so many incredible moments!

I need to start out by saying that I am usually not a fan of personal essays – being primarily a fiction writer, I am a lover of the story and find essays difficult to sink my teeth into. However, I was pleasantly surprised with this collection – I found it touching, infuriating, funny, profound. I got really into it and was even brought to tears at some moments. While it might not have been in true memoir form, in its own right, East Eats West was a story. It is the story of one mans journey to understanding his traumatizing past, and also making sense of the complex world today and how the two hemispheres which he has called home that were once so distant are merging closer and impacting one another ever more rapidly, not only in his own life but in the public sphere as well.
That being said, since this isn’t in traditional memoir/story form, I’m a little unsure of how to tackle it from a craft point of view. I’ll try my best, though. I’m going to look at some of the passages I check-marked (I marked a TON of stuff in this one), and try to figure out what about those moments had such an impact on me and what Andrew Lam was doing on the page to make that happen.
One thing that I really appreciated was how he delved into so many different aspects of life – from religion, to food, to language, to relationships. He mixed fact and statistics with personal experience, which made this essay collection even richer.
An example of telling fact (at this moment it’s actual a summary of historical events) is on page 101:

“A startling moment when China turned a decisive corner: a man carrying two plastic bags, one in each hand, stood directly in the path of a column of armored tanks, effectively preventing them from proceeding down the avenue toward Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
The day before, on June 4, 1989, hundreds of pro-democracy students and workers had been gunned down in and near the square…
…Although direct political confrontation failed, a new sideways rebellion began in the cultural and economic sphere, one that has succeeded. If Mao launched the cultural revolution in 1966 to be rid of “liberal bourgeois” and to continue the revolutionary class struggle, the bourgeois liberals have struck back.”

Another example of this is on page 98:

“Lim’s modesty is reassuringly Asian, echoing the famous Chinese saying “He who is not satisfied with himself will grow.” In a classic 1992 study, psychologists Harold Stevenson and James Stigler compared academic skills of elementary school students in Taiwan, China, Japan, and the United States. It showed a yawning gap in self-perception between East and West. Asian students outperformed their American counterparts, but when they were asked to evaluate their performances, American students evaluated themselves significantly higher than those from Asia. ‘In other words, they combined a lousy performance with a high sense of self-esteem,’ notes Nina H. Shokraii Rees, author of School Choice 2000: What’s Happening in the States, in an essay called ‘The Self-Esteem Fraud.’”

And then on page 75:

“The only wilderness left is within; human beings have conquered everything but ourselves. We have decided, in the age of global warming, that we are our greatest enemy, our own stalker, and ultimately, our own destroyer. We consume all that lies in our path.
In Vietnam, one third of Vietnamese depend solely on the forest and forest products for their living, and the number is rising steadily, according to the United Nations Development Program. Whereas the entire Vietnam War destroyed close to five million acres of forestland, almost fifty million more have been destroyed because of population pressures since the war ended more than three decades ago.”


Some of these types of moments in the essay, like the first two examples, while I found really interesting, were a bit dry for me (like I said – I’m a lover of the story). It worked for me though, because Lam just sprinkled these types of passages in; if the whole book had been written in this way, I doubt that I would have made it through. The third example was so emotionally charged that it really had an impact on me. I like how he uses these two different types of fact giving to mix it up. But what really kept me going was how he juxtaposed these “tellings” with incredibly rich, profound, touching, and funny moments from his own personal experiences.

Examples of these moments, that really stood out to me:

Page 78 when for an uncle’s birthday he requests that every family member sings a song on karaoke rather than give him a gift:

“After a few more singers, it was Uncle’s turn. He chose a well-known Vietnamese song titled ‘Come What May, I Will Always Love You.’ His is a beautiful voice, but halfway through, as he looked at his three grown children staring back at him, he choked. Another aunt, his closest sister and confidante, quickly grabbed his mike, put her hand on his shoulder, and finished the song. Meanwhile, my uncle’s tears were flowing outward, finally, in front of his entire clan.”

Page 135-137 with the grandma talking to the grandfather’s ghost.

Page 124 when everyone gives their story of Pho soup. I just realized that in all of these examples, we get other people’s voices coming in. Maybe that is part of what makes them so powerful – that we are getting the collective and other individual voices telling their stories as well.


Lim is also a master at imagery and powerful moments that stop you in your tracks as you are reading:

On page 85, when he goes to see the Vietnam War Memorial in Orange County that is of a South Vietnamese and an American G.I.:

“Standing in front of it, I was of two opposed minds. I felt something akin to patriotism for my long lost homeland restirred in my blood, and a deep sadness for the men who fought and died and those who survived broken; I felt, at the same time, a dire need for distance. While I stood there on a Saturday evening, a couple of older women lit incense and prayed and several older Vietnamese men in army uniforms stood guard nearby. Something somber and heavy in their stance suggested a collective sorrow that caused me to shudder; their eyes – eyes that no doubt saw the worst of the old war – conveyed anger, hatred, and bitterness. Their faces, inevitably, reminded me of my father’s.”

And on page 58:

“Bones. American bones, which once lay buried in tropical graves, have been unearthed, washed, and carefully wrapped by impoverished hands. Then when they flee their homeland, refugees carry the bones with them. Malaysia had a malicious practice of pushing these boats back out. But the refugees were hoping that the bones could serve as talismans or passports to barter their way to the Promised Land.”

On page 114:

“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 icecaps melt and the sea keeps rising and polar bears drown, and as the ominous storms keep gathering and growing stronger – if not at our shores then at the edge of our collective unconsciousness – it may very well be that happily-ever-after narratives are no longer the right medicine, and that the stories American children are gravitating toward are alternative fairy tales that can assist them as they bear witness to the churning tides.”

On page 132:

“If you don’t believe me, then look at the new faces of America: the Indian writer, the Salvadoran poet, the Chinese actress, the Haitian hip-hop artist, the mixed-race children of many inheritances who are in themselves the fusions of many far-flung ideas. The entire world has entered here and commingled, and the richness of our stories has become, in my humble opinion, America’s saving grace. The American experience no longer needs to be monolithic and singular. Instead, a complex, many-voiced chorus is forming. And it needs your voice.”


And finally, there are moments that every person, no matter their background, can relate to. Universal truths of the human condition. Which is why this book is so accessible to everyone, not only Vietnamese. Such as on page 48:

“When one loses someone one loves, with whom one shares a private life, a private language, a private world, one loses an entire country, one becomes an exile.”

And on page 80:

“Yet if I manage to say so much in public – and still there is much to be said – I too have failed to say the things I wanted to say to the people I love the most, things that need saying. The old ways, in familial settings, remain overpowering and the tongue refuses to bend, so that the words prepared in reveries are never, by me, spoken.”

And on 131:

“How you do this you must find on your own; you must think through on your own. I can, from experience, however, tell you this much: you cannot run away from the past, feign amnesia, and embrace the new. I tried this, and it did no good. I learned in time to combat the rancor in my heart by embracing my losses instead. I learned to accept the tragedies of my life: my lost homeland, my murdered friends and relatives, my traumatized family, my broken heart – all my own sadness – as an inheritance. But by ‘inheritance,’ I do not mean that the past owns me, but that I learned to appropriate it. Over time, I have learned to give that heritage aesthetic testimony, returning to it again and again, and each time, I find new points of articulation. This gives me solace, a spiritual center, and, ultimately, a sense of direction.”


And, finally, as a writer, one of my favorites:

“This, then, is my final piece of advice: tell your story. Rage against the impulse to forget. Commit everything: each burnt-out house, each broken body, each wailing mother – all your grief – to memory. Live with your anguish, with your questions, even where there are no easy answers. When you find your voice, sing. It’s your responsibility, your spiritual burden to speak up, to bear, if you can, moral witness to the new tragedy of your generation.”

That final quote really helped me a lot this week. For the memoir piece we are turning in to this class, I ended up writing something extremely personal and heavy. I’ve been wanting to write a memoir for some time now, and the writing was incredibly cathartic. When I tried to read what I had written, however, I ended up having a bit of a panic attack at the idea of actually showing this to people and publishing it eventually. Lam’s words here comforted me, though, and propelled me forward.

-kris