Cultural Writing. Asian American Studies. In his long-overdue first collection of essays, noted journalist and NPR commentator Andrew Lam explores his life-long struggle for identity as a Viet Kieu, or a Vietnamese national living abroad. At age eleven, Lam, the son of a South Vietnamese general, came to California on the eve of the fall of Saigon to communist forces. He traded his Vietnamese name for a more American one and immersed himself in the allure of the American Dream: something not clearly defined for him or his family. Reflecting on the meanings of the Vietnam War to the Vietnamese...
Cultural Writing. Asian American Studies. In his long-overdue first collection of essays, noted journalist and NPR commentator Andrew Lam explores his...
The thirteen stories in Birds of Paradise Lost shimmer with humor and pathos as they chronicle the anguish and joy and bravery of America s newest Americans, the troubled lives of those who fled Vietnam and remade themselves in the San Francisco Bay Area. The past memories of war and its aftermath, of murder, arrest, re-education camps and new economic zones, of escape and shipwreck and atrocity is ever present in these wise and compassionate stories. It plays itself out in surprising ways in the lives of people who thought they...
*Finalist for the California Book Award*
The thirteen stories in Birds of Paradise Lost shimmer with humor and pathos as they ch...
