Quotes for All
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 … Read more
[The immigrant] 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. Andrew Lam
When I came to the United States in 1975 I was eleven, and within a few months my voice broke. 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. … Read more
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 . Andrew Lam
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. … Read more
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. Andrew Lam
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. Andrew Lam
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 and others, have been most encouraging. Andrew Lam
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. Andrew Lam
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 are speaking up. Andrew Lam