, I laughed. Then, as I scampered to retrieve the cards, I found myself yelling out ecstatically the name of each image on each one of them — “School,” “Cloud,” “Bridge,” “House,” “Dog,” “Car”— as if for the first time.

Then I looked up and saw, far in the distance, San Francisco’s downtown, its glittering high rises resembling a fairy-tale castle made of diamonds, with the shimmering sea dotted with sailboats as backdrop.

“City,” I said, “my beautiful city.” And the words rang true; they slipped into my bloodstream and suddenly I was overwhelmed by an intense hunger. I wanted to swallow the beatific landscape before me. For it was then that I intuited that, through my love for the new language, and through the act of describing and the naming of things, I, too, sounding like a hungry duck, could stake my claims in the New World.

Editor’s Note: The stimulus package President Obama signed yesterday is designed to revive America’s sagging economy. But what will it do for America’s ailing soul? That’s where the president can really provide direction, if he so chooses. NAM editor Andrew Lam is the author of “Perfume Dreams – Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora.”

Barack Obama signed into law the $787 billion stimulus package, giving the moribund U.S. economy a much-needed resuscitation (or so we all hope), and yet there is a larger crisis looming, one that existed long before our economy tanked and has it no guarantee of recovery. Call it the ailing of the American soul.

It’s perhaps fanciful to talk of soul and spirit, even as metaphors, at a time when our country is already shrouded under the dense haze of foreclosures and joblessness. But when a country loses its bearings and sense of direction, its soul, too, falters. If not quantifiable, it is at least discernible: in the form of collective insecurity and loss of confidence, and increasingly, through collective anger, cynicism and shame.

On a grander scale, Americans, I fear, have lost their sense of centrality, sliding irreversibly toward triviality on the world stage. “Americans have always needed to know the point of it all; that has been part of their peculiar national ‘innocence’ and residual Puritan sense of themselves as the new elect of God,” essayist Lance Morrow once noted. “They need to possess an idea of themselves, a myth of themselves, an explanation of themselves.”

Our malaise has its roots in several camps. Our former president began an unjust war in Iraq based on false data about WMDs, resulting in the deaths of so many American soldiers and Iraqi civilians—the latter we like to understand as “collateral damage” – and in the process he helped deplete us of our national treasures. At home, individualism, coupled with a hyper-consumerist lifestyle, has become an unsustainable American experiment, one that possibly has reached its dead end; and the resulting breakdown of family, and therefore family values, has become a national threat. Furthermore, our sense of insecurity is profound since 9/11, and coupled with a dire economy, it results in rising anti-immigrant sentiments and xenophobia; the battle over whether America will remain a nation of immigrants or a country of singular identity has intensified.

The economy may revive in a few years, and may, in fact, take a different form, but our spirit will lay in the metaphorical dumpster without an articulate vision of a new America. After all, money maybe the measurement of a country’s wealth, but the country’s health is measured by something far larger than economics.

President Barack Obama, perhaps more than any other president since Ronald Reagan, has the ability to correct this by giving the nation a sense of direction. The role of a president in time of crisis, to be sure, is far beyond being a good technocrat. While a good and capable president can deal with the nuts and bolt of the economy, only an inspiring and charismatic leader can deliver his people out of the wasteland.

A major ingredient of the cure lies in the area of “social capital.” Political economist Francis Fukuyama, defined it as “an instantiated informal norm that promotes cooperation between two or more individuals…. they must lead to cooperation in groups and therefore are related to traditional virtues like honesty, the keeping of commitments, reliable performance of duties, reciprocity, and the like. And Berkeley emeritus social science professor Franz Schurmann called it, “A human bonding where work and capital are linked in order to function.” A house can be built cheaply, for instance, when neighbors joined in to help. Hungry folks can be fed more efficiently if volunteers show up at local soup kitchen, and so on.

Or take the case of Henrietta Hughes, a woman who lived in a truck with her grown son. Hughes spoke to Obama at a recent town hall rally in Fort Meyers, Fla. asking for help. The president kissed her, but it was another woman, Chene Thompson, wife of Florida State Rep. Nick Thompson, who stepped up and offered her second home to the woman and her son, free of rent. (Cynics suggested that it was a plant, though no evidence emerged as such, and even if it is, so what?) That’s social capital, in a big, shiny way.

Obama himself said that the stimulus package is not “a panacea.” He is now moving in the right direction by calling for Americans to volunteer and share the burden. In a recent TV broadcast, the president urged Americans to play an active role in healing ourselves: “Prepare a care package for a soldier. Read to a child. Or fix up a local basketball court so the next generation can play and grow. … Log on to USAService.org to find or create a project near you, then gather some friends and lace ‘em up.””

Of course, social capital has always existed, in good times and bad. In immigrant communities, strong social networks are precisely what keep many from dire poverty, and in some cases, from certain catastrophe. Take the Vietnamese community. Long before the government managed to fully mobilize to deal with the Katrina disaster, an intricate social network – Vietnamese language media, Vietnamese-owned shopping malls, Vietnamese Buddhist temples and Christian churches, Vietnamese political organizations – were already providing information and shelter to tens of thousands fleeing Vietnamese from New Orleans and the surrounding region. As far as Dallas and Houston and Los Angeles, volunteers took strangers into their homes while others around the country gave money and sent care packages. Because of communal support, Vietnamese Americans were among the first ethnic groups to rebuild their lives in Louisiana.

Alas, that tight-knit, social infrastructure does not exist on a national scale, and that communal sense is only within ethnic and religious enclaves. How to replicate those ethno-specific social bonds and sense of collective responsibility for the entire country is the trillion-dollar question.

Yet it is a question that needs a good answer. America is now adrift and unmoored. Obama commands the rare thing call public trust and national (and international) good will. But he may risk squandering it if he doesn’t go full speed ahead and articulate a vision of Americans helping themselves and remaking their society. He needs to give equal weight to healing the soul of America as he does to mending America’s purse. And he needs to bring in the social dimension in the remaking of America.

He needs, in other words, to tell us that we all have a stake in committing to protect the wellbeing of our society.

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Obamamania Conquers the World

The audience was flabbergasted when the shoes, one after another, sailed toward President Bush as he gave his speech in Baghdad during his surprise visit. The second almost hit him but, with good reflex, he ducked. He even joked afterwards: “If anyone one needs to know, it’s a size 10,”...

Kudos for the lameduck for his humor and for ducking, indeed, when necessary. Still, the anger from the Iraqi tv journalist turned assailant was real enough and disturbing as he screamed in Arabic: “This is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, dog.” he was wrestled to the ground by other journalists – who turned policemen – and secret servicemen and then led away.

It’s that scream that stays in my mind. And I hope, president Bush’s, who, to his credit, managed to keep his wit. i hope he heard it well. He said he was all right and it didn’t phase him, but that’s just the problem in the last 8 years. Nothing phased him. He slept well, he had told reporters earlier on during the war. He believed, unwavering in what he did is right, WMD or no. Those who died under bombs were collateral damage, after all. Those boys and girls he sent were performing patriotic acts, after all. And those who were tortured, water boarded, kept naked and beaten, all those shot by mercenaries the likes of Blackwater who acted with impunity, were all done in the name of freedom and democracy.

A teflon president is one who won’t let reality sink in, no matter what. His steely conviction, however, has turned out to be a major personality flaw and a national disaster. His unwillingness to be swayed by others’ sufferings, seeing things from any one else’s point of view – He’s protected by more than good reflexes, apparently, he’s under god’s good protection, a higher power and anything that goes against his vision is a mere challenge to his conviction and fate; it reeks of arrogance – has led us to this point in the American history where we lost our good standing in the world, and are on a verge of an economic collapse while two wars keep going on, and on.

The size 10 shoes didn’t hit him but for the man’s sake, in dreams, where convictions often drop away, where the sheen of righteousness fades, and where the conscience often plays itself out in profound, if terrifying ways, may all the shoes and boots and sandals stained of the blood of the innocents, land where the outraged Iraqi journalist had intended. And may the man wakes up one gray haired morning, in cold sweat, full of doubt.

By Andrew Lam

Pavlos Tsimas is a columnist, TEA commentator, of Mega TV in Athens. He spoke in front of an audience at the Global Forum for Media Development.

(Note, i typed as fast as I could but this is not a full transcript nor a complete word by word rendering of his speech. I just think it’s
worth hearing what he has to say.)

When this [media] congress was programmed and my presence agreed upon I planned to give another talk but then on Saturday night on what we are witnessing is so overwhelming I have nothing else to talk about but the Greek experience of the last 4 to 5 days. A 9:00 in the evening of Saturday a boy was shot dead. For no reason. In cold blood.

I learned about the fact 80 mintues later by email. Turned on the TV set and there was nothing on. Just commercials and nice shows. I turned to the Internet and there in some blogs extensive coverage of the event. I kept receiving messages. The clock struck midnight. People took to street to protest the murder. Victim’s name nobody knew.

Even radio stations were late to get the news.

Thousands of people in the street protesting murder of a boy whose name they didn’t know. Established media have not yet reported the event. TV stations came in a little late. The next day the newspapers did not carry words of the event with the exception some sport papers that carried the story due to late night printing (due to reporting of a football match).

Greece plunged into the deepest crisis in recent memories – people watched fire burning in neighborhoods and saw smashed windows. Radio and TV stations, most of them choose to open the airwaves non stop with call-in shows where listeners expressed themselves and newspapers tried to find out what else to do.

Some background. Picture already seen on TV but it took us a day or two to bring ourselves together and try to grasp and understand and to explain what people were feeling. Meanwhile tens of thousands of young people were signing on facebook sites and organized. They were enraged over the young man’s loss.

Here we are with three different sets of problems.

1.We failed to understand the anxiety, discontent , anger and rage and the sense of lost future we’ve been watching expressed in the street.

2.We failed to understand our own failure. Not just a technical failure. But we failed to understand how such a flammable fabric around us that needed just a spark to [be set on fire]. We failed to see what was around us. We failed – the established media failed. The political world failed. And why did we fail? We find out that many our most established media are disdained rather than trusted by young people in times of crisis.

3.We need to think about the future of our trade in an era when news travels faster [among society] than TV or radio, which only can try to catch up with them. People turn out on the streets before radio and TV can air stories. People react before news were airing on TV.

We talked among us [at the media forum]. We talk in terms of freedom and censorship and the changing technology…. But we need to have to think and talk in term of rehabilitation of our credibility –and our connection with the social environment. We need to understand user-generated content and, not only YouTube, but major interactivity of society.

I’m not an expert. I don’t claim to have answers. I am as puzzled as my colleagues. But especially when you are facing as we are facing with the extraordinary situation like this one – we should start a new social role of the media and our place in this new environment rather than just discuss technological and financial news of our profession.

*Photos by Andrew Lam

For Andrew Lam’s story: go to Letter From Athens: Greek Tragedies and the News Media in the Age of Twitter

Listen to Andrew Lam on WNYC talking about Greece

SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL POETRY FESTIVAL

Presents

Vietnamese Poets of the Diaspora
NOVEMBER 8, 2008

7:00 p.m.
Featuring readings from six poets
Golden Gate Room, Fort Mason Center

9:00 p.m. Reception
Featuring live musical entertainment
Book Bay Fort Mason, Building C, Room 165, 415-771-1076

Join Friends of the San Francisco Public Library and the Diaspora Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN) for the San Francisco International Poetry Festival—Vietnamese Poets of the Diaspora. This special event celebrates the large and thriving Vietnamese community in the Bay Area and brings Vietnamese American poets from around the country to read and perform. These artists are the new voices of their communities.

Curated by Friends’ Poet-in-Residence Jack Hirschman and Isabelle Thuy Pelaud in the Asian American Studies Department at SFSU, this special event features Anh-Hoa Thi Nguyen, Truong Tran (author of Dust and Conscience), Linh Dinh (author of Fake House), Mong-Lan (author of Why Is the Edge Always Windy), le thi diem thuy (author of The Gangster We Are All Looking For) and spoken word poet Bao Phi.

For more information, please visit friendssfpl.org or call 415.771.1076