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

Andrew Lam

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Andrew Lam
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Businessperson
Writer
Republic of Vietnam
Swings
Hopeful
Immigrants
Terms
Toward
Seeing
Pendulums
Term
Pendulum
Favorable

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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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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.
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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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Precious things lost are transmutable. They refuse oblivion. They simply wait to be rendered into testimonies, into stories and songs.
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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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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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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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Art is the lesser sister to medicine. It aims to heal.
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In the war on terrorism, the immigrant is often the scapegoat.
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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.
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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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I always say that writing non-fiction versus writing fiction is a bit like architecture versus abstract painting.
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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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I think in a larger sense, immigrant narrative is comprehensive and speaks to the core of human experience.
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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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In non-fiction you have to stay true to historical events, be they personal or national .
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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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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 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.
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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.
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