Nov. 8th, 2008
This is a speech Andrew Lam, author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora gave last Saturday, a few days after the Nov. 4th election, on diversity and his own experience as a non-native speaker.

In October when I was asked to come up with the title of my talk today, a month later, I came up with this title thinking it’s a propos to an ESL teachers conference on empowering students who are second language speakers.

When Friday Speaks, You can Expect a Brighter Saturday…

The reference is, of course, of that famous book by Daniel Defoe: “The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,” arguably the first English novel ever written, published in 1719. Crusoe was a British sailor who was part of the slave trade when he was shipwrecked off the coast of Venezuela. He was alone for some years but managed to rescue a native prisoner who was about to be eaten by his captors who brought him to the island. He named him Friday. Crusoe taught him English and converted him to Christianity.

To be honest, I didn’t think about the ramifications of the current time when I gave that title.

But then Tuesday Nov. 4, 2008 happened.

Tuesday – I’m sure many of you will agree – spoke so loud that today, Saturday, I am still overwhelmed by its many reverberations. It feels like some kind of cold war has ended between the races in America, that colonialism has come to its final chapter after 5 centuries, and that somehow we’ve all been rebooted into the 3.0 version of America.

So remind me to not schedule to keynote and talk about diversity and the need for minorities to learn English and speak up just a few days after the biggest history event in modern time, one in which a man of mixed race and global biography became president of the United States.

Indeed, my impulse is not talk at all about my life as a refugee from Vietnam and how I became an American writer – and how I learned English and how it empowered and delivered me and sent me around the world- but just to tell you how wonderful it was to witness the tsunami called Obama sweeping over us all.

Last night at dinner in a small Italian restaurant on a windblown Hill in San Francisco, a few friends and I celebrated the restaurateur’s new citizenship and how he got to vote in his first election, and how overjoyed he was that Obama won.

We all drank champagne and sang “America, the beautiful,” and I have to say everyone – black, Asian, white, Hispanic, women, men – all shared in that awesome feeling when you believe in the same song. We were all near tears as we sang. And how proud we were to be Americans.

Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised that a thousand writers will have their careers built upon the meanings of last Tuesday and I’m probably going to be one of them.

The novelist James Joyce noted that Robinson Crusoe is the true symbol of the British conquest: “He is the true prototype of the British colonist. … The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence, the unconscious cruelty, the persistence, the slow yet efficient intelligence, the sexual apathy, the calculating taciturnity.”

Likewise, all of those who have been subjugated and oppressed in the age of European imperialism and colonization are embodied in Friday. Friday, who was taught to call Crusoe “master,” is the enduring political symbol of racial injustice, of victims of colonization and imperialist expansion, of slavery. Friday was native American, was Asian, was African, was Latin American, was all of those who endured horrors upon horrors but emerged into the light, using what they have available at hand to survive then thrive.

A few years after I came to America as a teenager from Vietnam I read the adventures of Robinson Crusoe, or some spin off version of it. I didn’t fully understand what I read, or the historical implications, but I knew what I was reading. I was, on one level or another, Friday, the savage rescued by the westerner.

I was the Other. Vietnam was colonized by the French, fought over by the Chinese and Americans. A refugee to America I was invisible, more invisible than a black man. I was robbed of home and hearth. I was dispossessed, an enemy of history.

I was the subjugated character. And while I knew learning English was the basic survival skill, I also knew that one is not fully oneself until one history is understood, one’s story is fully told, and one’s dreams expressed and enabled and realized.

But just like Friday, I didn’t hate Crusoe. I was amazed by what he could do, by his language, his knowledge, by his technology.

I was, above all, enthralled by the English language.

A few months after I came to America at the end of the Vietnam War – My voice started to break. 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 was fond of teasing me.

By then I had practically stopped speaking Vietnamese. When I answered in Vietnamese to the English teacher’s question that first day in 7th grade, the entire class erupted in jeers and laughter. I remember feeling terrible shame.

So I desperately embraced English so I wouldn’t stand out. Each morning, each night, I practiced new vocabulary words out loud. I mimicked characters on TV, and memorized entire commercials and recited them like mantras in order to sound like an American. “my baloney has a first name..it’s O S C A R… my baloney has a second name..”

Trouble was in our Vietnamese refugee home the smell of fish sauce wafted along with the smell of incense from the newly built altar that housed photos of the dead, and speaking English was a no-no. And 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, long time – perhaps more than a year – until a classmate told me in very frank terms what puberty entails.

But I also remember being of two minds: while I mourn the loss of my homeland, I, at the same time, marveled at how speaking a new language could change me. After all, I was at an age where magic and reality still share a porous border, and speaking English was like chanting magical incantations. The English language was reshaping me from inside out.

So I began to tell my story. I told it with the conviction that words and narratives would change how others perceive me.

Along the way, many people helped. Mr. K in junior high, who fixed my sentences and gave me A’s in English class and kept me in his room during lunch so I wouldn’t get beat up. Mrs Hamilton the ESL teacher who taught me diction and grammar. Helen Kalkstein, esl at Berkeley who encouraged me to write. Then there’s the creative writing teacher at UC extension Berkeley who said, “you are not going to medical school.” after having read a few of my short stories. I was a biochem major at the time. “You are going to creative writing school.” I remember saying, “O god, my Vietnamese mother is so going to kill me.” But I went to creative writing program.

Charlotte Painter, professor at sfsu, who still had to fix my grammar even though I was in master fine arts program, but who wept when I read my first story out loud.

The writer Richard Rodriguez, who told me I can be literary in any genre, even in the op-ed pages of newspapers or as a radio commentator and who guided me for many years.

There’s my boss, Sandy Close, who worked on my essays and believed in my journalistic instincts even when I was full of self doubt.

They were not exactly Crusoe. They were friends and mentors. Often they are considered “others” as well.

They all believed that this society, this democracy, needs to have its interconnected-ness, its diversity of voices, and that bridges shouldn’t be built to nowhere but everywhere all at once… so that the story of America is one of inclusivity and thereby enriched.

In my lifetime here I have watched the pressure to move toward some generic, standardized melting-potted center deflate—transpose, in fact —to something quite its opposite, as the demography shifts toward a society in which there’s no discernible majority, no clear single center.

It is the age of “hybridity,” as coined by G. Pascal Zachary, in which individuals claim multiple memberships. Children born from so much intermixing have coined new words to describe themselves—Blaxicans, Hindjews, Chirish, Afropinos, Caureans, Japoricans, Cambofricans, Chungarians, Zebras, and Rainbows—coinages that confound the standard categories offered by the U.S. Census. This is why Tiger woods call himself Cablinasian. Being part African, Dutch, Native American and Thai. Or as president elect Obama in his first press conference called himself a mutt.

Diversity may not be new, but it has never been so fully acknowledged on such grand scale and in full splendor as in a biography of an American president and new, too, is the way our society has gone from being overtly xenophobic to celebratory about our differences in a matter of one night. And America since last Tuesday has acknowledged itself in a way it has never before. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” senator Obama had remarked earlier this year. And Americans of all colors and creeds claimed their public space in celebration last tuesday – dancing and weeping in the streets, believing in the dream again.

Friday spoke at last – spoke loud and clear- and his voice is heard around the world. He demands to be an equal. He has his story to tell. He owns the language taught him now as much as does Crusoe. What’s more, he hadn’t relinquished his own. He therefore becomes more enriched than the one who refused to understand him, who refused to learn his language.

And in as much as Crusoe has changed Friday, Crusoe too has been irrevocably transformed by his companion.

To live in America fully these days is to learn to see the world with its many dimensions simultaneously, and where others hear a cacophony, the new resident of the cosmopolitan frontier discerns a new symphony. It entails the ability to overcome paralysis of the many conflicting ideas by finding and inventing new connections between them. It entails fundamental respect for others’ histories. Above all, one needs the spirit of adventure and curiosity, and the willingness to hear and embrace others’ stories, and to recognize in their narratives that of one’s own.

Related materials

Hear Andrew read from “Perfume Dreams” at Asia Society.

Watch Obama’s Speech Nov. 4th, 2008:

Watch Andrew’s “My Journey Home” documentary

Portrait of Andrew by artist Jun-Jun Staana Jun-Jun Staana whose works are at once inventive and playful.

also Check out Asia Society’s event nov. 21st, 2008