Andrew Lam is a writer and an editor with the New America Media, a short story writer, and, for eight years, a commentator on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. His essays have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country, including the New York Times, the LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Baltimore Sun, the Atlanta Journal, and the Chicago Tribune. He has also written essays for magazines like Mother Jones, The Nation, San Francisco Focus, Proult Journal, In Context, Utne Magazine, and California Magazine. His short stories also are anthologized widely and taught in many Universities and colleges. His short stories appeared in literary journals, including Manoa Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Nimrod International, Michigan Quarterly West, Zyzzyva, Transfer Magazine, Alsop Review, Asia Literary Review, and Terrain. His book, Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora won the Pen American “Beyond the Margins” Award in 2006, and was short-listed for the “Asian American Literature Award.”His book of essays, East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres was published in September 2010 and listed as top 10 Indies of 2010 by Shelf Unbound Magazine. Lam’s first short story collection, Birds of Paradise is due out in March 2013. Currently he is working on a novel.
Lam was a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University during the academic year 2001-02, studying journalism. He has a Master in Fine Arts from San Francisco State University in creative writing, and a BA degree in biochemistry from UC Berkeley. He taught journalism at San Francisco State University and has lectured widely at universities and institutions, including Harvard, Yale, Brown, UCLA, USF, UC Berkeley, University of Hawaii, William and Mary, Rice, Indiana, Hong Kong, University of Hawaii, William and Mary, Rice, Indiana, Hong Kong, and Loyola University, UC Davis, Stanford University, Asian American Journalist Association Conference, Media Alliance, National Writers Conference, Boston Public Library, Seattle Public Library, University of Hawaii, Portland State University, Colorado State University, Freedom Forum, Tulane University, World Academy of Art and Science Conference 1998, Vancouver, Hong Kong University, Oakland Museum, Contra Costa College, Santa Clara University, KCRW “To the Point,” Common Wealth Club, World Affairs Council, and East-West Center.
Lam, who was born in Vietnam and came to the US in 1975 when he was 11 years old. He was featured in the documentary My Journey Home, which aired on PBS nationwide on April 7, 2004. In the documentary, a film crew followed him back to his homeland Vietnam.
A member of the American Academy of Arts and Science, Lam’s awards include the Society of Professional Journalists “Outstanding Young Journalist Award” (1993) and “Best Commentator” in 2004, The Media Alliance Meritorious awards (1994), The World Affairs Council’s Excellence in International Journalism Award (1992), the Rockefeller Fellowship in UCLA (1992), and the Asian American Journalist Association National Award (1993; 1995). He was honored and profiled on KQED television in May,1996 during Asian American heritage month.
PRAISE FOR ANDREW LAM’S WORK
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.
—Randy Fertel, author of The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak, A New Orleans Family Memoir
There may be braver writers on our chaotic new continent, there may be more beautiful prose on Borders Books’ memoir shelf. But it’s not likely. Andrew Lam delivers gold in Perfume Dreams. His muse may be unkind, his music may make me cry like an abandoned baby boy — but oh my, this man can talk story. In fewer than 150 pages, he tells his bright Yank story, he tells his father’s burdened Viet story, even his motherland’s tortured history. And like all profound story tellers, his voice illumines a dark place — “that treacherous space,” as he calls it “between the traditional ‘We’ and the ambitious American ‘I.’”
—Asian Reporter
In his collection of 21 personal essays, East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres, Andrew Lam explores not only how the East and West have respectively changed but how they are changing in conjunction with each other. The cofounder of New American Media possesses a talent for details that lure you in page after page no matter the topic – from Naruto to tiger bone soup to talking to Ghosts. In this follow-up to his award-winning Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, Lam creates an anthology that is part memoir, part meditation and part cultural revelation.
—Audrey Magazine
Andrew Lam’s collection of essays, very cleverly entitled East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres, is a timely ode to the growing Eastern influences on Western, particularly American, cultural traditions. But even more, it is a moving recollection of how Lam himself, as Eastern as could be when he arrived in San Francisco as an 11-year old refugee from the fall of Saigon, fell under the influences of the West. Lam covers the big three “e”s of everyday life — entertainment, education, and eating — and discusses how Western and Eastern takes on these all-importance endeavors play back and forth against each other, everything from action movies to comics and manga, to the deliciously described Pho stew, prepared worldwide now but a salient and significant memory from Lam’s Vietnamese childhood. Lam takes on the education question with brave gusto, pitting the Eastern tradition of respect for the teacher, self-effacement, and community against American individualism, egotism (the self-esteem movement in education that may be leaving whole generations with inflated egos and unfulfilled potential), and freedom (he is grateful for the career of writer, a bliss he never could have discovered if he had stayed in Vietnam or on the medical career course proscribed to him by his parents). Lam writes with honesty, wit, and excitement — this man is never bored by what he covers in his works. For him words are sacred, and are to be spent only in recording what is deserving of remembrance. Much as his mother lights the daily incense in honor of deceased relatives, Lam writes his daily words in honor of all the interesting ideas, people, activities, sights, smells, and sounds that make up his marvelous world. How lucky for us that he shares his words, and his world.
—Nina Sankovitch, Readallday.org