Andrew Lam
Biography
Andrew Lam was born in South Vietnam. The son of General Lâm Quang Thi of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, he left Vietnam with his family during the fall of Saigon. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, majoring in biochemistry. After graduation, however, he entered a creative writing program at San Francisco State University. While still in school he began writing for Pacific News Service and in 1993 won the Outstanding Young Journalist Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Lam’s books include “Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora,” which on the Pen Beyond Margins Award in 2010. “East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres,” which was named top 10 best non fiction by Shelf Unbound. “Birds of Paradise Lost,” a collection of stories, won the Josephine Miles Literature award and became a finalist for the California Award.
The recipient of many journalism awards, later received a Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University where he studied China’s modern history and lectured on Vietnamese history in America. A PBS documentary in 2004, My Journey Home, told of Lam’s return to Vietnam was aired nationwide. His latest book is “Stories from the Edge of the Sea.”
Books
“At times humorous and ecstatic, other times poetic and elegiac, the fourteen pieces in Stories from the Edge of the Sea explore love and loss, lust and grief, longing and heartbreaks through the lives of Vietnamese immigrants and their children in California. A younger dancer is haunted by memories of almost dying on a boat when they escaped from Vietnam, a widow processes her husband’s death through frantic Facebook postings, a writer enters an old lover’s home and sees a ghost at twilight. If the human heart is a vast, open-ended terrain, then Andrew Lam’s short stories are its mountains, valleys, and lakes. Together they seek to chart a barely explored country.”