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Refugee Crossings on the Fortieth Anniversary of the Vietnam War: An Interview with Andrew Lam

San Francisco-based writer and journalist Andrew Lam is a highly visible, yet at times controversial, figure within Vietnamese American and Asian American studies. Lam is the author of three books: Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora (2005); East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres (2010), and Birds of Paradise Lost: Stories (2013). Over the past two decades, he has written over one hundred media essays that focus on politics and culture related to the Vietnamese diaspora, including a recent commemorative piece published in the Huffington Post titled “Speech: 40th Year Anniversary of the End of the Vietnam War” (2015). Lam is the founder of New America Media and the subject of a 2004 PBS documentary titled My Journey Home. Born in Saigon on 23 May 1964 to a father who served as a general in the South Vietnamese Army and a mother from a rural village in North Vietnam, Lam grew up with the comfortable economic privileges of his father’s post until 28 April 1975, when he and his family became refugees. As an eleven-year-old boy, Lam, along with his grandmother, sister, and brother, fled Saigon on a crowded cargo plane to escape the impending takeover of the city by the North Vietnamese Army. Traveling through the refugee camps in Guam and California (Camp Pendleton), Lam’s transpacific passage reflects Ŷen Lê Espiritu’s discussion of the militarized routes through which the US military relocated the majority of first-wave Vietnamese American refugees. These routes, Espiritu argues, “followed the dictates of a ‘militarized organizing logic’ that reflected—and revealed—the layering of past colonial and ongoing militarization practices on these islands” (26). Lam’s writing makes visible these militarized connections in essays such as “The Stories They Carried” (Perfume Dreams), touching on Lam’s time spent in the refugee camp in Guam, and “Step up and Whistle” (Birds of Paradise Lost), capturing the chaotic and traumatic experience of the