“West has changed the East, indeed, but in profound ways, East too eats West.”

Andrew Lam visits Vietnam regularly. In a PBS special called My Journey Home he discusses how he has been back to Vietnam many times since he was forced to leave but each time he visits finds that he has something new to (re)discover. In the PBS special it was a visit with his uncle who he and his mother had not seen since they fled. His uncle talks to Lam about being a singer and poet and commends his nephew for being a writer, for giving voice to the history of their people and their experiences, which is very important to Lam’s experience as a Viet-American writer. Lam also visits the home he grew up in, which he has done many times before, but he had yet to step foot inside the gates since leaving. In the footage, Lam is shown entering and walking throughout the house, memories flooding him, emotions swirling. This special made me realize that although Lam has written many pieces about his experiences in Vietnam and after he left, there is always more to be explored. This is why I think the essay is the perfect form for Lam because it allows him to go back and revisit his life and work, to continue the exploration. If he were to have written a thick memoir perhaps he wouldn’t feel the freedom to continually go back and revisit his body of work, his history, to add on, to fill in the blanks. The essay offers Lam the freedom for his work to be forever revisited and built upon.

I really appreciated the humor that Lam incorporates in some of these essays. The title of the piece, “Ph(o)netics,” made me laugh out loud and I thought it was a really creative way to title a piece that explores the wonderful world of Pho. It was so interesting to think of all the places in the world that serve Pho and how each member in his family has a different story to tell about their travels and finding Pho in the most unlikely of places. I also found the piece “Stress, Vietnamese Style” to be exceptionally funny. “Si-tret” is “a kind of symptom associated with young, upwardly mobile urban professionals in peacetime,” “a phenomenon not of simple hard work” (93). This not only gives readers some insight into how the Vietnamese are changing and are influenced by the Americans but also on Lam himself. His articulate and detailed observations allow me to understand a lot about who he is and where he fits in among the changing culture of modern Vietnam versus the traditional culture he grew up in.

One of my favorite essays in the book was “California Cuisine of the World.” The way in which Lam writes about being homesick in America when his family first arrived to later feeling so at home was profound. He describes the way California has embraced global foods, especially Vietnamese, making me appreciate the food culture we share in the Bay Area as well as learn a thing or two about how this all came to be. Lam writes, “West has changed the East, indeed, but in profound ways, East too eats West.” The homesickness suddenly turned in a new direction when a family friend brought some seeds back from Vietnam. “Soon mother’s small garden in the backyard was full of lemongrass, Thai basil, Vietnamese coriander, and small red chilies. Homesickness was placated by the fact that home was coming slowly but surely, nearer to the golden shore” (84-85). And this brings me to what I found most profound in the whole book: how the two worlds have collided, criss-crossed, spilled over. With the growth of technology, what once seemed a far away home that could never be returned to is now a place that can be perused by Google Earth, a place where people can be reached by video chat and email, a home that can easily be revisited by airplane.

“From Rice Fields to Microchips: The Vietnamese Story in California” really explores and opens up this idea of cross-cultural and cross-world communication, of bringing a home that is far away so close. In this essay, Lam writes about how he received a letter from a former teacher in Vietnam, someone who he thought he had lost touch with forever. “But if war and migration separated us, technology renewed otherwise impossible ties. Not so long ago, the ocean was vast, homesickness was an incurable malady, and a Vietnamese overseas had little more than nostalgic memories to keep cultural ties alive. There was a time when leaving meant risking one’s life in the turbulent sea, and one who did not make it to foreign shores would not expect to ever see the homeland again” (61). So what has changed? Technology and the interconnectedness of the information highway. The world, it seems, has become a smaller place.

The interesting thing about Lam’s essays is that they too are all interconnected. They explore overlapping themes, locations, foods, and peoples. But they also reach out a vast audience people: Americans, Vietnamese, Vietnamese-Americans, and other groups who share similar or dissimilar stories. What his audience does share is the information highway, the vast route that allows us to communicate with each other, discover our pasts, those of others, explore the present and future and share who we are through stories, videos, live streams, photographs, etc. And this is where Lam’s perspective is so unique and eye-opening: “So while some native-born Americans may blame technology—the ATM, the automated gas pump, the Home Shopping Network, the Internet—for breaking down community and family ties, many Asian immigrants will tell you it has had the reverse effect on their lives. With the advent of communication technology, Vietnamese living today can generate and disseminate their own media, their own history, information that’s close to their hearts” (62-63).

So what does this have to do with craft? I think Lam writes for this very reason: to “generate and disseminate [his] own media, [his] own history, information that’s close to [his heart].” And I think this is why the book is in the form of short essays: because they are accessible, easily wide-spread and easily read, short for people who have technologically inclined, short attention spans. They allow for information to collapse in and cross over each other, for similar themes to rise and fall, and they allow Lam to explore what he loves and what matters most to him with a wide audience. He blurs the lines of where he is, who he is writing for and what it all means in a beautiful and nostalgic way: “Vietnamese stories rise and fall; I close my eyes, listen. I swear, I could be heading north to Nha Trang or Da Nang from Saigon. Except, I am not. I am on the other side of the Pacific, on my way to San Jose from Orange County, going up Highway 5 in a bus owned by one of two competing Vietnamese companies” (51).