Follow Your Bliss

At the opening of Wild, Wild East by Andrew Lam, the author frequently requests that his reader “picture this,” rather than simply showing us the image/memory. Using the technique, Lam is able to give us short clips of his life as a child in Vietnam and the transition of moving to American. One way he does this particularly well is through his meditation on kung fu/Bruce Lee. Lam writes, (Bruce) “Lee single-handedly brought the heroic Asian male image, long suffering from invisibility, onto the world stage” (14) However, Lee dies and, by the time that the Lam family arrives in the West in the mid-seventies, Andrew realizes that the Americans could “not yet fathom the dawning of the Pacific Century. And if Bruce Lee, with his swift kicks and furious punches and energized grunts, made a dent in the American imagination, he died too soon and did not save me from the taunts of the neighborhood kids.” (14) It’s amazing how Lam is able to take a global icon/kung fu and use this as a means to zoom in on his own personal struggle of being an immigrant while also making it significant on a global, cultural scale.  This piece isn’t just about kung fu or movies or even Lam’s part in all of this, it’s about how the world changes.

Lam uses a similar strategy to his “picture this” request when he writes, “Let’s fast-forward a couple of decades or so, towards the new millennium, to an age of unprecedented travel and mass migration and global commerce, where borders are porous and information, thanks to various high-tech gadgets, flows freely.” (16) A part of me could not believe that, with one line, Lam was able to “fast-foreword” decades! You can’t just skip that much time, I thought. But he did…and in a way that actually works very well, craft wise. He shows the contract between the 70s and the 90s very quickly by (again) asking us to PICTURE “a new kung fu moment” that makes Far East entertainment the norm. (16) Then he gives a run-down of all the ways that kung fu shows up in the media today. But he doesn’t stop here…we then get a little history lesson about what happened when the West started adopting Eastern ideas in the media and how the messages in film has had great political and cultural significance. Lam writes,

“The new narrative seems to reflect a sense of uninhibited wildness, and many characters—powerful eccentrics—live outside the social norms and stifling traditions, taking only what’s good and discarding the rest. The movies were beginning to explore and deconstruct Confucian ideas, and along with it, issues of loyalty and patriotism and friendship and love.” (18)

           

In short, the West has gobbled up the ideas of the East. Or as Lam says in a very colloquial manner, “So, here the thing: West has become part of East.” (20) In so may more ways than just media, the East appears everywhere in the West from acupuncture to Asian names to the once extremely popular Chinese character tattoo to fish sauce at Safeway. I love it when Lam writes,

“East and West—the twain have met with the blessing of shared fascination. A refugee of California, I once resigned myself to the idea that incense smoke, gongs and Confucian dramas were simply an Asian immigrant’s preoccupation, a private affair of sorts. But I’ve changed my mind…Like the heroes of old, I carry on my skills, walking a path with determination to tell my stories. Language is my weapon, invention my martial art. I seek to marry the New World and the Old continent, fantasies of memories, and, through the act of writing, reimagining the hemispheres as one.” (22)

Lam spends the rest of the book—a compilation of short stories/essays—delving into how he came to the conclusion that the East and West are constantly changing each other by reexamining his own past and the Vietnamese Diaspora.

In the next “chapter” entitled My Teacher, My Friend, Lam describes his last day of junior high when he is walking home and trips. He writes,

“Though I skinned my knee, I laughed. Then, as I scampered to retrieve the cards, I found myself yelling out ecstatically the name of each image on each one of them—“school,”  “cloud,” “bridge,” “house,” “dog,” “car”—as if for the first time. It was then that I looked up as saw, far in the distance, San Francisco’s downtown, its glittering high-rises resembling a fairy-tale castle made of diamonds, with the shimmering sea dotted with sailboats as backdrop.  “City,” I said, “my beautiful city.” (28)

As I read this, I felt such emotion rising up inside me. I remember feeling that way recently when I was home in Maui and I was sitting out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on my surfboard during sunset, staring at the West Maui Mountains. They glowed in a rainbow of pinks, peaches, and purples. It’s a sight I’ve seen hundreds of times and thought, “It’s pretty.” But this time, I felt this overwhelming sense of belonging. Of home: that it was the only place I was meant to be. My heart was bursting with so much appreciation that I simultaneously wanted to laugh and cry.

The way in which Lam describes his own “home moment” is a short, relatively simply description but it’s filled with so much beauty and that incredible sense of wonder. Although Lam was torn from a life of privilege and spent some time grieving the loss of his homeland, in this moment, he recognizes the beauty of his new home and in a sense, he seems content to move forward, eventually living in one of the “glittery glass towers” himself. (28) He explains: “because I felt blessed and happy, I went on blessedly with my business of growing up” (30) and “If I mourned the loss of my homeland, I was also glad that I became an American. Here, perhaps, like nowhere else, I was given the opportunity…to follow my bliss” (45).

Incidentally, this move towards bliss is instigated by heartbreak. Lam questions, “Wasn’t that when I began to bleed myself into words?” (47) And then he answers his question:

           

“I tried to capture what it was like to loose someone who had been my preoccupation throughout my college life; who was, in fact, my life then. Yet I was too close to the subject, too hurt to do the story justice. But the raw emotions unearthed another set of older memories simmering underneath.” And thus he “began to go back” into the past. (48)

Throughout most of East Eats West, Lam’s language is beautiful yet straightforward (often times colloquial) so I was surprised when he departed from this style and slipped into much more densely poetic language at the end of this piece. Lam writes:

“And so—the river glints and sparkles and I sail on. Because I did not go back, I will send ahead the future stretch where I can not yet go, to where the storyteller’s flesh crumbles to dust but his stories, when told from the heart, may yet live on. For this, tendered by enchanted memories and tinged with regrets, is a story of requited love.” (32)

This voice is so starkly different from the way in which he tends to “summarize” the end of some of his other pieces. For example, in Too Much Self-Esteem Can Be Bad For Your Child, Lam concludes, “It houses very different mentalities in Asia –for when it comes to the perception of self, East and West remain apart.” (100) And yet, on the other hand, Lam also concludes in Buddha and Ancestral Spirits in Surburbia (also in a very "summarizy" tone), that,

“East and West have not only met but comingled and fused. When a Vietnamese man whose parents left his impoverished homeland might very well reach the moon, with Americans turn inward, breathe in and own, and try to reach a state of Nirvana, I think the East-West dialogue has come very far.” (157)

Perhaps not all the way to Nirvana, but very far.

In the section One Asian Writer’s Lesson: Love Your Immigrant Parents, Follow Your Bliss, Lam continues to examine how the East and West remain apart. Lam begins, “One summer afternoon many years ago I came home to rob my parents of their American dream.” (39). What a “crafty” sentence! He basically manages to tell us the whole story in one line. In this piece, Lam uses his own decision to disobey his parent’s wishes for him to go to medical school and decided to become a writer as a springboard to delve into the Asia versus American views on education and vocation. He writes,

“American demands serious examination of the soul for children growing up between conflicting cultures, two seeming anitpodes, two opposite hemispheres. Asia will tell you to obey and honor your parents’ wishes, but America will tell you to look out for number one, to think for yourself. It whispers words of rebellion against the communal.” (45)

And thus, Lam is forced to choose between his duty and his bliss and in the end, he chooses bliss… and in that bliss there is freedom, joy and growth but also self-doubt the pain of remembering. But in the end, it’s worth it and Lam writes, “I am happy to report that I haven’t ever regretted my decision.” (46)