Where are the leaders who can speak to the idea that it is not alien to American interests, but very much in our socioeconomic interests - not to mention our spiritual health - to integrate immigrants, that our nation functions best when we welcome newcomers and help them participate fully in our society?

Andrew Lam

Categorized in : Ideas Spiritual Leader

As a Vietnamese refugee who became an American writer, I can tell you that you matter, that your sadness matters, the story of how you survived and triumphed matters. For every story that belongs to you, in time, belongs to America.

sadness stories america

Art is the lesser sister to medicine. It aims to heal. by Andrew Lam

Art is the lesser sister to medicine. It aims to heal.

aim medicine art

Precious things lost are transmutable. They refuse oblivion. They simply wait to be rendered into testimonies, into stories and songs.

waiting stories song

America's story is largely an immigrant story. That hasn't changed since the Pilgrims ate their first turkey some four hundred years ago, and they were the original boat people.

turkeys america years

Today, more people are crossing various borders in order to survive, thrive, change their lives. Even if you don't cross the border, with demographic shifts, the border sometimes crosses you.

today order people

The collection is a labor of love and devotion, and whenever I found free time from my journalism work, I'd work on one story or another, or at least sketch out my characters, and research various issues related to my characters' dilemmas.

issues stories character

In the war on terrorism, the immigrant is often the scapegoat. by Andrew Lam

In the war on terrorism, the immigrant is often the scapegoat.

scapegoat terrorism war

I think in a larger sense, immigrant narrative is comprehensive and speaks to the core of human experience.

narrative speak thinking

I am glad to see the wheels are moving at last toward comprehensive immigration reform after last year's election. I am glad that immigrants are speaking up.

speaking-up years moving

Missing from the national conversation are voices of pro-immigration reformers and civil rights leaders, who can speak on behalf of those who have no voice.

voice leader rights

I am hopeful that the pendulum swings toward seeing immigrants in... by Andrew Lam

I am hopeful that the pendulum swings toward seeing immigrants in favorable terms once more.

pendulums hopeful swings

All three of my books, "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora," "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres," and "Birds of Paradise Lost," are immigrant narratives - their dreams, their traumas, their struggles - and I write them with the confidence that these stories, written from the heart, will belong, in time, to America.

struggle dream book

I've been writing short stories for twenty years now, on and off ever since I was in the creative writing program at San Francisco State University.

san-francisco writing years

I thought, "Wow, English is like magic." It not only shattered my voice, it changed me physiologically. I believed this for months ... There's magic in the language. I never fell out of the enchantment.

wow magic voice

I have a funny story to tell about English and how I came to fall in love with the language. I was desperate to fit in and spoke English all the time. Trouble was, in my household it was a no-no to speak English because somehow it is disrespectful to call parents and grandparents "you" - impersonal pronouns are offensive in Vietnamese.

speak-english grandparent falling-in-love

Though I later found a career as a journalist and an essayist, fiction is my first love and I never left it, even though there was no easy way to make a living from it.

first-love careers fiction

After twenty years and thirty stories, thirteen pieces were finally selected and the collection was born. So far, the blurbs from [authors] Maxine Hong Kingston, Gish Jen, Robert Olen Butler, Oscar Hijuelos and others, have been most encouraging.

twenties stories years

I always say that writing non-fiction versus writing fiction is a bit like architecture versus abstract painting.

abstract-painting writing fiction

[The immigrant] becomes a kind of insurance policy against the effects of the recession. By blaming him, the pressure valve is regulated in times of crisis ... What we have now is a public mindset of us versus them, and an overall anti-immigrant climate that is both troubling and morally reprehensible.

times-of-crisis climate pressure

In non-fiction you have to stay true to historical events, be the... by Andrew Lam

In non-fiction you have to stay true to historical events, be they personal or national .

events historical fiction