Thoughts on East Eats West

I’m trying not to take an either/or stance in this response.  I think that Andrew Lam is invested in creating East/West balance instead of establishing binaries.  I will go on to say that some of his essays left me feeling unfulfilled.  Others were thoughtful, engaging and interesting.  Since the work wasn't one story then I feel like I'm allowed to like some of it, but not all.

Andrew Lam’s personal essay style utilizes texts—objects, people and food—as tools, portals into memory, transition and meaning.  He was skilled in stretching his texts, but some of his concluding positions left me a bit annoyed.  Let me be clear—when I picked up the book I assumed it would be critical of the West, and while some of his essays discussed injustice here in the States, the racism and economic turmoil was often positioned as a distant past.  Lam seemed invested in optimism, in helping folks (white folks?) grabble with America’s shifting racial landscape—but see there’s yummy multiethnic cuisine now! He claims to be marrying East and West as he writes, but what happens if East and West are still at war?  I wanted to gather in Lam’s writing a sense of anger, an urgency to debunk the Model Minority Myth, but I guess that’s not his concern.  All good.

It might be Lam’s journalist background, one that prioritizes objectivity that sometimes resulted in a neutral tone of which I didn’t like.  I mean, not all writers are going to say something political, but since his book is called East Eats West he’s setting up readers for something.  Plus, the cover was misleading.  There’s a conflict.  East is on top of the West looking ferocious.  Superman, I mean the West, flees toward the bottom of the cover.  Honestly, I don’t feel that any writer can be objective.  Lam writes that he seeks to “reimagine the hemispheres as one,” which makes sense because his own body is a representation of the two hemispheres intertwined, and so I wondered how his writing itself represented a balance between the two.

West writing: the weaving in of research definitely made me think of Western notions of fact checking, of backing up statements with evidence. The essay structure is interested in making an argument and using facts to prove a point. The only problem was that Lam didn’t always have a clear stance.  Lam devotes quite a few pages to explaining the socioeconomic advancement of Vietnamese people—what about the Vietnamese immigrants that haven’t attained the American dream?  Lam argues that the “concept of filial piety, the idea that the collective assigns and directs the destiny of the individual” has remained a integral part of the Asian immigrant mindset and hasn’t been swayed by Western influence.  Yet, he serves as an example of going against his parent’s wishes.  What about the other young Asian American writers with potential that never pursued their dreams.  I wondered about them…

Lam writes that his intention is to “marry East and West” and I thought about how his prose might be a fusion of Eastern and Western storytelling techniques.  Was the brevity of each tale a testament to nonwestern narrative?  Was his use of Vietnamese words a way of paying homage to his native tongue?  How do bilingual writers provide a sense of who they are without distancing English speaking/writing readers? Most of the essays were no more than ten pages in length.  There was somewhat of a linear structure to the book—it begins with his interaction with a teacher then transitions to his experiences as a college student—yet, the collection ultimately ends with letters he wrote as a child to his older brother. Discontinuous History? Last question: who decided the order of the essays themselves?   

There were many reoccurring themes in Lam’s collection of essays.  My favorite was the concept of the familial alter and worship.  Ideas of spirituality, more than food and Anime, seemed to do a lot more for me.  Both his mother and grandmother light the incense at the family alter to remember the dead and ask for blessings. Lam claims that the act of writing allows him to remember and pay homage to those who came before him:

“strangely enough, is a kind of ritual, a kind of filial impulse to reconcile mother’s world and my own.  The solemnity of the act—my fingers gliding on the keyboard, my mind on things ethereal—is something akin, at last to my mother’s morning prayers.” 

Lam claims that he will continue to worship his elders via the written word.  Again, he writes that although there isn't complete balance between east and west there is hope--there has been a great deal of change...   

“When a Vietnamese man whose parents left his impoverished homeland might very well reach the moon, while Americans turn inward, breathe in and out, and try to reach inner peace and possibly Nirvana, I think that East-West dialogue has come very, very far.”