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Perfume Dreams:
Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora

Andrew Lam
Foreword by Richard Rodriguez

192 pp (5.5 x 8.5), with eight pages of b&w photographs
Trade Paper, ISBN: 1-57914-020-1, $14.95

“When Americans say Vietnam, they don’t mean Vietnam.”

Along the Perfume River there lives an old woman who has never left her village, who has raised children and grandchildren never having seen the other side of the river.

A nightclub owner from Saigon travels the world, hobnobbing with international celebrities.

A young man goes to college in America, only to return to the Perfume River with made-up stories and forged photographs of himself with President Clinton.

And another grows up both an American teenager and a Vietnam warrior’s son…the author himself.

In his long-overdue first collection of essays, noted journalist and NPR commentator Andrew Lam explores his lifelong struggle for identity as a Viet Kieu, or a Vietnamese national living abroad. At age eleven, Lam, the son of a South Vietnamese general, came to California on the eve of the fall of Saigon to communist forces. He traded his Vietnamese name for a more American one and immersed himself in the allure of the American dream: something not clearly defined for him or his family.

Reflecting on the meanings of the Vietnam War to the Vietnamese people themselves—particularly to those in exile—Lam picks with searing honesty at the roots of his doubleness and his parents’ longing for a homeland that no longer exists.

Reviews:

A BookSense notable book

“[A] powerful collection of essays.”—Library Journal

“Lam shatters the assumptions of readers who have encountered the Vietnam experience only through American pop culture.…He writes with the delicacy and intensity of a poet.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Andrew Lam writes with the honesty of a true journalist and the feeling of a born storyteller. On his many journeys between Vietnam and the U.S., he sees first-hand the global consequences of war. Perfume Dreams is a meaningful book for our times.”—Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Fifth Book of Peace and Woman Warrior

“Much will be made—and rightly so—of the eloquent commentary Andrew Lam’s essays provide on Vietnam and the Vietnamese. But his collected essays have a far deeper reach. Lam brilliantly illuminates the universal issues of self and home and human striving. Andrew Lam speaks to each of us quite individually and personally, with wit and compassion, about the things that connect us all at the deepest level. Perfume Dreams is a fascinating and important book by a truly gifted writer.”—Robert Olen Butler, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

“Andrew Lam’s description of what he faced as an 11-year-old in a refugee camp is so powerful that I literally stopped people on the street and insisted that they read these pages. Perfume Dreams brings a fresh, provocative perspective to our understanding of Vietnam—as a country, culture, war and emblem of American public policy failure—all the while reminding us that the U.S. is not at the center of this narrative.”—Elaine Mar, author of Paper Daughter

“Lam paints unforgettable portraits of the horror of refugee camps, a father who was once a three-star general, and a rebellious son who finally finds his own home, not in Vietnam or United States, but in the country of story.”—Maria Hummel, author of Wilderness Run

“Andrew Lam’s engaging and thoughtful collection of essays on the Vietnamese diaspora offers a fascinating window into lives spent in exile. A terrific achievement.”—Paula Peterson, author of Women In The Grove

About the Author:

Andrew Lam is an award-winning syndicated writer, an editor with the Pacific News Service, and a regular commentator on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. He co-founded New California Media, and his essays have appeared in dozens of newspapers and magazines across the country, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Baltimore Sun, the Atlanta Journal, the Chicago Tribune, Mother Jones, The Nation, and Earth Island Journal.