Reborn Through His Eyes

Reading this collection I thought about the viability of creating a media association, publishing articles through it, and compiling them into a book to be released by a different publisher. Smart!

I thought about twenty-one essays as twenty-one different memoirs and there being still more to come.

I thought about witnessing Andrew Lam’s prayer to himself, the world.

Throughout the book, Andrew Lam solidly knows who he is (someone living in multiple worlds) so he plays with not knowing. He speaks about what he wants in the world and who he is in the world simultaneously:

“Having been victims of the war, these people have emerged as victors of the peace. They’ve managed to remake themselves and go on with their lives, and more important, by refusing to let rage and thirst for vengeance dominate their hearts, some have become active agents in changing the destiny of Vietnam itself”(67).

Lam uses minute personal experiences to illustrate big social problems or universal concerns:

“I watched the soup billowing smoke in front of me and felt as if I was about to swallow poison. To make things worse, the tiger was my favorite animal and I felt wholly unworthy to receive such a sacrifice”(73).

And:

“Man, this is like, right out of Akira!”(113)…”In a post-9/11 world in which waging preemptive wars in the name of peace has become the norm and the sky is full of war drones, and as the polar ice caps melt and the sea keeps rising and the polar bars drown…”(114).

In “Letter to a Young Iraqi Refugee to America”, Lam tempers the carnage of war with a boyhood hobby:

“I could, as with baseball cards, trade Gulf of Tonkin Incident for Weapons of Mass Destruction…”(129).

His ability to articulate a place where his family struggles, with expressing their emotions in “Singing in the Family”:

“That afternoon I watched and listened in amazement as my relatives laid bare their hearts before me. It was as if in poetry we could finally converse about what in prose, in conversation we couldn’t”(78) does not relieve him of his struggling:

“And was it not why my lover left me? Don’t leave. I love you”(80).

Lam reminds us globalization goes both ways:

“For every McDonald’s or Starbucks that spring up in Taipei or Bangkok or Tokyo, a handful of Vietnamese, Chinese, and Thai restaurants bloom in the U.S.”(154).

Lam uses different tricks to identify himself in his text while speaking of others in various eras and social movements.In “Our Man Obama” he speaks of Frederick Douglass:

“For this is the way the power lies: those who once dwelled at the margins of the commonwealth have appropriated the language of their colonial masters and they use it with a great degree of articulation as they inch toward the center, crossing all kinds of demarcations, dispelling the old myth”(118). With every consonant and vowel, Lam is speaking himself into the center here.

He does it again here, speaking of Friday on page 121:

“His talent is the ability to overcome paralysis induced by multiple conflicting narratives and selves by finding and inventing new connections between them”(121).

This is a work of "aesthetic testimony". Lam repeatedly tells what he is doing, yet never repeats himself. He has found as many ways to tell his story as there are people to tell it to. This is part of the process of de-marginalizing, of centering; of us as readers, being “reborn through his eyes”(133).