Andrew Lam

A recipient of the San Francisco Creative Works Fund, Andrew Lam is the author of a collection of short stories, Birds of Paradise Lost, and two collections of essays, Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora and East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres. He served on the jury of the 2014 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

Living in the Tenses in Saigon

Summer 2019
Andrew Lam

A photography installation from Dinh Q. Lê’s exhibit True Journey Is Return at the San Jose Museum of Art. Photo: Sharon Mollerus Not far from where I live now, a kilometer or so, the...
Birds of Paradise Lost by Andrew Lam

July 2013
Andrew Lam

Pasadena, California. Red Hen Press. 2013. ISBN 9781597092685 Andrew Lam, author of the essay collections Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora and East Eats West: Writin...
Stranger Than Nonfiction—A Look at the Online Homework Racket

February 21, 2013 | Andrew Lam

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. played himself in the movie Back to School, where he comically helps the wealthy Thornton Melon (played by Rodney Dangerfield) in a homework scheme that backfires. “Dear M...
“Gangnam Style”: Crossing Over in the New World

January 9, 2013 | Andrew Lam

Anthropologists and linguists no doubt are having a field day trying to chronicle and dissect how, in the early autumn of 2012, “Gangnam Style” became an American idiomatic expression. It stands for...
Ssshthanks Give in: A Vietnamese Refugee Remembers His First Thanksgiving

November 21, 2012 | Andrew Lam

Photo Flickr/NedraI “Thanks-giving,” said Mr. K., my seventh-grade English teacher. “Repeat after me: Thanksgiving.” “Ssshthanks give in,” I said, but the word tumbled and hissed, turning my mouth in...
The Postcolonial Presidency: Our Man Obama

November 14, 2012 | Andrew Lam

Photo by Christopher Dilts As a refugee from Vietnam, a country colonized by the French and then fought over by the Americans and the Soviet Union, I see the Obama presidency as spelling the end of a...