Andrew Lam

Andrew Lam is the author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, which won the 2006 PEN Open Book Award, and East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres. Lam is an editor and cofounder of New America Media, an association of over two thousand ethnic media outlets in America.

He was a regular commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered for many years, and was the subject of a 2004 PBS documentary called My Journey Home. His essays have appeared in newspapers and magazines such as the New York Times, The LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Baltimore Sun, The Atlanta Journal, the Chicago Tribune, Mother Jones, and The Nation, among many others. His short stories have been widely taught and anthologized. Birds of Paradise Lost is his first story collection and due out by Red Hen Press in the spring of 2013. He lives in San Francisco.

Please visit his website here.


All Books

Stories from the Edge of the Sea

Andrew Lam

Publication Date: March 25, 2025

$16.95 Tradepaper

ISBN: 9781636282428

Description:

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 storiesthere 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

Birds of Paradise Lost

Andrew Lam

Publication Date: March 1, 2013

$15.95 Tradepaper

ISBN: 978-1-59709-268-5

Description:

The thirteen stories in Birds of Paradise Lost shimmer with humor and pathos as they chronicle the anguish and joy and bravery of America’s newest Americans, the troubled lives of those who fled Vietnam and remade themselves in the San Francisco Bay Area. The past–memories of war and its aftermath, of murder, arrest, re-education camps and new economic zones, of escape and shipwreck and atrocity–is ever present in these wise and compassionate stories.


The past plays itself out in surprising ways in the lives of people who thought they had moved beyond the nightmares of war and exodus. It comes back on TV in the form of a confession from a cannibal; it enters the Vietnamese restaurant as a Vietnam Vet with a shameful secret; it articulates itself in the peculiar tics of a man with Tourette’s Syndrome who struggles to deal with a profound tragedy. Birds of Paradise Lost is an emotional tour de force, intricately rendering the false starts and revelations in the struggle for integration, and in so doing, the human heart.


Praise for Birds of Paradise Lost:


“Andrew Lam’s Birds of Paradise Lost brilliantly engages the fundamental theme of much great literary work: who am I and what is my place in the universe? His stories are elegant and humane and funny and sad. Lam has instantly established himself as one of our finest fiction writers.”—Robert Olen Butler


“Read Andrew Lam, and bask in his love of language, and his compassion for people, both those here and those from far away. He reminds us that we have history in common; we can laugh and cry together.”—Maxine Hong Kingston


“Grandma is in the freezer, there’s Zoloft in the chicken curry, and a man is on fire in Washington D.C. The immigrant story will never be the same again now that it’s gone through Andrew Lam’s prose – razor-tongued, sophisticated, achingly aware of where it comes from but never imprisoned by its memory. Lam takes the traditional immigrant story and set it ablaze and then serenely rescues from its burning embers what had been there all along – the all-American story.”—Sandip Roy, commentator, Morning Edition, National Public Radio


“The 13 stories in Andrew Lam’s Birds of Paradise Lost soar like birds in mid-flight, bridging the space between the dreamscape of Vietnam and the glass and steel of “Gold Mountain””—Thuy Dinh, Shelf Awareness


“Lam crystallizes the tension of immigration—the pull between wanting to hold onto the old world while needing to accept the strangeness of the new—with sensitivity, beauty, and yet with a welcome lack of sentimentality or bathos.”—Nina Sankovitch, Huffington Post


“Several decades have passed since harrowing and miraculous tales of ‘boat people’ splashed across the headlines. In the eclectic and engrossing collection of short stories by Andrew Lam, readers are bound to rediscover a profound sense of awe at the vastness of such journeys, both literal and metaphorical, from Vietnam to America.”—Elizabeth Rosner, The San Francisco Chronicle


“One of Lam’s greatest gifts is his ventriloquist-like ability to get inside each narrator’s skin. Just as Lam connects with and penetrates each persona, so too each persona achieves a moment that bridges or leaps the gap between our two cultures, forever wedded by the tragic war.”—Randy Fertel, Kenyon Review

News

Andrew Lam Interviewed by Asian Fortune News

Journalist Jenny Chen for Asian Fortune News sat down with Red Hen author Andrew Lam to discuss his short story collection Birds of Paradise. In the interview, Lam discusses an array […]