In this interview, Andrew Lam discusses his upcoming short story collection Stories from the Edge of the Sea, which explores love, heartbreak, and identity beyond the immediate trauma of war. He reflects on the shift from writing out of duty and survivor’s guilt to writing for personal fulfillment. Lam also shares thoughts on the evolution of Vietnamese American literature and encourages writers to tell stories that speak to their own experiences, free from obligation.

We’re eager to read your next book, Stories from the Edge of the Sea! This will be your second short story collection since Birds of Paradise Lost, published in 2013 by Red Hen Press. What did your creative writing process look like in crafting these two short story collections? Did you have a different goal or themes you wanted to explore in this newest collection? 

I wrote quite a few stories for the first collection, and the publisher had to take out a couple in order for it to fit. Although Red Hen Press loved them, they couldn’t fit them all in Birds of Paradise Lost. These became the seeds for the second collection, and I built around them. 

But if I have to compare the second collection to the first, I would say that Birds of Paradise Lost felt more immediate in terms of how the Vietnam War and painful exodus still played out in refugees’ lives in America. Birds is a set of survivors’ stories, whereas Stories from the Edge of the Sea seems to me to be a literary exploration of love and heartbreaks. If the Vietnam War and the refugees’ trauma still exude some effects on the lives of my characters, the effects are more of an echo, though resonant and powerful at times. The affairs of the heart are more prominent in this collection. In this collection, too, I allow myself to explore the sensual aspects of being, with LGBTQ stories woven in, and I let my characters navigate this vast ocean we call love—which seems to me mostly uncharted.

You’ve published essays, short stories, and you’re a journalist too. As you move through genres and forms, do you feel particularly attached to or challenged by any? Are there genres you haven’t tried or want to venture into? 

I’ve said this before, but writing essays and news analysis always felt to me to be the task of a literary architect, and logic plays a central role, and even if one employs all one’s senses, central themes and supporting ideas need to play out for the house to stand— whereas writing fiction, especially short fiction, feels a bit like abstract painting. One’s own feelings and one’s insight into yearnings and fears, trepidation and desire— what quickens the heart and moves the soul— play a pivotal role in writing a good story. Characters’ quirkiness, hidden needs and wants, lead the way, and you just follow them and report their movements. It’s hard to explain it, but a good short story constantly surprises me, who is supposed to be the writer. I’m surprised because my characters seem to do things I couldn’t predict when I first built the garden in which they inhabit. Writing essays, on the other hand, requires a discipline of mind. Even if one allows the heart to speak, it only speaks through controlled logic, supporting ideas and obeying some central theme or another. Fiction is more open-ended in what you can do and get away with. I love all forms. But I am particularly fond of personal essays and short story writing because they fit my temperament.

In the essay “Notes of a Warrior’s Son,” written in February 2005 and published in Perfume Dreams, you ask, “Could a son ever redeem his father’s lost war? What duty does an Americanized son owe his Vietnamese father in exile? What kind of territorial integrity could father and son hope to defend in America?” I find that many children of immigrants writing their family story continue to grapple with these questions. There’s this indescribable guilt they carry, a parent-child relationship shrouded in debt, obligation, sacrifice. Over the years, has anything changed or stayed the same for you in how you think about your “duty” as your father’s son, or the Vietnamese immigrant parent-child relationship in the abstract? I am most curious about where the guilt goes, or what it evolves to, or what form it takes now. 

I would say this: over the years I’ve transitioned out of guilt and shame.The guilt for me at least has a lot to do with not just fulfilling my parents’ hopes and expectations but also being someone who survived the war and escaped the worst of that war’s aftermath. So many people died in re-education camps, new economic zones, and over the ocean while escaping, while others suffered unspeakable treatment by the winners of that war. I went on with my American life, to high school and college and traveling the world —  but I felt both at once lucky and guilty for having escaped and led a life of relative comfort. 

Why did I survive and have a good life while so many others drowned in the ocean? I remember my mother rolling $100 dollar bills into tight little rolls, smaller than a drinking straw, and pushing them through Colgate tubes as part of her care packages that she sent home. I remember brown letters that reached us from Vietnam, begging for medicines, assistance. I remember my father’s grief upon receiving news of so and so who died in the re-education camps. I remember watching TV and seeing images of boat people on rickety boats bobbing up and down on the ocean. At the beginning of my writing career, I wrote about all that— the survivor’s guilt driving me on. Back when I started writing there were so few — one or two people, maybe— who wrote for mainstream media from the Vietnamese American point of view. 

I felt a lot of pressure back then to write about issues facing our people. “You should say…” is a phrase I often got from relatives and friends who wanted so and so issues addressed. I had to tune those voices out as the pressure was tremendous. 

But over the years, as more folks wrote and became great writers and journalists and media personalities, I felt less pressure to write as my duty. Instead, I fell in love with the process of writing, of exploring what literature can do — art for art’s sake kind of. And certainly I moved on to exploring themes that are my own interest. 

Though the plight of the migrant still remains my chief concern, here are some themes I’d love to explore: Buddhist minds and spiritual experiences, ghost stories, and maybe, who knows, even science fiction.

You wrote about a conversation you had with your friend, the artist Dinh Q. Le. As 1.5 generation Vietnamese Americans, you both meditate on Vietnam’s past in your creative works, while also experiencing Vietnam in the present tense and all the ways in which it is no longer the home our elders left behind. But then he tells you over dinner one evening that he’s “tired of the Vietnam story,” and you say “Me too.” And you write, “Then we continue to talk about Vietnam.” When were some times that you experienced this ‘tiredness’ or felt trapped, or felt that Vietnam’s past was too daunting of a topic to continue writing about? How do you take care of yourself and find support in a creative career that is so tied to your history? 

One of my favorite quotes about history is from the great James Baldwin: “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”  I agree with this wise assessment, of course, but this is where I take an existentialist approach: Yes, history is trapped in me, but I can choose to process it and own it, rather letting it simply own me. Camus, in his famous essay on the titan Sisyphus, suggested that even when forced for eternity to push a giant boulder up one side of the hill only to see it roll down the other and repeat it all over again, that it is within Sisyphus’ power to smile, to choose to be happy. Likewise, instead of seeing it as a curse, I tend to see history as a complex riddle that requires my literary skills to solve. The task is sometimes onerous and extremely difficult, and oftentimes defeating, but I also find it incredibly cathartic upon creating a beautiful story or writing an essay that captures a fragment of that complexity. There’s so much to unravel indeed through the task of writing, of art.

As a pioneer in Vietnamese American literature, are there any topics in Vietnamese American literature that you would encourage the community to explore and discuss further? Maybe another way to put it is – what stories do you want to read in the next Vietnamese American book you pick up? 

First of all, I want to see translations of first-generation writings in Vietnamese into English. So much of the gap between the generations is language. Books by authors who came to America as adults and wrote in Vietnamese rarely get to be read in English by the second generation and non-Vietnamese Americans. There were testimonies of the horrors of wars and exodus that are captured in painful details. Too bad so many of these books languished in Vietnamese language bookstores, never being read outside of the enclave. If I had lots of money, this is where I would spend it. Publishing worthy works by the likes of Duyen Anh, Nguyen Mong Giac, etc. would add to what we think of as Vietnamese American literature. 

Secondly, I would love to see a kind of writing that is both intellectual and literarily satisfying — something, say, on the level of Joan Didion or Truman Capote or Norman Mailer — that would somehow connect Vietnamese America to the larger world. Or just anything that explores contemporary life from the experience of a Vietnamese American. 

But mostly, I want to say this: be free. If the war is not your experience nor the exodus part of your memory, don’t feel obligated to address them unless you are compelled to. Be free to choose and pick and follow that interest, that bliss. Isn’t it why we got here, to be free, and to fight to stay free?

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This interview was conducted by Cathy Duong as part of the Author Spotlight series. All featured authors participated in Viet Book Fest 2025, a literary event presented by the Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Association (VAALA). Held on Sunday, April 6, 2025, at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, the all-day festival celebrated Vietnamese diasporic voices in literature, culture, and storytelling.