Quote

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.

Andrew Lam

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Andrew Lam
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Businessperson
Writer
Republic of Vietnam
Love
Story
Somehow
Vietnamese
Funny
Fit
Grandparents
Language
English
Grandparent
Fall
Parents
Spokes
Speak
Trouble
Spoke
Tell
Parent
Offensive
Pronouns
Stories
Came
Household
Impersonal
Time
Call
Desperate
Disrespectful

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When a well-rounded character takes over, he doesn't lecture you about his history and how he is misunderstood. He lives his life, does things that are unexpected, and makes you laugh and cry because of his human flaws and foibles.
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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.
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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.
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In non-fiction you have to stay true to historical events, be they personal or national .
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[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.
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That experience of losing home, longing for home, that yearning for meaning and rootedness and identity in a floating world, it's what often makes an immigrant story into an American story .
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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.
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Precious things lost are transmutable. They refuse oblivion. They simply wait to be rendered into testimonies, into stories and songs.
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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.
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It's unfortunate that the country of immigrants has turned its back on immigrants. The atmosphere after 9/11 is toxic.
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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.
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I am hopeful that the pendulum swings toward seeing immigrants in favorable terms once more.
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In the war on terrorism, the immigrant is often the scapegoat.
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I think in a larger sense, immigrant narrative is comprehensive and speaks to the core of human experience.
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Isn't the first story told in the West about the Fall? Adam and Eve were immigrants too from somewhere, a lost Eden, a paradise lost. We all now are so mobile, so nomadic .
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Art is the lesser sister to medicine. It aims to heal.
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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 Americ
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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?
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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.
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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.
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