Optimism and the Impersonal Essay

“When it comes to matters of the heart, my family, like so many others from Vietnam, is notoriously inexpressive… But at the birthday bash, we all discovered that what we could not talk about, some of us could at least sing about.” (77)

Some of my favorite moments in Andrew Lam’s East Eats West are ones like these, moments which – as I will try to explain – I have come to believe work to disprove one of his greater theses across these many essays. There are several things about this passage which I find significant. The first is that the experience he describes is, though briefly described in that generalized frame of the Vietnamese people (like so many others…), actually quite personal. The second, which is not represented in the quote, is that almost all of the songs named are English language tunes (“Delilah”, “Somewhere My Love”, “You’ve Got a Friend” – only the uncle singing a Vietnamese song). The third is that of the unbridgeable gap: There is something that can only be performed through translation (in this case, speech as translated into song).

The Thesis:

“Take the sign that used to hang in… Oakland. It said, ‘American-Mexican-Chinese-Vietnamese-Thailand-Cambodia-Laos-Filipino-Oriental Food.’ Some saw it as evidence of diversity gone bad. I, on the other hand, see all those hyphens as complex bridges and crossroads that seek to marry otherwise far-flung ideas, tastes, and styles.”

Lam does seem to make a continued effort throughout the book to come out in favor of something like the melting pot (beside the point entirely, I had originally, mistakenly, typed “melted pot”; I rather like that image as a way to represent another kind of societal collision). He does not, to be fair, subscribe to the melting-pot-proper, a term he suggests should be reconsidered as a blender – somewhat more of a violent a mixer (2) – but he does seem continually upbeat about the success of or prospects for fusion. We can see this in his discussions on food, politics (from Obama to Friday!), entertainment (the wonderful proliferation of manga and anime!), and more. But even in the hyphenated sign listed above, we can begin to see the breakdown. It seems to me that this sign represents a marriage of ideas as much as it does a billing order. Is it no coincidence that “American” is top-billed, followed by the only other country on the list to be found on the American continents, followed by the most internationally significant of the remaining, followed by…? I think, perhaps, it is not.

Which brings me back to the first significant point I had about the first quote: Lam seems most able to admit these kinds of conflicts in his ever-optimistic worldview when he is speaking the closest to home. It is at his uncle’s party that we see sorrow, the problem with language, and the unbridgeable gap in some of their clearest forms. It is not so, for example, with Pho. In some ways, it feels like the personal essay format, a more distanced format than a strict memoir, gives Lam the weapon he needs to express this happiness with the world.

“Back in my homeland, I used to bow when meeting a teacher… it took me half a year or so after having arrived in America to stop that kowtowing habit…” (24)

“… at night, I wept myself to sleep, longing for my lost world… but in the daytime—in school, at lunch, in English and art classes—I became a rowdy, giggly boy…” (26)

“When I broke the news [that I would not pursue medicine] to my parents, the air went out of the living room, and a pall settled in. Mother covered her mouth and cried; Father muttered a few curses in French. My older brother, a civil engineer, shook his head in disgust and left the room.” (39)

“I wish I could assure her that, after she is gone, each morning I will light incense for her and all the ancestors’ spirits before her, but I can’t.” (71)

“I recalled too that first time that I won a journalism awad and my father tried, then failed to say something in Vietnamese. Finally, he said it in English: ‘I’m proud of you,” then a quick pat on the shoulder. I was stunned. ‘Thanks, Dad,’ I said and looked over to my older brother, whose face was an expression of astonishment. He’d said it to the wrong son…” (79)

And lastly, because this is turning into a heck of a lot of examples:

“Perhaps this is why, though I have spoken about the war and my Vietnamese childhood, I have found it difficult to write in depth about it in English. While I could easily write about my Americanization process, to examine my Vietnamese childhood in English has seemed at times nearly impossible.” (167)

Each of these quotes hits on Lam’s individual, personal experience, from his own struggle to adopt American customs in the classroom to the tears that he personally shed for his lost home to the possibility of his grandmother’s death, and so on. Each one, in turn, is intimately concerned with language (or, that other form of language, culture): For instance, it was in bed that he wept but in English class that he was a giggly boy, he is not culturally capable of fulfilling the rituals of his ancestors, and he shares with his father a vocabulary that can only be expressed in English, and another that can’t. Thirdly, the unbridgeable gap: It is the complete lack of middle ground that seems to fly most completely in the face of Lam’s more optimistic thesis. In the quote from page 24, his language becomes aggressive: What was respectable to do in Vietnam is “kowtowing” in an American classroom. I find it astonishing how deep of a rift this language implies. In its denigrating aggression, it carries more than traces of the racism behind the classroom jeers that compelled him to change in the first place. There is no room for Vietnam in that language. There is, likewise, no middle ground between the weeping bed and the giggly English class; there is no word in Vietnamese for his father to express disappointment when he leaves the medical track, only French; the old rituals must be replaced by – not combined with – new, American ones (his writing, which is revealed just after the selected quote); there are again, no words in Vietnamese for his father to be proud of his American son; and it is “nearly impossible” to speak properly of Vietnam in English.

In these ways, I understand Lam not to be a traveler across the gulf, but only a resident of both sides at once. The span is only crossed with extreme difficulty (it is “nearly impossible” to do so), and the attempt almost never successful. And, I think, without the personal essay, this is all that Lam would have. In his personal history, there is no way to escape the fact of this: American-Vietnamese is not a fusion – it is a billing order.

The personal essay, though, gives Lam a great many other things to write about aside from his personal history: food, politics, entertainment, history, sports, and more. In these, he can identify – dare I say manufacture – fusion, can be optimistic. And while it is difficult to give him credit for the attempt when the contradictions are constantly creeping in at the corners, I don’t know that I can blame him for trying. It could be rather a beautiful world that we live in.