2013-05-22T09:57:01-04:00 Andrew Lam http://www.voces.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=andrew-lam Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Andrew Lam Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.3283827 2013-05-16T01:39:00-04:00 2013-05-16T13:46:01-04:00

Andrew Lam http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-lam/
This ultimate form of protest became global news in 1963 when the venerable monk Thich Quang Duc set himself ablaze in the middle of Saigon, Vietnam, protesting religious oppression. Doused in gasoline, the monk sat serenely in lotus position and lit a match. A bird of paradise thus blossomed and bloomed, and quickly charred his body.




The photographer Malcolm Browne captured Thich Quang Duc's fiery renouncement of the mortal coil, the image quickly becoming an icon of the Vietnam War era. The term "self-immolation," in fact, entered into common English usage after his death, which led to a coup d'etat that toppled the pro-Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem regime.

Half a century later, to die by fire in protest registers little more than a media blip.

As of this writing, 117 Tibetans have set themselves ablaze since 2009 in a series of protests against Chinese rule. The most recent incidents came in April, when two young Tibetan monks and a lay Tibetan woman set themselves on fire. There was little coverage of their deaths.




Indeed, with the exception of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit vendor who set himself on fire and thus sparked what became known as the Arab Spring, self-immolation has by all accounts become a failed form of protest as an agent of change. Whether in Syria or Palestine, Greece, Italy or Vietnam, individuals continue to go up in flames as crowds look on. Since Bouazizi, in fact, 150 more Tunisians have set themselves on fire protesting the new government, according to al-monitor.

"All the Tibetans who resort to self-immolation do so because they feel they have no other way to make China and the rest of the world listen to their country's call for freedom," Byrne-Rosengren, director of the London-based advocacy group Free Tibet, told Radio Free Asia last month.

Alas, China has turned a deaf ear to their cries, while the world media has averted its eyes.

Aristotle once observed that the plot of a tragedy should be so framed that, even without witnessing the events, simply hearing of them should fill one with "horror and pity" -- even lead to insight and action. But the amphitheater of the 21st century has fallen into decay, scattered and fragmented into a multitude of media platforms. There are too many actors in too many theaters and their tragedies -- overwhelming, lacking in context, incoherent, truncated or badly reported -- have lost their grip on the human psyche.

Studies about desensitization of the modern mind are aplenty, but the general consensus is that over-saturation of images and narratives of violence have resulted in a collective numbness. A profound act of public death cannot hope to sway a world in which horror itself has lost its power.

What we want instead is entertainment, and what we gravitate toward and react to, more often than not, is profanity.

A year after Bouazizi went up in flames in Tunisia, an unknown amateur filmmaker named "Nakoula Basseley Nakoula," aka "Sam Bacile," inflamed the Middle East with incendiary video clips ridiculing the prophet Muhammad. His film turned the Arab Spring of 2011 into the Autumn Rage of 2012, resulted in the death of an American ambassador in Libya, and continues to be a bone of contention in Washington.

The cynic observer can't help but wonder: If self immolation no longer works as an agent for change, then is it still worth the price? Has it been reduced to mere suicide by fire?

At its most profound the act stands as the highest form of human compassion, a confirmation of life by giving up one's own. At its most incoherent self-immolation becomes more expressive of the frustration of the powerless. The individual, enamored by death, possessed by anger, elicits neither horror nor pity but cynicism. After all, to burn with passion is very different than to be consumed by rage.

Fire -- this gift and curse to humanity -- is a terrifying beauty. Contained, it hints at elegance, cooks our food and propels our world. Out of control, it engulfs body and soul. It seduces. It overpowers. And it destroys.

Potential self-immolators may want to rethink their relationship with fire. In a world where individuals leverage more power online than in the public square, it may be that to live burning with desire to bring attention to one's cause -- regardless of the oppression and humiliation -- is the real challenge to becoming actual agents of change in the world. So why not live instead? And find new ways to force the world's attention once more back onto the stage -- and evoke pity and horror in us all.

To burn with that desire, to call our attention and hold our gaze until we weep -- isn't that worth living for?



Andrew Lam is an editor with New America Media and the author of three books, Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres, and his latest, Birds of Paradise Lost. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.3259904 2013-05-11T14:14:56-04:00 2013-05-11T14:14:59-04:00

Andrew Lam http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-lam/ Note: I wrote the essay below a decade ago and it was collected in "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres." On the occasion of Mother's Day, it is reposted here. My mother suffers from dementia and forgetfulness now, and is growing frail, but her ways remain forever devoted to traditions, to distant memories, to ancestors worshipping and family.


She turns 70 but she remains a vivacious woman -- her hair is still mostly black, there is still a girlish twang in her laughter, and her eyes twinkle at the telling of a joke -- still, mortality weighs heavily on her soul. After the gifts are opened and the cake eaten, Mother whispers to her younger sister-in-law: "Who will light incense to the dead when I'm gone?"

Aunty shakes her head. "Honestly, I don't know. None of my children will do it, and we can forget the grandchildren. They don't even understand what we are doing when we pray to the dead. I guess when we're gone, the ritual ends."

Such is the price for living in America. I myself can't remember the last time I lit incense sticks and talked to my dead ancestors. Having fled so far from Vietnam, I can no longer imagine what to say, or how I should address my prayers, or for that matter what promises I could possibly make to the long departed.

My mother, on the other hand, lives in America the way she would in Vietnam. Every morning in my parents' suburban home north of San Jose, with a pool shimmering in the backyard, she climbs a chair and piously lights a few joss sticks for the ancestral altar, which sits on top of the living room's bookcase. Every morning she talks to ghosts.

She mumbles solemn prayers to the spirits of our dead ancestors, and to the all-compassionate Buddha. What is she asking for? Protection for her children and grandchildren, and that they should prosper in America.


Mother as a young woman in Vietnam


At that far end of the Asian immigrant narrative, however, I will readily admit that I cannot help but feel a certain twinge of guilt and regret upon hearing my mother's question to Aunty. Once upon a time, in that other world, I was a pious child. I paid obeisance to the dead, prayed for good health. As the youngest in my family, it was my task to climb the table over which the altar stood. It was I who placed the incense in the bronze urn nightly.

In America, however, I became rebellious, distant. And once Mother asked me to speak more Vietnamese inside the house. "No," I answered in English, curtly. "What good is it to speak it, Mom? It's not as if I'm going to use it after I move out."

She had this pained look in her eyes. If she was proud of his accomplishments, she mourned the distance that had grown between her and her youngest son. Something in the water, in the airwaves, changed his inner makeup and dulled his Confucian ways. America gave him too much freedom. America made him self-centered, introspective. "He thinks too hard, he reads too much," she complained to Father, who shook his head and smiled.

We have made peace since then, she and I, but it does not mean that I have become a traditional, incense-lighting Vietnamese son. I visit. I take her to lunch. I come home for important dates -- New Year, Thanksgiving, Tet, grandfather's death anniversary.

But these days, in front of the family altar with all those faded photos of the dead staring down at me, I often feel oddly removed, as if staring not at the present, but a relic of my distant past. And when, upon my mother's insistence, I light incense, I do not feel as if I am participating in a living tradition so much as pleasing my traditional mother.


Mother's 80th birthday last year

We live in two different worlds, after all, she and I. Mine is a world of travel and writing and public speaking; hers is a world of consulting the Vietnamese horoscope and eating vegetarian food when the moon is full, of attending Buddhist temple on the day of her parents' death anniversaries, a pious devotion.

But at her birthday party, having listened to her worries, I had to wonder: what will indeed survive, Mother?

I wish I could say that I will pick it up as naturally as any Vietnamese in Vietnam would. I wish I could assure her that, after she is gone, each morning I will light incense for her and all the ancestors' spirits before her, but I can't.

Yet, if some rituals die, some others have only just begun. I am, after all, not a complete American brat, dear mother. Every morning I write, rendering memories into words. I write, going back further, invoking the past precisely because it is irretrievable. I write if only, in the end, to take leave.

And this morning, with the San Francisco fog drifting outside my window, it occurs to me as I type these words that this too, strangely enough, is a kind of ritual, a kind of filial impulse to reconcile Mother's world and my own. The solemnity of the act -- my fingers gliding on the keyboard, my mind on things ethereal -- is something akin, at last, to my mother's morning prayers.

Andrew Lam is editor and cofounder of New America Media, an association of more than three thousand ethnic media outlets in the United States. He is the author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres, and most recently, a collection of short stories, Birds of Paradise Lost,a collection of stories about Vietnamese refugees struggling to remake their lives in America.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.3240302 2013-05-08T17:04:08-04:00 2013-05-08T17:20:43-04:00

Andrew Lam http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-lam/ Note: I wrote the essay below almost two decades ago, at the beginning of my life as a writer. It is collected in my first book Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora which won a Pen Award in 2006, and is anthologized widely over the years. A popular assignment in high schools and colleges, it still holds up well, I think, despite the years. Grandma is long gone but as Mother's Day approaches, here it is, available online finally, for those who have fond memories of their grandmothers like I do.

When someone dies in the convalescent home where my grandmother lives, the nurses rush to close all the patients' doors. Though as a policy death is not to be seen at the home, she can always tell when it visits. The series of doors being slammed shut reminds her of the firecrackers during Tet.

The nurses' efforts to hide death are more comical to my grandmother than reassuring. "Those old ladies die so often," she quips in Vietnamese, "everyday is like New Year."

Still, it is lonely to die in such a place. I imagine some wasted old body under a white sheet being carted silently through the empty corridor on its way to the morgue. While in America a person may be born surrounded by loved ones, in old age, one is often left to take the last leg of life's journey alone.

Perhaps that is why my grandmother talks mainly now of her hometown, Bac-Lieu, in the Mekong Delta. Its river and rice fields are vivid in her retelling. Having lost everything during the war, she can now offer me only her distant memories: life was not disjointed back home; one lived in a gentle harmony with the land; people died in their homes surrounded by neighbors and relatives. And no one shut your door.

So it goes... The once gentle, connected world of the past is but the language of dreams. In this fast-pace society of disjointed lives, we are swept along and have little time left for spiritual comfort. Instead of relying on neighbors and relatives, on the river and land, we hope the health care system won't let us down in our old age. Instead of going to temple to pray for good health, we pay life and health insurance.

My grandmother's children and grandchildren share a certain pang of guilt. After a stroke that paralyzed her, we could no longer keep her at home. And although we visit her regularly, we are not living up the filial piety standard expected of us the old country. My father silently grieves and my mother suffers from headaches when they visit. (Does my mother see herself, I wonder, in such a home in a decade or two?)

Once, a long time ago, living in Vietnam, we used to stare death in the face. The war, in many ways, had heightened our sensibilities toward living and dying. I saw dead bodies when I was five after a battle erupted near my house during Tet offensives. I remember holding on to my great uncle's hand as we watched blue bottle flies gathered on the wounds of the dead. If I was afraid, I now feel appreciative of my Great Uncle's gesture. I could look at the horror of war in the face.





Though the fear of death and dying is a universal one, Vietnamese did not hide from it. We prayed daily to the dead at our ancestral altar. We talked to ghosts. Death pervaded our poem, novels, and sad ending fairy tales. We dwelled in its tragedy. We know that terrible things can and do happen to ordinary people.

But if agony and pain and suffering are part of Vietnamese culture, admittedly, to be point of being morbid at time, pleasure is at the center of Americans'. While Vietnamese holidays are based on death anniversaries of famous kings and heroes, birthdates of presidents are celebrated here.

American popular culture treats death with humor. People laugh and scream at blood-and-guts movies. Zombie movies are the rage. The wealthy sometimes freeze their dead relatives. Cemeteries are places of business, complete with colorful brochures. There are, I saw on TV the other day, drive-by funerals in some places in the mid-West where you don't have to get out of your car to pay your respects to the deceased.

That America relies upon the pleasure principle and happy endings in its entertainments does not, however, assist us in evading suffering. Americans tell their kids everything will be Okay. American children are spoon-fed undaunted optimism and happily ever-afters then grow up to confront realities like divorce, domestic violence, drugs, broken homes, failed politicians. No wonder so many teenagers, as if chasing the saccharine of childhood narratives, seek solace in the pages of Stephen King and Anne Rice, horror's king and queen. These days the little train that could carries very few passengers.

Then there is the loneliness of old age. When one visits the convalescent home the suffering of the old is self-evident. There is an old man, once an accomplished concert pianist, now rendered helpless by senility and arthritis. Every morning he sits on his wheel chair and stares at the piano in the cafeteria. One feeble woman in her late 90s who outlived all of her children keeps repeating: "My son will take me home. My son will take me home." One smells death in the air even if one cannot see it there. One hears death in the moans and groans of those in pain. Take a look down the hall. There are those mindless bedridden bodies kept alive through a series of tubes and pulsating machines.

Last week on her 83rd birthday I went to see my grandmother. She smiled her sweet sad smile.

"Where will you end up in your old age?" she asked.

I was taken back by the question. The memories of the monsoon rain and tropical sun and a world of clanship and insular network of people came back to mind. Not here, not here, I wanted to tell her. But the soft moaning of a patient next door and the smell of alcohol wafting from the sterile corridor brought me back to reality.

"Anywhere is fine, grandma," I told her instead, trying to keep up with her courageous spirit. "All I'm asking for is that they don't' shut my door."




Andrew Lam's latest book, Birds of Paradise Lost, a collection of short stories about boat people who remade themselves in America's West Coast.



Andrew Lam is editor and cofounder of New America Media, an association of more than three thousand ethnic media outlets in the United States. He is the author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres, and most recently, a collection of short stories, Birds of Paradise Lost. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.3174440 2013-04-28T11:08:14-04:00 2013-04-28T12:33:49-04:00

Andrew Lam http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-lam/ Mẹ Việt Nam ơi, Chúng Con Vẫn Còn đây (Oh Mother Vietnam, We Are Still Here)

The lyrics from this sentimental song come back to me once in a while, especially when I think of the Vietnamese Diaspora and its complicated relationship with its homeland. One bitter evening on April 30, 1976, in an auditorium in downtown San Francisco, my family and I sang it to mark our first anniversary in exile. The first of a handful of Vietnamese songs penned abroad after the end of a war that spurred an unprecedented exodus, Oh Mother Vietnam was sung the way a people who had just lost a country would sing it; that is, with tears in our eyes and a cry in our voices. Some in the audience, I remember, even wore white headbands, the kind worn at some funerals to mourn the dead.

Vietnamese refugees escaping a fallen Saigon in 1975.

Nearly four decades have passed since then. If I were to sing it now, not that I remember the lyrics entirely, I would sing it with a tone full of irony. So removed from that emotional juncture, I wonder to what extent is the song's declaration still true? Vietnam is accessible now to the Diaspora, but to what extent are we still here for her? Who, in fact, are we?

In his book Tribes: How Race, Religion and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy, Joel Kotkin describes a quintessentially cosmopolitan global tribe as an international community that combines a strong sense of a common origin with "two critical factors for success in the modern world: geographic dispersion and a belief in scientific progress." Kotkin's primary examples include the British, Jews, Chinese, Japanese, and Indians. These groups, relying on mutual dependence and trust, created global networks that allow them "to function collectively beyond the confines of national or regional borders." In subsequent writings, Kotkin has added Vietnamese to his list.


The Trip to Orange County

More than four million Vietnamese have fled or migrated abroad since the end of the Fall of Saigon in 1975. They have re-established themselves elsewhere, scattered on five continents. These days you can find restaurants selling pho, banh mi, and other Vietnamese favorites in South Africa, Brazil, Dubai, and beyond. I myself have relatives living in six different countries on three continents. But the largest numbers of the Diaspora ended up in North America, and the largest portion of that population resettled in California, where my family and I, and most of my relatives, now live.

Ours is an epic filled with irony: traumatized by wars and bound by old ways of life where land and ancestors are worshipped, where babies' umbilical cords are traditionally buried in the earth as a way to bind them to the ancient land, we relocated to a country known for its fabulous fantasies, high-tech wizardry, and individualistic ambition.

Take, for example, this bus trip I am on. A comfortable bus going south, with the nostalgic music of Trinh Cong Son, sung by the smoky-voiced Khanh Ly, echoing from the overhead speaker. Son was the most famous Vietnamese composer during the Vietnam War, the master of love and antiwar songs, and Khanh Ly the most famous singer. The two old Vietnamese ladies next to me are bragging about their children and their grandchildren, and how well they're doing, and so on. Behind me, a couple of middle-aged men are humming along with this song of their youth. And up front two kids are playing handheld computer games while their mother talks endlessly on her cell to someone about her restaurant business.

Vietnamese voices rise and fall; I close my eyes and listen. I swear I could be in Hue heading south to Saigon or Dalat.

Except, I am not. I am on the other side of the Pacific, on my way from San José to Orange County, going down Interstate 5 in a Vietnamese-owned bus. It is owned by one of three competing Vietnamese companies, which speaks to the infrastructure of our ethnic community in America.

One of the two old ladies comments that she cannot get over the fact that her son and grandchildren live in a big house on a hill in Freemont, California. "To think my son back home wore shorts and played in the rice field, and all my kids studied by lamplight. Now, he's a big shot engineer. It's so different, our lives, all these machines," she says and looks out to the verdant knolls that blur past us. Then, instead of being relieved, she sighs and says in a voice full of nostalgia, "We've come so far from home."

When I think of the Vietnamese narrative in America, I think of my mother's ancestral altar. In her suburban home on the outskirts of San José with a pool shimmering in the backyard, my mother prays. Every morning she climbs a chair and piously lights a few joss sticks for the ancestral altar on top of the living room bookcase and mumbles her solemn prayers to the dead. Black and white photos of grandpa and grandma and uncles stare out benevolently to the world of the living from the top shelf. On the shelves below, by contrast, stand my father's MBA diploma, my older siblings' engineering and business degrees, my own degree in biochemistry, our combined sports trophies, and, last but not least, the latest installments of my own unending quest for self-reinvention-- plaques and obelisk crystals and framed certificates, my literary and journalism awards.

What mother's altar and the shelves tell is the story of the Vietnamese American conversion, one where Old World Fatalism meets New World Optimism, the American Dream. After all, praying to the dead is a cyclical, Confucian habit--one looks to the past for guidance, and one yearns toward that "common origin" to keep him connected to his community, his sense of continuity. Getting awards and trophies, on the other hand, is an American tendency, a proposition of ascendancy, where one looks toward the future and deems it optimistic and bright.

So Mother Vietnam, we have survived but we have irrevocably changed. To be Vietnamese American, one learns to lurk between these two opposite ideas, negotiating, that is, between night and day.

Under California's cerulean sky the newcomers undergo a marvelous transformation. In the Golden State where half a million Vietnamese resettled, dreams do have a penchant of coming true. The newcomer grows ambitious. He sees, for instance, his own restaurant in the "For Rent" sign on a dilapidated store in a run-down neighborhood. He sees his kids graduating from top colleges. He imagines his own home with a pool in the back five years down the line--things that were impossible back home.

Day and night, indeed. The traumas of the initial expulsion and the subsequent exodus--re-education camps under communist rules, thirst and starvation on the high seas, years languishing in refugee camps, the horror of Thai pirates and unforgiving storms--are over the years replaced by the jubilation of a new-found status and, for some, enormous wealth. A community that initially saw itself as living in exile, as survivors of some historical blight, has gradually changed its self-assessment. It began to see itself as an immigrant community, as a thriving Little Saigon, with all sorts of make-it-rich narratives.

Sister, did you know the man who created the famous Sriracha chili sauce was a boat person? He arrived in America in January of 1980 and by February already started making his famous green-capped bottles of hot sauce. Now his company rolls out ten million bottles plus a year. It's the next Ketchup. He's a very rich man.

Aunty, do you know that the man who started Lee's sandwiches started out with just a food truck? He parked outside electronics assembly plants in San José selling sandwiches to mostly Vietnamese workers, but he parlayed his business into a multi-million dollar chain. There are now Lee's sandwiches shops in California, Arizona, and Texas, not to mention China, Korea, and Vietnam itself. It's an international corporation.

Brother, have you heard about the assistant to the attorney general in the George W. Bush administration? He was a boat person and left Vietnam at age fifteen but graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and was editor of Harvard Law Review. He was the chief architect of the USA Patriot Act. Can you believe it?

Soon enough houses are bought, jobs are had, children are born, old folks are buried, businesses and malls are opened, community newspapers are printed, and economic and political organizations are formed. That is to say, ours is a community whose roots are burrowing, slowly but deeply, into the American loam.

The pangs of longing and loss are thus dulled by the necessities of living and by the glory of newfound status and wealth. And the refugee-turned-immigrant (a psychological transition) becomes a naturalized U.S. citizen (more or less a transition of convenience) and finds that the insistence of memories insists a little less as he zooms down the freeway toward a glorious chimerical cityscape to work each morning.


To be a Viet Kieu

We fled abroad and changed, and we in turn developed extraordinary influence back home. The rich, well-fed Vietnamese abroad sent gifts and letters home, kept impoverished relatives fed. They sent pictures of themselves. "See, Tree Hang and Hien? They're Helen and Henry now. Aren't they so tall? It's the American milk and peanut butter, you know. They make your bones large and strong. Henry has a PhD. And Brother, look... "

The relatives devoured the photographs with their eyes. Beyond those handsome, smiling young adults who pose with such ease next to their sports cars is, inevitably, that two-story house with its two-car garage, as if in mockery. During the Cold War, like sirens, such images were the final tug that lured some Vietnamese from their shantytown toward the open sea.

So much yearning for America changes the character of Vietnam itself. Vuot bien--to cross the border--became a household verb in Vietnam in the 80s. Viet Kieu--literally "overseas Vietnamese," people of Vietnamese origin now living abroad--became a powerful symbol in the 80s and 90s for all Vietnamese of their potential, the future. And it is universally understood that the Viet Kieu, with their wealth and influence, can change the fortune of their poor cousins.


Returning Vietnamese expats at the Tan Son Nhat Airport


Until a decade or so ago, Vietnam's narrative of herself was that she's four thousand years old. Her milk is dry, her hair gray, she suffers from astigmatism. She has little to offer her numerous children. America, on the other hand, is young, rich, and optimistic: everything that Vietnam cannot be. Vietnamese, increasingly a younger population and full of yearning, inevitably dream of America, a place they imagine of peace, freedom, and wealth, and of little suffering.

For let it be noted that, despite the horror and bloodshed of the war, the Vietnamese missed the Americans after they abandoned the country. Stepping over broken wings of warplanes and moss-covered fragments of rusty old tanks, young Vietnamese search for America. The American relics offer wondrous possibilities. Assemble the broken parts and you might end up with a car, a bridge, or even a homemade factory. Dig up some missing bones and crown the assemblage with an MIA's dog tags and, who knows, you might turn it into a coveted treasure, an American GI's bones, to be sold to Americans for a lot of money.

A few years ago, I went back to Vietnam to participate in a PBS documentary, and I did the touristy thing: I went to the Cu Chi Tunnel in Tay Ninh Province, bordering Cambodia, the underground labyrinth where the Viet Cong hid during the war.

There were a handful of American vets in their sixties. They were back for the first time. They were very emotional. One wept and said that, during the war, "I spent a long time looking for this place and lost friends doing the same."

But the young tour guide told me that it was tourism that forced the Vietnamese to dig up the old hideouts. She, however, did not see the past. She crawled through the same tunnel with foreigners routinely but she emerged with different ideas. Her head is filled with the Golden Gate Bridge and cable cars and two-tiered freeways and Hollywood and Universal Studios. "I have many friends over there now," she said, her eyes dreamy, reflecting the collective desire of Vietnamese youth. "They invite me to come. I'm saving money for this amazing trip." If she could, she told me, she would go and study in America.

Here's a young woman who looks at a tunnel that was the headquarters of the Viet Cong and the target of massive bombings years ago and what does she see? The Magic Kingdom. The Cu Chi Tunnel leads some to the past surely, but for the young tour guide it may very well lead to the future.

After the Cold War ended, Vietnamese refugees were no longer welcome in the West, and, as forced repatriation became more or less a new international policy, boat people stopped coming. But the migration did not stop. In fact, it continues to this day, albeit in a more orderly fashion. Relatives sponsor relatives, Vietnamese marry Vietnamese Americans, political and religious prisoners and Vietnamese Amerasians come under the U.S. special programs, and, the latest wave, well-to-do and bright Vietnamese foreign students apply to study in the U.S., and children of the ruling class of Hanoi and Saigon (now called Ho Chi Minh City)--all are hopeful for a new beginning in America.


A Bar on Truong Han Sieu Street

It sometimes seems almost inevitable in the twenty-first century that the refugee becomes an immigrant and the immigrant, if he fares well, becomes cosmopolitan, with multiple languages and cultural-geographical affiliations.

And it's inevitable, too, for many a Vietnamese abroad that at some point he takes the journey home.

Consider this National Public Radio story two years ago that began thus: "Many Vietnamese who fled the communist takeover have returned as visitors since, but none of them as commander of a U.S. guided missile destroyer, one making port in the same city where U.S. combat troops first came ashore in Vietnam in 1965. The symbolism wasn't lost on Commander H.B. Le of the USS Lassen as he spoke to reporters pier side."

Commander Le was five years old when he fled Vietnam in a crowded boat. Returning in his U.S. Navy uniform, he stood a foot taller than the old admirals who saluted him, a former boat person, someone they would have readily arrested three decades earlier if he were caught escaping.

Diep Vuong, a cum laude graduate of Harvard University with a degree in economics, left Vietnam as a boat person in 1979, but came back seven years ago to help fight human trafficking in An Giang, her home province in the Mekong Delta. "I always remember once we came to America my mother saying to my sisters and I that we were born Vietnamese for a reason, and it is up to us to figure out what that reason is," she said. Hers is that she can protect at-risk young women being sold into slavery.

As the rich-poor gap in Vietnam has widened with the growth of the economy, human trafficking has become a scourge. Vuong's programs are part of the Pacific Links Foundation's effort to empower young women by providing education, skills training, scholarships, and shelter to those at risk. "Increasingly, Vietnamese Americans are playing central roles in the philanthropy sector," she said. "As for me, I can't just sit and do nothing. Any of those girls being sold to Cambodia or China could be a cousin or a child of an old friend."

Nguyen Qui Duc, a Vietnamese refugee who became an American radio host and the author of the memoir Where the Ashes Are: The Odyssey of a Vietnamese Family, has found yet another incarnation in his late-fifties: as a bar owner and art curator in Hanoi. Why would he come back to the country from which he once fled as a refugee? "Home is where there's a sense of connection, of family, of community," he said after struggling to find a single answer. "And I found it here."

Duc is one of at least 200,000 Viet Kieu who return to Vietnam yearly, many only to visit relatives and for tourism, but a small portion increasingly to work, invest, and retire. The majority of the people who return are from the United States, where the largest Vietnamese population overseas resides. Indeed, thirty-eight years after the Vietnam War ended, the Vietnamese Diaspora is now falling slowly but surely back into Vietnam's orbit.

Not long ago, a Vietnamese overseas had little more than nostalgic memories to keep cultural ties alive. During the Cold War, letters sent from the United States could take half a year to reach their recipients in Vietnam. Today, however, eighteen years after the United States re-established diplomatic ties with Vietnam, and six years after Vietnam joined the World Trade Organization, Hanoi is but a direct flight from Los Angeles, and Vietnamese at home and overseas chat online, text message one another, and video call on Skype. Vietnamese tourists visiting the United States is also increasingly the norm.

Overseas Vietnamese play an important role in Vietnam's economic life. According to Vietnam's Chamber of Commerce, in 2008, despite the slowdown in the world economy, Vietnam received overseas aid of more than $7.4 billion. The Vietnamese government said that the Diaspora is reducing poverty and spurring economic development. Official development assistance pledged to Vietnam in 2008 by international donors was $5 billion, whereas the overseas Vietnamese contributed $2.4 billion more.

In 2010, the total amount of remittances plus investment funds from the Diaspora, according to the Vietnamese government, had reached $20 billion, or 8 percent of Vietnam's GDP. Hanoi, seeing the Diaspora as a tremendous resource, is even considering granting dual citizenship to Viet Kieus to spur further repatriation.

There's another form of Viet Kieu contribution that is not so tangible, but arguably just as important: themselves.

Nguyen Qui Duc's bar, Tadioto, an elegant place on Truong Han Sieu Street in Hanoi, has become a gathering place for artists and writers and intellectuals--expatriates and locals alike. Avant-garde art pieces hang on the wall or stand alone in the middle of rooms. "Public space is not yet what it should be in Vietnam," Duc explained. "I'm aiming to change that--to bring real dialogue between different people."Each week at Tadioto, Vietnamese-American poets and writers share their experiences with their Vietnamese counterparts.

Vietnam has reached an ideological dead end--but, in the private sphere, new political thoughts are being formed. If Vietnam still wears the hammer and sickle on her sleeve, her heart throbs now with commerce and capitalism.

There is, along with a fledgling civil society, a growing middle class, and a slow erosion of the political barricade as the pressure rises for political reform, transparency, and pluralism. The return of the Diaspora to the homeland is thus a double-edged sword: Many bring back financial investment and technological know-how. Yet with the presence of so many vocal Viet Kieus in Vietnam, a complex narrative is being formed, one in which knowledge and ideas of the outside world permeate the local culture and society. In this private sphere, and on the Internet, and despite continual arrest of dissident bloggers, the din of political debate and dissent can loudly be heard.

In the wake of that bitter civil war and the subsequent exodus is an irony: those persecuted by Uncle Ho's followers for being affiliated with the United States and as "collaborators" and forced to flee abroad during the Cold War are now being actively solicited to return to Vietnam to help invest in and rebuild the government that once spurned them. For having international connections in the post-Cold War aftermath is now seen as a good thing.

Having been victims of the war, these people with multiple affiliations have emerged as victors of the peace. They've managed to remake themselves and go on with their lives, and more important, by refusing to let rage and thirst for vengeance dominate their hearts, some have become active agents in changing the destiny of Vietnam itself.


Traditions and Ambitions

The reason I am on this bus is this: to see for myself the Vietnam War Memorial in Orange County that I've heard so much about from my parents. My father, once a high-ranking South Vietnamese officer, was on the advisory committee of this memorial-building endeavor. On one evening a decade or so ago, the Vietnamese in Orange County raised more than $200,000 for the memorial. Well-known Vietnamese singers sang for free and ticket receipts all went into the memorial fund. The result was two larger-than-life statues, one depicting a South Vietnamese, the other an American GI, standing side by side in combat fatigues adjacent to the city hall in Westminster, the heart of Orange County's Little Saigon.


Vietnam War memorial in Westminster

Standing in front of it, I am of two minds. I feel something akin to patriotism for my long lost homeland stir in my blood as well as a deep sadness for the men who fought and died--and for those who survived but were broken by the experience; I feel, at the same time, a dire need for distance. While I stand there on a Saturday evening, a couple of older women light incense and pray and several older Vietnamese men in army uniforms stand guard nearby. Something somber and heavy in their stance suggests a collective sorrow that causes me to shudder; their eyes--eyes that no doubt saw the worst of the old war--convey anger, hatred, and bitterness. Their faces remind me of my father's.

It occurred to me then that while one strand of history still defines those men in army uniforms and, of course, my father, another strand of history was redefining me. My father considers himself an exile living in America, part of an increasingly small population; I see myself as an American journalist who happens to make many journeys to Vietnam without much emotional fanfare. For me, Vietnam, my country of birth, and its tumultuous history have become a point of departure, a concern, but no longer home.

The irony is that because he holds Vietnam so dear to his heart, my father cannot return to the country to which he owes allegiance, so long as the current regime remains in power. His is a rage left over from the Cold War that has no end in sight. History, for my father and for those men who still wear their army uniforms at every communal event, has a tendency to run backward, to memories of the war, to a bitter and bloody struggle whose end spelled their defeat and exile. And it holds them static in a lonely nationalist stance. They live in America but their souls are still fighting an unfinished war in Vietnam.

The old passion lives on, but it must now contend with the new integration: the Vietnamese Diaspora, no longer in exile, is steadily finding itself in Vietnam's orbit. Lan Nguyen, writing for Nguoi Viet, the largest Vietnamese paper in Orange County, noted that "While the younger generation of Vietnamese Americans shares with elders a general concern regarding human rights, democracy, and freedom in Vietnam, they are not as invested in the cause." Nguyen, who lives in San José, cites language barriers and lack of experience under communism as the factors that help widen the generation gap. "The Vietnamese American youth...often are disillusioned as it seems their every effort to help Vietnam is met with criticism by those older than them. The elders in turn are horrified to see young people organize philanthropic missions to Vietnam."


Photo by artist Binh Danh - Vietnam memories embedded on dead leaves.

The question remains whether the Vietnamese Diaspora can be an effective agent of change and find new ways to influence the future of the country. To do so, it needs to ask tough questions. Is there real freedom for those who give in to their hatred and are ruled by it? Is democracy for Vietnam possible when those who live in America often fail to understand and practice it with their own communities, and the majority of those in Vietnam barely show any interest? And what does it take to move beyond anger and lust for revenge, and create space for constructive discussion and dialogue and spur new political thoughts?

It is true: once the hate is gone, in its place is pain. Those who cling so strongly to hatred, I suspect, are often those who fear what comes after it. But it is true also that many of us have moved on beyond the old rancor, beyond that us-versus-them mentality. We have learned to absorb our pain and grief and are negotiating our positions between East and West, memories and modernity, traditions and individual ambitions, old loyalties and new alliances, such that we are in the process of recreating a whole notion of what it means to be Vietnamese, a definition that is both open-ended and inclusive.

So, Mother Vietnam, in a sense we are still here, but we aren't who we used to be. The new generations born abroad may still behold that sense of common origin, may still take pride in their heritage, but they are not bound by the idea that Vietnam is their destiny. Rather, it's one of their many destinations.


A new song is needed, one that describes an individual with multiple affiliations, with additional homelands, someone who shares a sense of common origin but is not bound by collective nationalism. The old umbilical cord, unearthed at last, is transmuted into a new trans-pacific verse, and is an epic in the making.



Andrew Lam's latest book, Birds of Paradise Lost, a collection of short stories about boat people who remade themselves in America's West Coast.



This essay originally appeared in the Cairo Review. Andrew Lam is editor and cofounder of New America Media, an association of more than three thousand ethnic media outlets in the United States. He is the author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres, and most recently, a collection of short stories, Birds of Paradise Lost.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.3148986 2013-04-24T15:09:04-04:00 2013-04-24T19:50:28-04:00

Andrew Lam http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-lam/
On April 4, 1991 three Vietnamese brothers and a friend -- all teenagers -- took over an electronics store in Sacramento, California. The group held 41 people hostage, garnering national attention as journalists flocked outside the store. Inside, the boys prowled about with their guns, the hostages tied up.

What did the Nguyen brothers want?

They wanted $4 million dollars, 1000-year-old ginseng roots (thought to make one invincible in battle), helicopters and bulletproof jackets. Their plan: To fly back to Vietnam and take on the Vietcong.

Negotiators on the scene were baffled, and when talks broke down the four began to wound hostages as a means of showing they were serious. The SWAT team ultimately stormed the grounds, killing three of the four hostage takers and critically wounding the oldest of the three brothers. Three hostages were killed before the siege ended.

Today, the eldest brother, Loi Nguyen, is serving three consecutive life sentences for the crime.

Tamarlan Tsarnaev, 26, and his younger brother, Dzhokhar, 19, are the alleged perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombings of last week, which claimed three lives and injured hundreds more.

Tamarlan was killed in a manhunt after the attack. His brother is now in custody and faces a possible death sentence.

Like the Tsarnaevs, the Nguyen brothers were described by those who knew them as decent, even obedient children. They attended church regularly. There was little hint at the barbarism they would later commit. Their parents, too, in the aftermath of the bloodshed were left to wonder: Why?

Yet not everyone who comes to America really manages to enter America. The late UC Berkeley sociologist Franz Schurmann once noted that the two paths for children of immigrants to become American once lay either through education or the military. But there's no longer a draft, and the other institution, the American education system, is failing our kids.

The Tsarnaev brothers, though reportedly well-adjusted and well-liked, too, failed school. One of their uncles, when asked for an explanation of their actions, described them as "losers" who harbored a hatred of those who were able to settle into life in America. "These are the only reasons I can imagine. Anything else, anything else to do with religion, with Islam, it's a fraud, it's a fake," he said.

Often the successful border crosser will use language to overcome shame by refusing silence. He will find ways to articulate and redefine himself; his revenge over his ignominious past is his successful transition in America, his newfound status. But when access to America's grandeur is blocked or denied, especially for children from war-torn lands, old memories have a way of reaching out. Inherited trauma, ever-present in refugee homes, becomes seductive, something to latch one's identity. In fantasy, in search for a new myth, some, like the Nguyen brothers, even fantasize themselves fighting their father's lost war, defending a land long lost.

Unable to move forward, they reach back to the wars of their homeland. Lacking imagination, violence by default becomes their game.

Though I have moved far from my own refugee past -- I've become an American writer and journalist -- I never underestimate the speed with which an immigrant boy can go off track, and how his vision of America as a land of milk and honey can quickly shift to that of a bona fide Waste Land with something as simple as a failing grade. Ambition, too, can shift to rage and hatred, and the "mixing memory and desire," to quote T.S. Eliot, can like spring rain stir all "dull roots."

For children from strife-torn lands, the Old World, though distant and forsaken by the years, sometimes calls out for blood. The war, the humiliation, the subsequent exodus, life in exile, poverty, the continual subjugation of their people back home, their invisible refugee life in America -- all are compounded into a kind of unshaped angst. They become susceptible to various indoctrinations. And unfortunately, given a mixing, they could even find expressions through the language of annihilation, the language of bombs and guns.


Andrew Lam is an editor with New America Media and the author of three books, Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres, and his latest, Birds of Paradise Lost. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.3088837 2013-04-15T21:43:06-04:00 2013-04-16T15:21:21-04:00

Andrew Lam http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-lam/
"I wonder what'll become of MY name when I go in? I shouldn't like to lose it at all..." declared Alice, in Louis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass," upon entering a strange woods, "because they would have to give me another, and it would almost certainly be an ugly one."

Such is the case for so many immigrants to America. We find quickly that our names are distorted in the new forest of concrete, glassy high-rises, double deck freeways and high-tech wizardry. Our names mispronounced, the magic snuffed out of them. My Vietnamese first name, Dũng (pronounced something close to Zoo-young), is alas but animal excrement in English. Kids in junior high used to tease me, since my last name is Lam. "Lamb Dung," they would say then laugh hysterically.

Vân, Trúc, and Trang - meaning Cloud, Bamboo, and Elegance - the three pretty girls who often walked together down their high school hallway suffered constant pestering from classmates who would yell: "Look out! Here comes a Train, a Truck, and a Van!"

The two brothers, Hiệp and Hùng suffered similar fate. At a college party some years ago in Berkeley, Hiệp introduced himself and his brother to some pretty young lady. "I'm Hiep and this is my brother, Hung." The young lady, not missing a beat, said, "You, OK. Your brother, on the other hand, remains to be seen."

By the time I graduated from high school, I'd changed my name to Andrew, based on André - a name that my French teacher back in Saigon gave me since he refused to speak a Vietnamese word. When visiting France, I am still André to my Parisian relatives.

For generations, it has been a rite of passage for newcomers to America's shore to change our names. We add on new sobriquets in hope for better acceptance, less discrimination, and to help ease our assimilation process into American life. We want to be seen, more often than not, as your Average Joe.

So one summer, Vân, Trúc, and Trang wandered into "Vogue" and "Mademoiselle" magazines and emerged Yvonne, Theresa, and Tania. They even looked different, wearing more fashionable clothes and make-up. And there's Nhung (Vietnamese for "Velvet"), who was dubbed Nancy when her landlord, after having tried in vain to pronounce her name, threw up his hairy arms and said: "Let's call you Nancy, as in Nancy Wong, the actress." Then there's my high school friend Khoa who turned into Kevin. How? When he was filling out his application for US citizenship his mother saw an image of a boy on a milk carton named Kevin on the dining table and said, "Why don't you take his name?" And so Kevin he became.

Like street urchins in a strange land, we gather our new identities from anything deemed worthy: milk cartons, lazy landlords and teachers and of course, fashion magazines.

And in some ways, immigrants live with multiple senses of our selves. The old names are not lost in the modern world, after all, with so much travel and modes of communication with our homelands. In Vietnam, where I visit often enough, no one calls me Andrew.

So we immigrants manage our various names the way we navigate going back and forth from one culture to the next. We often view the world through multiple lenses, and as multilingual speakers, we see different shades of personalities emerge when we enter each of these spheres. My parents still call me by my Vietnamese name at home, where I am in many ways still a child in a conservative family setting, bound in an intimate world of clanship, and memories; a private world. Only when they speak in English and to non-Vietnamese do my parents refer to me by my American name, as in when guests visit and they show my journalism and literary awards on their mantel: "These are Andrew Lam's awards," father would say.

Dũng is the Vietnamese who is expected to perform certain familial duties, who suppresses his individualism for the sake of familial harmony -- but it is Andrew who claims credit for this essay. In some way, Dũng and Andrew are opposing ideas of myself, but over time I've learned to navigate and live comfortably with these names and sobriquets, crossing back and forth over the hyphen that connects dissimilar societies, different sensibilities and languages, senses of the self.

For immigrants to the US, however, the need to change one's name has become less pressing in the 21st century, according to the New York Times. It quoted sociologist, Douglas S. Massey, at Princeton University, as saying the pressure to change surnames has lessened, since "during the 1970s and 1980s, as immigration became more a part of American life and the civil rights movement legitimated in-group pride as something to be cultivated."

That is, as diversity is becoming increasingly the norm, as Asians recently passed Hispanics as the largest group of new immigrants to the United States, and as immigration reform influences immigrants' ideas about identity and pride in keeping their original names, perhaps the American tongue will have to be more flexible in calling out the names of the entire world.

But for me at least, I like the management of different names; the challenge of mental agility - I see this navigation as part of the modern condition. F. Scott Fitzgerald once noted that, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." Pluralism, after all, isn't just a modern social condition - the individual, too, has become pluralized with so many affiliations and allegiances. Without abandoning one's names but adding on, one's life is richer for it, one owns a kind of multilayer Technicolor coat, as it were.

So I am Dũng, Andy, André, Andrew... And who knows, I might just add another as I enter some new strange woods.


New America Media editor, Andrew Lam is the author of "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora" (Heyday Books, 2005), which won a Pen American "Beyond the Margins" award, and "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres" where the above essay was excerpted. His latest book, "Birds of Paradise Lost" published March 2013. He has lectured and read his work widely at many universities.




]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.3082523 2013-04-15T00:46:24-04:00 2013-04-15T09:55:22-04:00

Andrew Lam http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-lam/ In early April the Associated Press announced that it would no longer use the word "illegal" when referring to undocumented immigrants. The decision has been hailed by immigrant rights groups and others, who say the term is a pejorative that dehumanizes large swaths of the U.S. population, immigrant and native-born alike. Below, authors Andrew Lam, Helen Zia and Chitra Divakaruni offer their own views on the term "illegal" through the lens of the immigrant experience.



My Americanization, A Love Story
Andrew Lam

When the Cold War ended and refugees from Vietnam fled en masse, western countries agreed on a cutoff date for hopeful entries. Up until then, anyone who escaped from communist Vietnam was given automatic political refugee status.

After July 2, 1989, however, most were deemed "economic" migrants -- or what we refer to as "illegal" -- and forcefully repatriated.

For one family, the sudden shift proved a cruel twist of fate.

They came in two boats. One - carrying the father and two sons -- reached Hong Kong before the cutoff date. The other -- with the mother and two more sons -- came a few days after. They became "illegal immigrants" and were sent back to Vietnam.

That experience showed me how labels can hold out the promise of a future, or rob you of it. In America, the two boys grew to become an engineer and a doctor. The mother and her two sons in Vietnam, however, were forced to depend on relatives to get by. Neither boy went to school. It took them years to be reunited.

I think of them when I hear the word "illegal." And I think of my own experience.

My family left Vietnam in the aftermath of war. We fled without passports, entering the Philippines illegally, without entry permits or visas. We later arrived in America.

My Americanization story is a love story, a success story. Had I not been granted a place here, I cannot think of where I might have ended up. Perhaps sent back to Vietnam to toil in the new economic zone set up for children of the bourgeois class.

I certainly would not be on a book tour around the United States, speaking of the Vietnamese American experience and the transformational power that comes with giving immigrants in this country a fighting chance.


All Criminals from Mars Report to the INS!
Helen Zia

There's a TV commercial I remember from my early childhood, more than half a century ago. It was a U.S. government public service announcement, of all things -- a grainy, black-and-white cartoon ordering "aliens" to report their whereabouts or face dire consequences.

The faces of the cartoon figures were featureless, almost inhuman, making it clear that an alien had more in common with a Martian than an American. That PSA appeared every year for most of my childhood, popping up while I watched Star Trek or the Three Stooges -- and I hated it.

There was something creepy, even shameful about the ad. Still, I didn't connect the faceless cartoon aliens to my mother and father, who were immigrants from China.

I was born in the US and therefore an American, thanks to Wong Kim Ark's lawsuit that was decided by the Supreme Court in 1898. But not my parents, they had not yet become naturalized Americans. It took me several years before I realized that the creepy "aliens" in the PSA were people like my mom and dad.

My parents never talked about this PSA with their children, nor did they ever tell us that they had once been threatened with deportation for overstaying their visas at the time of China's Communist revolution. Because they had some American-born infants, including this writer, the INS allowed them to stay.

But the stain of being "aliens" never washed away, especially during the austerity years of the Reagan administration in the 1980s. Suddenly the issue of "aliens" turned even uglier. An extremist, histrionic wind stuck the word "illegal" onto the word "alien," turning my Martian parents into something worse: "illegal aliens," criminals from Mars.

For the last three decades, these dehumanizing words have been applied to people like my parents. It's about time to call out this degrading language for what it is, and to return humanity back to those people, who, for whatever reason, are without documents. Now maybe some reasonable immigration policies can be made for human beings, not Martians.

The Words That Hurt Us
Chitra Divakaruni

I came to this country in the 1970s as the holder of a coveted "green card," the official name of which was (and still remains) the Alien Registration Card. For years, every time I looked at that card, it made me cringe. I felt strange and un-American, of a different species. It took years of living around kind, helpful Americans for that term to stop stinging.

Thus it is with pleasure that I read of the Associated Press's decision to drop the term "illegal immigrant" from its stylebook.

The term had several technical problems associated with it. It was an oxymoron (since an immigrant is a person who has entered a country legally); it was inaccurate (an action is illegal, not a person). But most of all, it was a term rife with prejudice. It lumped thousands of people into a single, negative category and made it easy for us to judge them as some kind of parasite feeding stealthily upon America's bounty. It allowed us, through two brief words, to de-humanize them.

The term "illegal immigrant" harmed the people to whom it was applied, yes, but it harmed the rest of us, too, by promoting attitudes of superiority -- and racism. It is easy to turn such attitudes -- once condoned by law -- on anyone who looks different from us, by whom we feel threatened. It is easy to blame them for the troubles of the nation. Ultimately, this can only weaken America.

Andrew Lam is an editor with New America Media and the author of three books, Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres, and his latest, Birds of Paradise Lost. Helen Zia, author of Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People, is an American journalist and scholar who has covered Asian American communities and social and political movements. Chitra Divakaruni is an award-winning author, poet and teacher. Her books include The Mistress of Spices and Sister of My Heart.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2990584 2013-04-01T02:42:20-04:00 2013-04-01T03:09:33-04:00

Andrew Lam http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-lam/
Guests roar with laughter as both scenarios have become too real, if not too painful to take seriously. The Shanghai Daily kept count of the rising number of dead pigs floating down the Huangpu as if tracking numbers on the stock exchange. At last count the number surpassed 13,000.

The pigs died of virus but upriver farmers, instead of burning or burying the carcasses, opted to toss them in the water to avoid a state probe that could force them to cull the rest of their stock. Instead, they hope to sell it off quickly, public safety be damned.

In Beijing the gray smog continued to shroud the cityscape and many a tourist new to the city mistook the sun for the moon in the morning. At a recent writers' conference the conversation moved quickly from politics to pollution -- what it would be like to raise your child indoors full time and what the best brand of air purifier is on the market. A billionaire had sent gifts of oxygen tanks to politicians and sold them in downtown Beijing as a stunt.

Xi Jinping was elected president of China in mid-March and his speech was titled: "The Chinese Dream of National Rejuvenation."

"The Chinese Dream, after all, is the dream of the people. We must realize it by depending on the people. We must constantly bring benefits to the people," Xi said. Pigs in rivers and smog that shrouds the Forbidden City went unmentioned. Prosperity remained the key theme, much as it has been since Deng Xiaoping led China out of the Cold War by declaring: "to get rich quick is glorious."



But the Chinese Dream of 2013 has run smack into London's Great Smog of 1952, where people literally dropped dead from the soot in the air, and tens of thousands came down with lung infections. Smog pollution in Beijing reached its highest concentration in March, shocking even blasé locals. So alarming was the dark shroud that blocked city views that expats began leaving, no matter the good jobs and high incomes to be had.

After five years in Beijing, an American couple with a new baby is grappling with the health impacts of pollution. "We're doing pretty well professionally," the wife said, "but now we have to seriously rethink our strategy." Their baby rarely leaves the house, where an air purifier is on round-the-clock. "If we stay we might have to equip her with an oxygen mask when we take her outside," the husband remarked. "There's probably a market for that kind of oxygen mask for children of the wealthy...You just don't see kids playing outside in Beijing."

Those who don't have the option to leave China like the expat couple take to the Internet to complain and speculate.

"Bureaucrats and corrupt officials are living the dream but for most people, it's become a nightmare," wrote one blogger on Weibo. "As vague as Xi's 'dream' might be, it has prompted mass public speculation, expectation and has even become the butt of political jokes," noted the South China Morning Post. It quoted a blogger named Longyi Sky Master, who wrote: "We're 100 years early in realizing the Chinese dream! We now have the biggest, most beautiful and luxurious government offices in the world! Right now, what else could the Chinese people be dreaming of?"

Along with jokes and cynicism are popular memes: photo-shopped images of Chairman Mao's portrait, the one that hangs on the wall of Tiananmen Square. One shows Mao's comb blown asunder by the wind and the other shows him wearing a mask due to air pollution. It went viral on Weibo until it was censored but it was already too late. People text each other these images as a way of saying, ironically, "Welcome to Beijing," or cryptically: "I'm not going out today for obvious reasons." A picture in this case is worth 10,000 words.



Not only does the Chinese Dream of 2013 have to contend with the London Smog of 1952, it also needs to take a look at America's gilded age. As China's top 1 percent reach the highest stratosphere of wealth -- with fleets of Ferraris and Mercedez Benzes and armies of servants and mansions around the world - these industrialists, reminiscent of America's robber barons of yore, exert power and control over natural resources, buy government influence, pay extremely low wages and break any effort of workers to organize.

"The Chinese have a saying, once you climbed on the tiger's back it's very difficult to get back down," a Chinese journalist in Shanghai commented in a private gathering. "We have no choice now but to keep growing. But how long can we stay on the tiger's back?" Capitalism is roaring indeed in the largest nation on earth, and the authorities have no choice but to keep on pushing for greater wealth. As the journalist noted, "Once you fall, once the market falters, you'll be eaten alive."

In early 2011 the government erected a 31-foot bronze statue of Confucius near Tiananmen Square. The statue disappeared within 4 months time. It was yet another of China' futile efforts to bring back traditional Chinese values, ones that Mao himself helped destroy. "Eager to fill the vacuum left by the fading of Maoist ideology, the party in recent years has been championing Confucianism as a national code of conduct, with special emphasis on tenets like ethical behavior, respect for the elderly, social harmony and obedience to authority," The New York Times reported.

But the problem with Confucianism is that it also raises the specter of the mandate of heaven. When a ruler loses his way, falling prey to corruption and immorality, he loses heaven's mandate and the right to rule. In ancient times earthquakes, famines or floods were seen as inevitable signs that the mandate had been withdrawn. It's no wonder the old sage had to go.

Which leaves very little left for the Chinese Dream, itself derivative of President Herbert Hoover's Great American Dream speech in 1928 promising a "chicken in every pot and a car in every garage." Luckily Hoover didn't have to deal with a failing ecosystem and manmade pollution on a planetary scale.

Besides, the problem with the promise of wealth is that it is not really an ideology. Collective desire, after all, is not the same as collective strength; more often than not it leads to selfishness. Everyone wants a new car, which produces traffic jams and the burning of low-grade gasoline that leads to more smog; everyone wants air purifiers but it leads to more coal burning and facemasks, lung cancer and birth defects. The China Dream lacks at its core a larger purpose for the nation beyond consumerism.

The Chinese journalist in Shanghai who went to graduate school in the US said he is still committed to China. But he is "watching the government's actions very closely." There have been efforts to clean up, to deal with pollution and wrong doers, he said, "but the problem is huge. We have 1.3 billion people, not like in the US where there's only 300 million with about the same landmass."

Every night in his new home in the suburb, he watches for violators. In the old days people burned trash and no one stopped them, he said. "Now there's a hot line. I called a few times when they burned trash with lots of plastic in it. Now the authorities show up."

He loves his country but leaving is an option. "It depends on whether China is serious about clean up... whether it's willing to deal with pollution while it still can."


Andrew Lam is an editor at New America Media. He is the author of "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora" (Heyday Books, 2005), which won a Pen American "Beyond the Margins" award, and "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres". His latest book, "Birds of Paradise Lost," a collection of short stories about Vietnamese immigrants struggling to rebuild their lives in the Bay Area after a painful exodus, was recently published by Red Hen Press. He has lectured and read his work widely at many universities and recently visited Shanghai and Beijing.





]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2957675 2013-03-26T15:07:53-04:00 2013-03-26T18:40:29-04:00

Andrew Lam http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-lam/
Though he spent a few days in San Francisco, he did not want to see the Golden Gate Bridge, did not visit Chinatown nor was he curious about Fisherman's Warf. The ocean or park didn't thrill him, either, nor the ride on the cable car. And when I pointed Russian Hill's shimmering skyline at dusk he felt obliged to take a picture. Otherwise he was bored. All he wanted to do was shop and eat at the best restaurants and having me take photos of him doing so. Otherwise he was on the Internet or on his cell phone to talk, yes, what else, shopping. He checked out real estate prices, took pictures and texted them back to his friends and business partners in Vietnam.

And he also had a list of luxury goods he "needed to buy," and since he spoke very little English, I was, besides driver and host and photographer, his interpreter.

Until the last few years, the Vietnamese economy had been growing fast and furious. Since the cold war ended, and especially since the US normalized with its former enemy in 1997, Vietnam's economy has been on a steady rise. The GDP average growth had hovered somewhere between 7 to 10 percent annually for nearly a decade. It has slowed down in the last few years but the wealth remains palpable among certain class. Indeed, Vietnam may wear the hammer and sickle on her sleeve but her heart throbs with commerce and capitalism.

Rather, it's the age of the red bourgeoisie. And Vietnam is rushing toward consumerist society at a breakneck speed without so much as a backward glance. If religion was once the opiate of the masses, and ideology the cause of revolution, than money has replaced both and converted everyone, young and old, to worship at the brand new altar of Vietnam called the shopping mall.


This new revolution comes with its own vocabulary.

Song voi: To live fast, to hurry life and spend it away.

Dua doi: To be competitive, to be greedy, to keep up with the Joneses.

Van hoa toc do: Speed culture; culture that moves along at high speed.

Lo Co: Borrowed from "local," a term too describe someone who's backward, a yokel, or cheap goods that are made in Vietnam. None of Hai's friends, he would tell you, is Lo Co. He prefers Viet Kieu like me, Vietnamese who return from overseas.

Si-tret: Stress. Vietnamese have appropriated this word to describe the upwardly mobile. One is si-tret, for instance, while text messaging in one's cell phone while talking on another about one business deal.

In that world, to be able to spend $200 dollars on a bottle of wine or $340 dollar Gucci shirt is to be the envy of all. It's a world of one-upmanship where at dinner among friends, the first thing one does is to leave his new cell phone on the table to show that he'd acquired the latest technology. In fact, Vietnam has more cell phones than China per capita - 130 million cell phones for a population of 90 million. To be rich in Vietnam is indeed glorious. And to be rich requires showing off - and lately, by traveling and shopping overseas.

After all, Vietnam has its first billionaire recently confirmed by Forbes named Pham Nhat Vuong. Others are coming up.

These post ideological elites - children of business family or high ranking communist members - are now living in a world steep in wealth and luxury, a world that their parents couldn't possibly imagine a generation or two ago when they wore black pajamas and stood in line to buy rice from state-owed stores.

But it's a country of dazzling wealth and humiliating poverty. Thousands of rice farmers are currently being displaced so Vietnam can build it's projected 140 golf courses. While human trafficking has become a major scourge in the country, a true communist politburo wouldn't be caught dead these days without a Lexus and a Rolex and at least five servants in his villa. While the yearly per capita income is $1,200 dollars in 2010, luxury brands like Shiseido, Prada, Bvlgari, Hermes are becoming increasingly common consumer goods. According a survey by advertising and marketing agency a few years ago, 68 percent of youngsters say brand is their biggest concern when buying, and 73 percent are ready to pay more for products with high quality.

My friend Hai was obsessed with belts; he has a collection of them by top designers. On his last shopping day, we spent four hours at Hermes. We tested the patience of the young saleswoman who called and searched on line for a blue belt with a big silver buckle in the shape the letter H from all over the country while we sipped our cappuccino.

When she failed to find one, Hai complained in Vietnamese: "I didn't know San Francisco's so limiting. They have more choices in Bangkok. "

I held my tongue but the young woman asked, so I translated. She apologized. Then quietly, she asked. "So, are you from Vietnam as well?"

I wanted to tell her that long ago I fled as a refugee. That when Saigon fell in 1975 and was renamed it Ho Chi Minh City the new regime got rid of the bourgeois class like me and my family and sent many others to re-education camps and new economic zones, our homes confiscated. Others fled out to sea as boat people. Many died.

But if Hanoi aimed to create a classless society it failed and the opposite had happened. They found a life of luxury in the abandoned villas irresistible. When the cold war ended, so began the age of status conscious, money-grabbing, hyper-materialistic society the likes Vietnam had never seen before in its long, wretched history.

"No," I told the saleswoman, thinking of Joan Didion's book about greed and extravagance. "But it's where I was from."


The above article has been updated from East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres". Andrew Lam is the author of "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora" (Heyday Books, 2005), which won a Pen American "Beyond the Margins" award. His latest book, "Birds of Paradise Lost," a collection of short stories about Vietnamese immigrants struggling to rebuild their lives in the Bay Area after a painful exodus, was recently published by Red Hen Press. He has lectured and read his work widely at many universities. Listen to his interview on Forum with Michael Krasny.




]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2926010 2013-03-21T15:04:12-04:00 2013-05-21T05:12:01-04:00

Andrew Lam http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-lam/
I never thought of how I looked living in homogenous Saigon, but in America, as an outsider barely speaking English, I was fodder for teasing and racist epithets. In the bathroom one night some years later, as a teenager wanting to fit in, I used a toothpick to push up my epicanthic folds. They held for a few seconds, giving me the appearance of rounder eyes, and a glimpse of what I might look like with double eyelids. I had contemplated cosmetic surgery, and for a few months, even saved money for the purpose.

I never went through with the surgery, but my experience is hardly unique. The pressure to alter one's features and body is endemic in every group and ethnic community in America, and in Asia it is as routine as having one's wisdom teeth pulled. But the number of minorities getting plastic surgery is apparently on a steep rise.

According to a survey by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), in 2005 Asian-Americans had 437,000 cosmetic surgeries. In 2010, the number has risen to 760,691 - almost doubled in 5 years. One only needs to open a Vietnamese or Chinese or Korean language magazines Orange County to see the onslaught of ads for cosmetic surgery: eyebrow tattoos, dimple and split chin fabrications, laser treatments for skin blemishes, facelifts, breast augmentations -- you can have it all and with an easy-to-pay credit plan. But the most popular are nose and eye surgeries. In the online business directory of Little Saigon in Orange County, where the largest Vietnamese population in the United States resides, there are more than 50 local listings for cosmetic improvements and surgery.

Looking at some of these ads, I must admit that I find both the "before" and "after" pictures slightly disturbing. In the "before," which is often out of focus, the woman is displayed in a downtrodden, bereft look -- a mess of misery to go with her messy hair. But in the "after" picture, she is all smiles, well-dressed and coiffed.

She poses in a kind of exaggerated cheerfulness -- cheerful, I suppose, because her features have been altered. Apparently along with the surgery, the image suggests, her outlooks on life has dramatically changed as well.

I wish happiness were so easily obtained. While I am not against it, and have friends and loved ones who have had plastic surgery, I can't help but find that there's an inherent complex attached to altering one's facial features -- especially for an Asian-American. After all, I have never heard of someone who goes under the knife to have a double-eyelid reversal surgery or his classic roman nose flattened.

For a long time plastic surgeons worked with the Anglo-Saxon ideal of beauty, and medical schools a few decades ago did not acknowledge racial distinctions when it came to plastic surgery. Going under the knife in the name of beauty was, for a long time, a move toward having a Caucasian face.

Indeed, Asia's relationship with the West has been traditionally schizophrenic and contradictory when it comes to self-image. Vietnamese children of mixed parentage born of American GIs during the war, for instance, were a permanent under class, and their conditions worsened after the war ended. Perceived as children of the enemy, they were often derided, chastised and beaten. But these days those mixed children's features are coveted by many wealthy people in Saigon and Hanoi. They want their noses, eyes, lips, and would save a fortune to go under the knife to look like them.

Or take Japanese animation. While Japanese cartoons and comic books are taking the world over by storm -- and are a source of pride for Japan -- on closer inspection, one wonders if such pride is fully justified.


The author a few years ago at Petra, Jordan

Characters in popular animes like Inuyahsa or Naruto, just to name a few, all have round, large eyes that are often blue or green, and their hair is blond, brown or red. Japan, even as it struggles to make itself a global political player, by the look of its manga and anime, seems strangely beholden to the visage of their World War II conquerors.

In Korea, one in five women has gone under the knife. Seoul, in fact, has become the cosmetic surgery meccas for East Asians, if not the entire world, where those who could afford it, fly to South Korea to spend a fortune for a complete make over. China, since a ban on cosmetic surgery was lifted in 2001, is now experiencing a boom in the cosmetic surgery industry. There are more than 10,000 medical institutions for cosmetic surgery and the industry is thriving. There is even, since 2004, a Miss Plastic Surgery beauty contest.

However, there is a new "Look East" movement underfoot -- a growing Asian social consciousness in the United States and Asia. Plastic surgeons have begun to develop techniques to preserve ethnic characteristics and retain their identity. The changes are now more subtle: the nose is no longer as pointy, and doctors are not removing as much fat near the lower eyelid to avoid "the Caucasian look."

"Ethnic correctness" is the new catch phrase in cosmetic surgery, noted Audrey Magazine, a fashion magazine for Asian-American readers. "With a growing appreciation for diversity and a higher social awareness come advances in technique and deeper understanding of the anatomy of the Asian eye, resulting in more ethnically sensitive procedures."


The above Chinese woman was sued by her husband who didn't know that she has had extensive cosmetic surgery in South Korea before they married.

A Chinese-American friend, who has had excess fat removed from her eyelids, told me she never thought she wanted to "look white." "In fact, I wanted to look natural but better. So if no one noticed I had it done, then that's great." It was the older generation, she said, that was obsessed with "looking like Audrey Hepburn and Kim Novak."

It also helps that many young Asian entertainers have resisted cosmetic surgery. Korean pop stars have been the rage in Asia as well as among Asian immigrants in America, and on top of that food chain is the 27-year-old superstar Rain, whose classic Korean features haven't deterred fans in the least. He's often thought of as the Michael Jackson of Asia, sans the plastic surgery knife. And, of course, there's Psy, whose Gangnam Style video became the biggest hit in Youtube history, who doesn't seem very concerned very much with the standardized ideas of beauty.

And Zhang Ziyi ("Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"), Sandra Oh ("Sideways" and "Grey's Anatomy") and Lucy Liu ("Charlie's Angels"), to name a few, are famous actresses with very distinctive Asian features.

Plasticsurgery.org noted that Asians like "to maintain their ethnic identity. They do not want to lose important facial features that exhibit racial character. For instance, the typical Asian patient who has eyelid surgery desires a wider, fuller eye that is natural looking to the Asian face and maintains an almond shape."

These days I am comfortable in my own skin, and I take comfort in knowing that there are more people who look like me in the world than not. Having traveled throughout Asia over the years, my sense of beauty has become pluralized, and is no longer limited to a singular ideal.

The above article has been updated from another version written for New America Media. Andrew Lam is an editor at New America Media. He is the author of "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora" (Heyday Books, 2005), which won a Pen American "Beyond the Margins" award, and "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres". His latest book, "Birds of Paradise Lost," a collection of short stories about Vietnamese immigrants struggling to rebuild their lives in the Bay Area after a painful exodus, was recently published by Red Hen Press. He has lectured and read his work widely at many universities.





]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2846779 2013-03-10T00:59:38-05:00 2013-05-09T05:12:01-04:00

Andrew Lam http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-lam/ Two years ago the Tohoku earthquake and resulting tsunami devastated the region, seriously damaged the Fukushima nuclear power plant, sending radiated fumes into the air and leaking radiation into the waters. Nearly 16,000 people were killed by the earthquake and tidal waves, and 2,600 others were missing.

The letter below, written in Vietnamese by an immigrant who was working in Fukushima as a policeman to a friend in Vietnam, and it was published in newspapers and circulated on the Internet a week or so after the incident. It is an extraordinary testimony to the strength and dignity of the Japanese spirit, and an interesting slice of life near the epicenter of Japan's current crisis, the Fukushima nuclear power plant. I translated and published it on New America Media two weeks after the disaster struck on March 11, 2011. I am reposting it here on the occasion of the two-year anniversary of the Tohoku disaster.


Brother,

How are you and your family? These last few days, everything was in chaos. When I close my eyes, I see dead bodies. When I open my eyes, I also see dead bodies. Each one of us must work 20 hours a day, yet I wish there were 48 hours in the day, so that we could continue helping and rescuing folks.

We are without water and electricity, and food rations are near zero. We barely managed to move refugees to one place before there were new orders to move them elsewhere.

I am currently in Fukushima, about 25 kilometers away from the nuclear power plant. I have so much to tell you that if I could write it all down, it would surely turn into a novel about human relationships and behaviors during times of crisis.

The other day I ran into a Vietnamese-American. His name is Toan. He is an engineer working at the Fukushima 1 nuclear plant, and he was wounded right at the beginning, when the earthquake struck. With the chaos that ensued, no one helped him communicate with his family. When I ran into him I contacted the US embassy, and I have to admit that I admire the Americans' swift action: They sent a helicopter immediately to the hospital and took him to their military base.

But the foreign students from Vietnam are not so lucky. I still haven't received news of them. If there were exact names and addresses of where they work and so on, it would be easier to discover their fate. In Japan, the police do not keep accurate residential information the way they do in Vietnam, and privacy law here makes it even more difficult to find.

I met a Japanese woman who was working with seven Vietnamese women, all here as foreign students. Their work place is only 3 kilometers from the ocean and she said that they don't really understand Japanese. When she fled, the students followed her, but when she checked back they were gone. Now she doesn't know if they managed to survive. She remembers one woman's name: Nguyen thi Huyen (or Hien).

No representatives from the Vietnamese embassy have shown up, even though on the Vietnamese Internet news sites they claim to be very concerned about Vietnamese citizens in Japan - all of it a lie.

Even us policemen are going hungry and thirsty, so can you imagine what those Vietnamese foreign students are going through? The worst things here right now are the cold, the hunger and thirst, the lack of water and electricity.

People here remain calm - their sense of dignity and proper behavior are very good - so things aren't as bad as they could be. But given another week, I can't guarantee that things won't get to a point where we can no longer provide proper protection and order. They are humans after all, and when hunger and thirst override dignity, well, they will do whatever they have to do. The government is trying to provide air supply, bringing in food and medicine, but it's like dropping a little salt into the ocean.

Brother, there are so many stories I want to tell you - so many, that I don't know how to write them all. But there was a really moving incident. It involves a little Japanese boy who taught an adult like me a lesson on how to behave like a human being. Last night, I was sent to a little grammar school to help a charity organization distribute food to the refugees. It was a long line that snaked this way and that and I saw a little boy around 9 years old. He was wearing a t-shirt and a pair of shorts.

It was getting very cold and the boy was at the very end of the line. I was worried that by the time his turn came there wouldn't be any food left. So I spoke to him.



He said he was in the middle of PE at school when the earthquake happened. His father worked nearby and was driving to the school. The boy was on the third floor balcony when he saw the tsunami sweep his father's car away. I asked him about his mother. He said his house is right by the beach and that his mother and little sister probably didn't make it. He turned his head and wiped his tears when I asked about his relatives.

The boy was shivering so I took off my police jacket and put it on him. That's when my bag of food ration fell out. I picked it up and gave it to him. "When it comes to your turn, they might run out of food. So here's my portion. I already ate. Why don't you eat it."

The boy took my food and bowed. I thought he would eat it right away, but he didn't. He took the bag of food, went up to where the line ended and put it where all the food was waiting to be distributed. I was shocked. I asked him why he didn't eat it and instead added it to the food pile. He answered: "Because I see a lot more people hungrier than I am. If I put it there, then they will distribute the food equally."

When I heard that I turned away so that people wouldn't see me cry. It was so moving -- a powerful lesson on sacrifice and giving. Who knew a 9-year-old in third grade could teach me a lesson on how to be a human being at a time of such great suffering? A society that can produce a 9-year-old who understands the concept of sacrifice for the greater good must be a great society, a great people.

It reminds me of a phrase that I once learned in school, a capitalist theory from the old man, Fuwa [Tetsuzo], chairman of the Japanese Communist Party: "If Marx comes back to life, he will have to add a phrase to his book, Capital, and that 'Communist ideology is only successful in Japan.'"

Well, a few lines to send you and your family my warm wishes. The hours of my shift have begun again.
- Ha Minh Thanh





The above letter was originally published in New America Media where Andrew Lam is one of the editors. He is the author of "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora" (Heyday Books, 2005), which won a Pen American "Beyond the Margins" award, and "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres".

His latest book, "Birds of Paradise Lost," a collection of short stories about Vietnamese immigrants struggling to rebuild their lives in the Bay Area after a painful exodus, was recently published by Red Hen Press. He has lectured and read his work widely at many universities.





Cover of Birds of Paradise Lost ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2818071 2013-03-06T08:31:01-05:00 2013-05-06T05:12:01-04:00

Andrew Lam http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-lam/
Take the popular animated film Akira, for example. "Tokyo is destroyed by an apparent nuclear explosion, leading to the start of World War III." So goes Wikipedia's note on the world-famous manga series turned anime. "Thirty-one years after Tokyo's destruction, Neo-Tokyo, a new metropolis built on an artificial island in Tokyo Bay, is gripped by political strife, anti-government terrorism and gang violence."

Or take Desert Punk: "After a global nuclear catastrophe Japan has been reduced to a desert and the surviving humans seek out a meager living in the hot sands," goes the description of the anime series.

"A devastating war fought between two major nations with ultra-magnetic weapons far greater than anything seen earlier brings about total chaos and destruction throughout the world, resulting in several earthquakes and tidal waves," begins the plot description of the anime Future Boy Conan, in which humanity is on the brink of extinction.

The examples are endless, but you see the point: Nihilistic themes dominate Japanese narratives of itself.

Now try this scenario: Japan has fallen apart. Its towns and villages devastated by such a massive earthquake that the earth's axis itself is affected and by the subsequent tsunami, its nuclear reactors exposed, sending fumes of radiation into the atmosphere. Millions live without water and electricity. Millions more live in panic and fear as the tremors continue and radiation leaks into food and water and land.

This, alas, is no scenario at all, but a reality two years ago.

So, what purposes do these apocalyptic stories serve? And how does one watch these animes, now that their visions have become prophetically superimposed on the real world?

As someone who was born into a world devastated by the Vietnam war I witnessed much destruction and suffering at a very young age. I saw dead bodies strewn about in rice fields, burned out villages, maimed survivors, homeless refugees trudging along highways, and many begging on the streets of Saigon.

As a teenager in America, however, I was enthralled by Bugs Bunny and Disney movies. In this world, evil is always conquered, and violence only serves as humor - Daffy Duck is shot so often it is expected he would be full of bullet holes, and anvils and boulders are meant to fall on Wile E Coyote. The princess marries the prince, and everyone is guaranteed a happy ending. That is, I bought into the American optimism, bought my own ticket on the little train that could.

Now, as an adult, as a seasoned journalist who has witnessed tragedy after tragedy around the world, I find myself drawn back to the Far East, and increasingly drawn to Japanese manga and anime. I watch them religiously in middle age.

Why? Because many of these stories, albeit far more complex and enticing, are similar to the folktales my Vietnamese grandmother told. On those frightful nights when the bombs fell in villages and their reverberations shook the city, Grandma's ancient stories with their ambiguous if flat-out unhappy endings were strangely soothing.

The princess died and her heart turns into a ruby, which was then carved into a teacup. The fisherman, her true love, came back and cried and his tear fell in the cup, which melted into blood.
Or she'd tell of a younger brother, who gave up his love for a beautiful woman so that his older one could marry her. The younger man went to the forest and died, turning into a betel tree. Then the older brother searched for him, died and turned into a limestone. The wife followed, and sat leaning on the tree, when she turned into a vine. When chewing betel nut together with the vine leaf and limestone, your spit will turn into the color of blood.




A few years ago in Japan, I interviewed professor Koike Kazuo, the celebrated author of the Lone Wolf and Cub manga series. It is the story of a samurai who walked the path of death while pushing a small cart in which sat his little boy. Their entire clan had been massacred.

The boy watches undaunted as his father stabs and slices their enemies. In the final episode, the boy's father is killed by their ultimate nemesis, an old man who has masterminded their clan's destruction. Undaunted, the little boy picks up his father's spear and rushes to drive it through the old man, who, recognizing the boy's samurai spirit, embraced him in death, calling him "Grandson of my heart."

I asked Kazuo sensei why such a tragic ending would be considered children's entertainment. He thought about this for a while before answering, "On the deepest level, serious mangas are about spiritual drama and love."

This struck a chord in me. Despite the age of high-tech wizardry, manga/anime continue to distill an ancient ethos of the Far East; a shared cultural matrix between Japan and East Asia, in which fatalism informs the floating world. It teaches that life is precious, and spending time serving the greater good may be the only control one has in the face of unpredictable calamity and uncontrollable and often violent cosmos. It teaches that sacrifice for others is more important than individual happiness, that to grow in strength and wisdom one must find something more precious to protect and love than one's self, that there is an inherent beauty in sadness and suffering, and that honor and loyalty and duty sometimes far outweigh romantic love.

When one lives life for the sake of others, then one will achieve his human/spiritual truth regardless of the outcome.

Indeed, if American fairy tales are in the business of protecting children from the reality of a cold and belligerent world, Japanese fairy tales told through certain genre of mangas and animes are doing quite the opposite: preparing their charges for the day in which their normal and seemingly sunny life may be abruptly thrown into complete chaos and destruction, where the rug is pulled from underneath of everyone. Thus, hidden behind those round eyed and perfect-faced cartoon characters are stories of human sufferings and survival rivaling the tragedy of Job.

No wonder these Japanese narratives are rivaling the world of Disney these days, and anime continues to enthrall children and young adults across the globe. It is in part because they don't belittle their viewers but treat them as adults to be and offer a more mature version of the world.

After the huge earthquake and devastating tsunami that destroyed Fukushima, I saw the importance of old world wisdom more clearly. My grandmother's old fairy tales, with their countless wars and natural disasters, evolved over the millennia and merge with anime as warning, as an admonitory mythos, and as a way to prepare the next generation for cataclysm and grief.

Here's another inspirational and true story with anime sensibility. The story, which has been widely distributed on the Internet and global media, is told by an immigrant in Fukushima, where the nuclear reactors continue to send radiation out of their broken roofs and walls.

A nine-year-old boy watched as the tsunami swept away his father from the balcony of his school. His sister and mother, too, were presumably swept away with their house near the beach. Yet, despite such losses, when given a bag of food, he went to the front of the food line and gave it back to the food distributors. He told the astonished man who gave him the food to nourish himself, "I see a lot more people hungrier than I am. If I put it there, then they will distribute the food equally."

The immigrant adult who told this story wrote that he wept. "Who knew a boy in the third grade could teach me a lesson on how to be a human being at a time of such great suffering?" He noted. The boy, having no superpower, having lost his family, nevertheless becomes a kind of anime hero, someone who sacrifices for the greater good and achieves human truth.

A year after the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City were destroyed by terrorist attacks I visited Ground Zero . There were many visitors and gawkers about, and next to me were a few teenagers with their charming Midwest accents, snapping photos. As they surveyed the terrible destruction before them - shattered concrete and melted steel of what was once an ivory citadel -- one of them said, with reverence in his voice, "Man, this is, like, right out of Akira!"

As the horror of Fukushima unfolded two years ago, I watched anime nightly along with news of the region's devastation, and the story lines of the Far East resonate deeply. In this post 9/11 world, where war drones fly and preemptive strikes and revolutions are the norm, where ominous storms keep gathering and growing stronger -- if not at our shores then in our collective unconsciousness - and where the earth keeps trembling, and man-made disasters become the norm, it may very well be that those apocalyptic narratives are the very medicine that could assist us all. Adults and children alike, in Japan and elsewhere, now bear witness to the churning tides.






Another versions of the essay above was written in the aftermath of the Fukushima's nuclear disaster for New America Media, where Andrew Lam is a senior editor. He is the author of "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora" (Heyday Books, 2005), which won a Pen American "Beyond the Margins" award, and "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres". His latest book, "Birds of Paradise Lost," a collection of short stories about Vietnamese immigrants struggling to rebuild their lives in the Bay Area after a painful exodus, was recently published by Red Hen Press. He was recently interviewed by Michael Krasney on Forum. To listen, click here. Lam has lectured and read his work widely at many universities. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2810289 2013-03-05T07:30:29-05:00 2013-05-05T05:12:01-04:00

Andrew Lam http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-lam/ EDITOR'S NOTE: New America Media editor Andrew Lam has made his name as a journalist, but in his newest book, his past as a Vietnamese refugee reverberates through short stories about characters who fled Vietnam and made new lives in the Bay Area. NAM reporter Anna Challet spoke with him about the collection, Birds of Paradise Lost (Red Hen Press, 2013), published this month.


Anna Challet: Birds of Paradise Lost is your first book of fiction - how did you come to publish a fiction collection after so many years of working as a journalist?

Andrew Lam: I've been writing short stories for twenty years now, on and off ever since I was in the creative writing program at San Francisco State University. Though I later found a career as a journalist and an essayist, fiction is my first love and I never left it, even though there was no easy way to make a living from it. The collection is a labor of love and devotion, and whenever I found free time from my journalism work, I'd work on one story or another, or at least sketch out my characters, and research various issues related to my characters' dilemmas. After twenty years and thirty stories, thirteen pieces were finally selected and the collection was born. So far, the blurbs from [authors] Maxine Hong Kingston, Gish Jen, Robert Olen Butler, Oscar Hijuelos, Sandip Roy and others, have been most encouraging.

AC: You've written many personal essays and non-fiction pieces about coming to the United States from Vietnam. How does it feel to bring that experience into the lives of your fictional characters?

AL: Well, I always say that writing non-fiction versus writing fiction is a bit like architecture versus abstract painting. In non-fiction you have to stay true to historical events, be they personal or national ... In fiction, it's as if you enter a dream world that you created, but your characters have their own free will. They don't do what you want them to do - they get into trouble, do drugs, fight over petty things, and do outrageous things that you wouldn't want your children to do. In other words, you can only provide the background, the seeds - in my case the background of the Vietnamese refugee. When a well-rounded character takes over, he doesn't lecture you about his history and how he is misunderstood. He lives his life, does things that are unexpected, and makes you laugh and cry because of his human flaws and foibles.

AC: How did you come up with the title?

AL: It's the title of one of the thirteen stories in the book, and it's a story that deals with death and hatred and self-immolation. In the story, the narrator's best friend commits self-immolation in Washington, D.C. and leaves a note that says he hates the Vietnamese communist regime and wants his death to call attention to communist cruelty. But he also leaves his friends back in San Jose, California, reeling from his death. Was it a patriotic act? A passing tourist captures a picture of the man on fire, and the flame reminds the narrator of the bird of paradise - both like a bird and a flame, a phoenix of sorts.

AC: English is your third language, after Vietnamese and French. How is it that you've come to write in English - your "stepmother tongue?"

AL: You know, I have a funny story to tell about English and how I came to fall in love with the language. When I came to the United States in 1975 I was eleven, and within a few months my voice broke. I was desperate to fit in and spoke English all the time. Trouble was, in my household it was a no-no to speak English because somehow it is disrespectful to call parents and grandparents "you" - impersonal pronouns are offensive in Vietnamese. But I couldn't help it. I recited commercials like a parrot and I got yelled at quite often. My older brother one night said, "You speak so much English when you're not supposed to, that's why your vocal chords shattered. Now you sound like a duck." I thought it was true. I went from this sweet-voiced Vietnamese kid who spoke Vietnamese and French to this craggy-voiced teenager. I thought, "Wow, English is like magic." It not only shattered my voice, it changed me physiologically. I believed this for months ... There's magic in the language. I never fell out of the enchantment.

AC: Many of the characters in your stories seem to be preoccupied with time - telling the future ("The Palmist"), being unable to let go of the past ("Bright Clouds Over the Mekong"), living in constant fear of what surprise the present moment might bring ("Step Up and Whistle"). Do you often find yourself writing about characters who struggle in dealing with time?

AL: I hadn't thought of it in that way, but it's true that the past is ever present in the characters' lives in Birds of Paradise Lost. Perhaps it can't be helped. So many of them either experienced trauma - fleeing Vietnam, watching someone be killed - or inherited trauma from those who fled Vietnam, that the past is always flowing into the present. The future is of course the possibility of an absolution, the possibility that they can conquer this haunting aspect of the past so that they can begin to heal. Not all of them do, of course, just like in real life.

AC: What are your thoughts on being identified as a writer of immigrant literature? Given that you've written so much about the Vietnamese diaspora over the past twenty years, how do you think the concept of immigrant literature is changing in the United States?

AL: I think in a larger sense, immigrant narrative is comprehensive and speaks to the core of human experience. Isn't the first story told in the West about the Fall? Adam and Eve were immigrants too from somewhere, a lost Eden, a paradise lost. We all now are so mobile, so nomadic ... That experience of losing home, longing for home, that yearning for meaning and rootedness and identity in a floating world, it's what often makes an immigrant story into an American story ... Today, more people are crossing various borders in order to survive, thrive, change their lives. Even if you don't cross the border, with demographic shifts, the border sometimes crosses you ... America's story is largely an immigrant story. That hasn't changed since the Pilgrims ate their first turkey some four hundred years ago, and they were the original boat people.




AC: As an immigrant, what do you think of the current debate over immigration in this country?

AL: It's unfortunate that the country of immigrants has turned its back on immigrants. The atmosphere after 9/11 is toxic. In the war on terrorism, the immigrant is often the scapegoat. He becomes a kind of insurance policy against the effects of the recession. By blaming him, the pressure valve is regulated in times of crisis ... What we have now is a public mindset of us versus them, and an overall anti-immigrant climate that is both troubling and morally reprehensible. Missing from the national conversation are voices of pro-immigration reformers and civil rights leaders, who can speak on behalf of those who have no voice. Where are the leaders who can speak to the idea that it is not alien to American interests, but very much in our socioeconomic interests - not to mention our spiritual health - to integrate immigrants, that our nation functions best when we welcome newcomers and help them participate fully in our society?

I am glad to see the wheels are moving at last toward comprehensive immigration reform after last year's election. I am glad that immigrants themselves are speaking up. I am hopeful that the pendulum swings toward seeing immigrants in favorable terms once more.

All three of my books, "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora," "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres," and "Birds of Paradise Lost," are immigrant narratives -their dreams, their traumas, their struggles - and I write them with the confidence that these stories, written from the heart, will belong, in time, to America.


Andrew Lam was recently interviewed by Michael Krasney on the National Public Radio (NPR) program, Forum. To listen, click here.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2703760 2013-02-16T21:55:36-05:00 2013-04-18T05:12:01-04:00

Andrew Lam http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-lam/
"We can find these objects, we can track their motions, and we can predict their orbits many years into the future," noted Robert Naeye of Sky and Telescope in an essay called, "Lessons from the Russian Meteor Blast."

"And in the unlikely event that we actually find a dangerous object on a collision course with Earth, we might actually be able to deflect it if given sufficient warning time. Now, every government in the world is keenly aware of the possibility of meteor explosions over its territory."

The Russian parliament is also keen on the idea. "Instead of fighting on Earth, people should be creating a joint system of asteroid defense," its affairs committee chief Alexei Pushkov wrote on his Twitter account late Friday. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin on Saturday reiterated the idea and proposed a global defense system to counter space threats.

And on CNN, Lawrence Krauss, professor of physics and director of the Origin Project, talked about how human technology has advanced to the point of predicting and, more interesting, deflecting oncoming meteorites that could cause the earth "significant damage."

"We have to think about it seriously,"he said. "It's not science fiction. We can send a rocket out and land on [a meteor] or impact with it." If the meteor is far enough, "A small rocket running for a while [can cause] a small angular change.. enough have it miss the earth."

Meanwhile a new program called ATLAS is about to be launched. According to The Guardian, "The University of Hawaii has proposed a cheaper, simpler system known as Atlas -- Advanced Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System -- to be constructed with the help of a $5 million grant from NASA." Its aim is to create a warning system on oncoming asteroids and find ways to save earth from the impact.

So welcome to the age of empyrealization -- an age of man's increasing awareness and interactions with the heavens. We grow cognizant that we exist on intimate levels with the rest of the universe, that we are interacting with it, and, increasingly, having an effect upon it as it does upon us. The word doesn't exist yet in the dictionary, but for that matter neither did globalization three decades ago.

Unlike the dinosaurs, we have, in effect, become active agents in changing our destiny. A giant meteor wiped out 90 percent of life on earth 65 million years ago because the dinosaurs didn't collectively create a missile shield to deflect the meteor. Humans, on the other hand, with our orbiting telescopes and space probes, and our growing awareness of the threat from space, can track large foreign objects coming millions miles away and are talking about collectively deflecting those that could do us harm.

That man has changed his home planet is now well-accepted. Long before the industrial revolution and the age of climate change, humans have significantly impacted earth, at least according to climate scientist William Ruddiman. In his book titled Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate, he claimed that there is significant evidence that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have been rising since the earliest beginnings of agriculture. There is strong evidence, too, that a mini-ice age was averted some 5,000 years ago due to the rise in methane caused by the proliferation of rice paddy agriculture in Asia.

Unlike our ancestors, however, increasingly we are aware that human actions have an impact on the entire planet and beyond.

The knowledge informs NASA's decision in September 2003 to crash the spacecraft Galileo on Jupiter rather on Europa, one of Jupiter's 39 satellites. Europa has an ocean under its ice and active volcanoes to boot. It just might be supporting alien life. Jupiter, on the other hand, is very hot and gaseous and deemed incapable of life. Crashing Galileo on Europa would have risked contaminating it with microbes from earth.

In fact, we have been interacting with the heavens longer than most have thought. Think of it in term of radio waves. According to Adam Grossman, "mankind has been broadcasting radio waves into deep space for about a hundred years now ... That, of course, means there is an ever-expanding bubble announcing Humanity's presence to anyone listening in the Milky Way. This bubble is astronomically large (literally), and currently spans approximately 200 light years across."

Or think of it in term of our orbiting trash. According to NASA, "More than 500,000 pieces of debris, or "space junk," are tracked as they orbit the Earth. They all travel at speeds up to 17,500 mph, fast enough for a relatively small piece of orbital debris to damage a satellite or a spacecraft. "

While some fall to earth, others exit into outer space. In other word, the cosmos might rain meteors on earth, but humans too have already interacted with the universe by sending manmade debris into space.

More significantly, our rovers have been on Mars, roaming and digging, and studying its soil. And we have plenty of space probes that travel about in our solar system. Voyager 1, the first space probe sent up to the cosmos, has gone outside of the solar system and into deep space.

And all the while we map the universe, searching for planets that maybe hospitable to life. Astronomers, in fact, have discovered hundreds of other solar systems, and 864 exoplanets so far -- planets that are outside our solar systems. One planet in particular, 150 million light years away, is believed to have an atmosphere.

Clearly our destiny is in outer space. In a sense, globalization is but child's play compared to empyrealization, where man now recognizes earth as exiting in an open system with the rest of the cosmos and that he is interacting with, and increasingly, having an effect upon it.

Alas, back home, there's the issue of falling meteorites. The dinosaurs didn't fare well. Man, on the other hand, has a better chance. Whether or not we can deflect a large meteor as in the Hollywood movie, Armageddon, remains to be seen. But brilliant minds are at work. And nothing like an external threat to galvanize humanity.

Andrew Lam is an editor at New America Media. He is the author of "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora" (Heyday Books, 2005), which won a Pen American "Beyond the Margins" award, and "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres". His latest book, "Birds of Paradise Lost," a collection of short stories about Vietnamese immigrants struggling to rebuild their lives in the Bay Area after a painful exodus, was recently published by Red Hen Press. He has lectured and read his work widely at many universities. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2699621 2013-02-16T02:47:41-05:00 2013-04-17T05:12:01-04:00

Andrew Lam http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-lam/
Receding from her memories are the years in America, years full of longing and grief for her lost homeland. Lost, too, mercifully, are her memories of the war and the incredible suffering it had caused her. The garden outside her window teamed with life, butterflies and bees hovering over gardenias and roses, but her vision had begun to travel far beyond its walls. In her mind, Grandmother had already gone back to a happier time, rowing her boat down the river in the old country, singing some folksongs, watching white cranes fly above the green rich rice fields, celebrating Tet with relatives and neighbors -- to an unhurried world of long ago.

My parents and aunts sighed and shook their heads whenever they visited, feeling guilty for not being able to care for her at home, sad that their mother no longer knew them. I, on the other hand, took a different attitude altogether. I saw that there was a mixed blessing in her senility and forgetfulness. After all, grandmother had, in her own way, managed to conquer time.

Years ago, when she was still lucid, Grandma bought a wooden clock carved in the S shape of the map of Vietnam from a Vietnamese store in Little Saigon in Anaheim. Above her bed, the clock ticked mournfully, a constant reminder of how long she'd spent away from her home and hearth. Sometimes she would watch that clock tick as she counted her rosary and then cried silent, bitter tears.

Indeed, America's concepts of time only helped to confuse her. She did not know why, for instance, a grandson had to leave home at 18. When I left home for college, she wept. I overheard her protesting to my mother in an incredulous voice: "How can you let him go? He 's immature at 17 and now he's 18, somehow he's mature? Not everyone is a real adult at 18 or 21 either. It's not so simple."

Once, I remember, she asked me how far Vietnam was from California. I shrugged, "Well, I guess it's about 18 hours." Hearing this, grandma, made a scowling face and snapped: "If our country is only less than a day away by your measurement, then tell me how come I've been waiting for 15 years, seven months and eight days now and I am still here in America?"

If since her exile to America at the end of the Vietnam War time had been her enemy, telling her how long she'd been away from the country of her birth, it finally lost its grip on her that last year. That year before she died, she was no longer ruled by the clock. She traveled freely most of the time to the distant past and she seemed, if not happy, then at peace.

The last time I saw her alive, we held hands. Perhaps grandma thought I was a beau from the next village come courting or a distant relative, but she blushed when I told her that she was beautiful.

"Let's hurry," she said, her eyes staring at an impossibly far away place, "we're going to be late for the celebration at the temple."

Perhaps she is there now. As for me, since she passed away I am, I must say, not as fearful of old age as I once was. When I grow old and senile, I, too, should like to forget all the sorrow and sadness in my own life. Memories of heartbreaks and great losses will be dissolved like smoke in the morning wind. Like grandma, I'll relive instead all the moments of intense happiness: walking with my first love down Bankroft Street in Berkeley at dusk; singing silly songs with my siblings on Christmas eve when we were kids; luxuriating in my mother's arms as a child after a warm bath; watching the moonrise with my cousin over the ocean on a tiny island in Thailand.

And above all, I should like to return to that windblown pine hill of Dalat, Vietnam, a plateau of forests high above the sea where I grew up. I will sit again with my best friend in fourth grade, the two of us leaning against a pine tree and looking up at the clouds drifting by, our sweaters and hair stuck with pine needles after a game of hide and seek.

It was on that same hill that I later lost my first watch, a Mickey Mouse watch which I got for my seventh birthday, Mickey's arms pointing at the hours and minutes that slowly led me away from my childhood wonders and eventually my homeland. I had cried for days afterwards, but I now think that it's apt that the watch should lie decaying somewhere on that lovely hill.

For perhaps there is something that the adult forgets and only the very young and very old could know: That time and space are an illusion, a trick of the mind...

See me then as a starry-eyed child among pine trees, staring at the shifting sky, enraptured by an impossible sense of beauty, delighting simply to be in the world.



The above essay was originally published in New America Media where Andrew Lam is one of the editors. He is the author of "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora" (Heyday Books, 2005), which won a Pen American "Beyond the Margins" award, and "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres".





Cover of Birds of Paradise Lost

His latest book, "Birds of Paradise Lost," a collection of short stories about Vietnamese immigrants struggling to rebuild their lives in the Bay Area after a painful exodus, was recently published by Red Hen Press. He has lectured and read his work widely at many universities. ]]>