Stories from the Edge of the Sea

At times humorous and ecstatic, other times poetic and elegiac, the fourteen pieces in Stories from the Edge of the Sea explore love and loss, lust and grief, longing and heartbreaks through the lives of Vietnamese immigrants and their children in California. A younger dancer is haunted by memories of almost dying on a boat when they escaped from Vietnam, a widow processes her husband’s death through frantic Facebook postings, a writer enters an old lover’s home and sees a ghost at twilight. If the human heart is a vast, open-ended terrain, then Andrew Lam’s short stories are its mountains, valleys, and lakes. Together they seek to chart a barely explored country

ADVANCE PRAISE

“These stories powerfully evoke the emotional world of the displaced, struggling to find their (our?) ways amid the roadless landscapes of post-colonial late-stage capitalism. Moving and poignant, Lam’s perceptions are at times funny, at other times tragic, always underlain with a bass note of nostalgia for a vanished world. Stories from the Edge of the Sea complements Lam’s earlier, equally fine collection Birds of Paradise Lost. Together with Perfume Dreams, his collection of essays, readers receive superbly complex insights into diaspora—for those Vietnamese forced from their country, of course, but for anyone who has loved and lost a lover, a landscape, a home.”—Fenton Johnson, author of At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life

“Andrew Lam’s Stories from The Edge of the Sea beautifully offers tales of longing, repression, and love as he recalls experiences of immigration and confronts the ruptures amidst generational memories. These stories are indelible, profound, and unforgettable.”—Lynn Novick, codirector of The Vietnam War

“Andrew Lam might’ve entitled this book War and Love, so universal and personal are his stories. I promise you: read Stories from the Edge of the Sea, and you will receive gifts of wonder and grief, shock and delight.”—Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, and others

“Andrew Lam is a master of the short story form. In each tale, a world is expertly built and emotions finely drawn. Stories from the Edge of the Sea is a gem of a collection—poignant, uplifting, complex, and wildly relatable. This book will be read and studied for years to come.”—Noël Alumit, author of Music Heard in Hi-Fi and Letters to Montgomery Clift

“No one maps the moveable feast of the Vietnamese diaspora like Andrew Lam. From stand-up comedians to social chameleons, from college student strivers to lovelorn lawyers taking a striptease walk on the wild side, Lam’s characters feel like old friends with shocking secrets to unfold—forced to confront the lost country of the human heart.”—Scott Lankford, author of Tahoe Beneath the Surface

“Andrew Lam was one of the first voices to emerge from the astonishing crash of literature from the first, second, and now third generation of Vietnamese American writers and poets that have graced and become an integral part of the American canon, and in this collection he continues to cement his place as a leading figure in that literature. The stories, as the title promises, touch from the sea’s western edge that marked the departure of the thousands of Vietnamese refugees to America, to its eastern border, the Land’s End that was the land’s beginning for them—and specifically San Francisco, Andrew Lam’s city, the city most on the edge of the future. Lam takes us into the lives of the new generations, torn between cultures, adapting or battered or victorious in the new world of start-ups or drive-bys, of the LGBTQ choices natural to a new generation but a source of tension or secrecy with their parents, of the eternal decision of what to hang onto and what to let go. How we live now is always a great theme of literature, and Lam, as a great writer must do, finds new and contemporary forms to meet that task. He cleverly brings a modern idiom to his stories—there are tales told as Facebook entries, or in a stand-up comedian’s monologue—but he never lets cleverness replace their core humanity: he manages to mix raunchy humor with gentle wisdom or with tragic poignancy. I laughed out loud reading of a model minority student who exoticizes his refugee past only to be subsumed by it, or of the disparate lives somehow threaded by pho soup; a story which includes careful and tender instructions of how to prepare that miracle food—but it was a laughter that always stemmed from or came to an acknowledgment of pain, a pain and the strength that pain gifts people in order to deal with it, epitomized finally in the last piece in the collection: Lam’s wonderful and moving and triumphant eulogy of his mother.”—Wayne Karlin, author of Memorial Days: Việtnam Stories, 1973-2022; A Wolf by the Ears; and other novels

“In this personal collection of stories, Andrew Lam bathes readers in a soup of memory. From Vietnamese wartime villas to college flats in Berkeley, we taste the desires of comedians, soldiers, tomboys, friends, queers, mothers, and refugees. Lam reveals a loving community where acts of care are savored and stirred to perfection.”—Long Bui, author of Returns of War: South Vietnam and the Price of Refugee Memory

“Andrew Lam has long been one of the leading chroniclers of the Vietnamese diaspora experience in the United States. This new collection, moreover, secures his position among a coterie of writers exploring notions of home, migration, and belonging in global and transborder contexts. Weaving a tapestry of locations from the Berkeley Hills to the bougainvillea-covered walls of Saigon, the streets of San Francisco, and the business-class section of a commercial jet high over the South China Sea, with characters whose accents wander between California, Paris, and Saigon, this is Lam’s most lyrical and wide-ranging collection yet.”—Matthew Spangler, playwright, notable for adaptations of The Beekeeper of Aleppo, The Kite Runner, and Tortilla Curtain

“With wit and tenderness, Andrew Lam consistently subverts conventions familiar to diasporic literature. Humor, linguistic virtuosity, and wholly original voices abound in Stories from the Edge of the Sea’s tightly crafted narratives.”—Paul Christiansen, editor of Saigoneer and author of Beneath Saigon’s Chò Nâu