Birds of Paradise Lost

Self-immolation loses its power as a means of protest

The Seattle Public Library presents a conversation with author Andrew Lam May 23 at NewHolly Gathering Hall

Author Andrew Lam will read from his new book, “Birds of Paradise Lost,” and participate in a cross-cultural dialogue about connections to Vietnam from 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday, May 23 at the NewHolly Gathering Hall, 7054 32^nd Ave. S.

Library events are free and open to the public. Seating is limited and registration is required; visit www.vfaseattle.org/worldcafe to register.

Parking is available in adjacent pay lots. Discounted parking is available in the main convention center garage two blocks north of Town Hall with a voucher obtained from any Town Hall staff member.

“Birds of Paradise Lost” is a collection of short stories that chronicle the anguish, joy and bravery of those who fled Vietnam and remade themselves in the U.S.

Lam is the author of “Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora,” which won the 2006 PEN Open Book Award, and “East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres.” He is an editor and co-founder of New American Media, and was a regular contributor to NPR’s “All Things Considered” for many years. Lam lives in San Francisco, Calif.

This event is sponsored by Humanities Washington and presented in partnership with the Vietnamese Friendship Association and PeaceTrees Vietnam.

For more information, call the Library at 206-386-4636 or Ask a Librarian.

For more information contact:

Andra Addison, communications director
206-386-4103

Note: I wrote the essay below a decade ago and it was collected in “East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres.” On the occasion of Mother’s Day, it is reposted here. My mother suffers from dementia and forgetfulness now, and is growing frail, but her ways remain forever devoted to traditions, to distant memories, to ancestors worshipping and family. 

She turns 70 but she remains a vivacious woman — her hair is still mostly black, there is still a girlish twang in her laughter, and her eyes twinkle at the telling of a joke — still, mortality weighs heavily on her soul. After the gifts are opened and the cake eaten, Mother whispers to her younger sister-in-law: “Who will light incense to the dead when I’m gone?”

Aunty shakes her head. “Honestly, I don’t know. None of my children will do it, and we can forget the grandchildren. They don’t even understand what we are doing when we pray to the dead. I guess when we’re gone, the ritual ends.”

Such is the price for living in America. I myself can’t remember the last time I lit incense sticks and talked to my dead ancestors. Having fled so far from Vietnam, I can no longer imagine what to say, or how I should address my prayers, or for that matter what promises I could possibly make to the long departed.

My mother, on the other hand, lives in America the way she would in Vietnam. Every morning in my parents’ suburban home north of San Jose, with a pool shimmering in the backyard, she climbs a chair and piously lights a few joss sticks for the ancestral altar, which sits on top of the living room’s bookcase. Every morning she talks to ghosts.

She mumbles solemn prayers to the spirits of our dead ancestors, and to the all-compassionate Buddha. What is she asking for? Protection for her children and grandchildren, and that they should prosper in America.

Mother as a young woman in Vietnam

At that far end of the Asian immigrant narrative, however, I will readily admit that I cannot help but feel a certain twinge of guilt and regret upon hearing my mother’s question to Aunty. Once upon a time, in that other world, I was a pious child. I paid obeisance to the dead, prayed for good health. As the youngest in my family, it was my task to climb the table over which the altar stood. It was I who placed the incense in the bronze urn nightly.

In America, however, I became rebellious, distant. And once Mother asked me to speak more Vietnamese inside the house. “No,” I answered in English, curtly. “What good is it to speak it, Mom? It’s not as if I’m going to use it after I move out.”

She had this pained look in her eyes. If she was proud of his accomplishments, she mourned the distance that had grown between her and her youngest son. Something in the water, in the airwaves, changed his inner makeup and dulled his Confucian ways. America gave him too much freedom. America made him self-centered, introspective. “He thinks too hard, he reads too much,” she complained to Father, who shook his head and smiled.

We have made peace since then, she and I, but it does not mean that I have become a traditional, incense-lighting Vietnamese son. I visit. I take her to lunch. I come home for important dates — New Year, Thanksgiving, Tet, grandfather’s death anniversary.

But these days, in front of the family altar with all those faded photos of the dead staring down at me, I often feel oddly removed, as if staring not at the present, but a relic of my distant past. And when, upon my mother’s insistence, I light incense, I do not feel as if I am participating in a living tradition so much as pleasing my traditional mother.

Mother’s 80th birthday last year

We live in two different worlds, after all, she and I. Mine is a world of travel and writing and public speaking; hers is a world of consulting the Vietnamese horoscope and eating vegetarian food when the moon is full, of attending Buddhist temple on the day of her parents’ death anniversaries, a pious devotion.

But at her birthday party, having listened to her worries, I had to wonder: what will indeed survive, Mother?

I wish I could say that I will pick it up as naturally as any Vietnamese in Vietnam would. I wish I could assure her that, after she is gone, each morning I will light incense for her and all the ancestors’ spirits before her, but I can’t.

Yet, if some rituals die, some others have only just begun. I am, after all, not a complete American brat, dear mother. Every morning I write, rendering memories into words. I write, going back further, invoking the past precisely because it is irretrievable. I write if only, in the end, to take leave.

And this morning, with the San Francisco fog drifting outside my window, it occurs to me as I type these words that this too, strangely enough, is a kind of ritual, a kind of filial impulse to reconcile Mother’s world and my own. The solemnity of the act — my fingers gliding on the keyboard, my mind on things ethereal — is something akin, at last, to my mother’s morning prayers.

Andrew Lam is editor and cofounder of New America Media, an association of more than three thousand ethnic media outlets in the United States. He is the author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres, and most recently, a collection of short stories, Birds of Paradise Lost,a collection of stories about Vietnamese refugees struggling to remake their lives in America.

Note: I wrote the essay below almost two decades ago, at the beginning of my life as a writer. It is collected in my first book Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora which won a Pen Award in 2006, and is anthologized widely over the years. A popular assignment in high schools and colleges, it still holds up well, I think, despite the years. Grandma is long gone but as Mother’s Day approaches, here it is, available online finally, for those who have fond memories of their grandmothers like I do.

When someone dies in the convalescent home where my grandmother lives, the nurses rush to close all the patients’ doors. Though as a policy death is not to be seen at the home, she can always tell when it visits. The series of doors being slammed shut reminds her of the firecrackers during Tet.

The nurses’ efforts to hide death are more comical to my grandmother than reassuring. “Those old ladies die so often,” she quips in Vietnamese, “everyday is like New Year.”

Still, it is lonely to die in such a place. I imagine some wasted old body under a white sheet being carted silently through the empty corridor on its way to the morgue. While in America a person may be born surrounded by loved ones, in old age, one is often left to take the last leg of life’s journey alone.

Perhaps that is why my grandmother talks mainly now of her hometown, Bac-Lieu, in the Mekong Delta. Its river and rice fields are vivid in her retelling. Having lost everything during the war, she can now offer me only her distant memories: life was not disjointed back home; one lived in a gentle harmony with the land; people died in their homes surrounded by neighbors and relatives. And no one shut your door.

So it goes… The once gentle, connected world of the past is but the language of dreams. In this fast-pace society of disjointed lives, we are swept along and have little time left for spiritual comfort. Instead of relying on neighbors and relatives, on the river and land, we hope the health care system won’t let us down in our old age. Instead of going to temple to pray for good health, we pay life and health insurance.

My grandmother’s children and grandchildren share a certain pang of guilt. After a stroke that paralyzed her, we could no longer keep her at home. And although we visit her regularly, we are not living up the filial piety standard expected of us the old country. My father silently grieves and my mother suffers from headaches when they visit. (Does my mother see herself, I wonder, in such a home in a decade or two?)

Once, a long time ago, living in Vietnam, we used to stare death in the face. The war, in many ways, had heightened our sensibilities toward living and dying. I saw dead bodies when I was five after a battle erupted near my house during Tet offensives. I remember holding on to my great uncle’s hand as we watched blue bottle flies gathered on the wounds of the dead. If I was afraid, I now feel appreciative of my Great Uncle’s gesture. I could look at the horror of war in the face.

Though the fear of death and dying is a universal one, Vietnamese did not hide from it. We prayed daily to the dead at our ancestral altar. We talked to ghosts. Death pervaded our poem, novels, and sad ending fairy tales. We dwelled in its tragedy. We know that terrible things can and do happen to ordinary people.

But if agony and pain and suffering are part of Vietnamese culture, admittedly, to be point of being morbid at time, pleasure is at the center of Americans’. While Vietnamese holidays are based on death anniversaries of famous kings and heroes, birthdates of presidents are celebrated here.

American popular culture treats death with humor. People laugh and scream at blood-and-guts movies. Zombie movies are the rage. The wealthy sometimes freeze their dead relatives. Cemeteries are places of business, complete with colorful brochures. There are, I saw on TV the other day, drive-by funerals in some places in the mid-West where you don’t have to get out of your car to pay your respects to the deceased.

That America relies upon the pleasure principle and happy endings in its entertainments does not, however, assist us in evading suffering. Americans tell their kids everything will be Okay. American children are spoon-fed undaunted optimism and happily ever-afters then grow up to confront realities like divorce, domestic violence, drugs, broken homes, failed politicians. No wonder so many teenagers, as if chasing the saccharine of childhood narratives, seek solace in the pages of Stephen King and Anne Rice, horror’s king and queen. These days the little train that could carries very few passengers.

Then there is the loneliness of old age. When one visits the convalescent home the suffering of the old is self-evident. There is an old man, once an accomplished concert pianist, now rendered helpless by senility and arthritis. Every morning he sits on his wheel chair and stares at the piano in the cafeteria. One feeble woman in her late 90s who outlived all of her children keeps repeating: “My son will take me home. My son will take me home.” One smells death in the air even if one cannot see it there. One hears death in the moans and groans of those in pain. Take a look down the hall. There are those mindless bedridden bodies kept alive through a series of tubes and pulsating machines.

Last week on her 83rd birthday I went to see my grandmother. She smiled her sweet sad smile.

“Where will you end up in your old age?” she asked.

I was taken back by the question. The memories of the monsoon rain and tropical sun and a world of clanship and insular network of people came back to mind. Not here, not here, I wanted to tell her. But the soft moaning of a patient next door and the smell of alcohol wafting from the sterile corridor brought me back to reality.

“Anywhere is fine, grandma,” I told her instead, trying to keep up with her courageous spirit. “All I’m asking for is that they don’t’ shut my door.”

Andrew Lam’s latest book, Birds of Paradise Lost, a collection of short stories about boat people who remade themselves in America’s West Coast. 

Andrew Lam is editor and cofounder of New America Media, an association of more than three thousand ethnic media outlets in the United States. He is the author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres, and most recently, a collection of short stories, Birds of Paradise Lost.

Bookmark this 

Start: 09 MAY 2013 6:10 PM

6:00 -8:00 pm

The thirteen stories in Birds of Paradise Lost ($15.95) shimmer with humor and pathos as they chronicle the anguish and joy and bravery of America’s newest Americans, the troubled lives of those who fled Vietnam and remade themselves in the San Francisco Bay Area. The past—memories of war and its aftermath, of murder, arrest, re-education camps and new economic zones, of escape and shipwreck and atrocity—is ever present in these wise and compassionate stories. It plays itself out in surprising ways in the lives of people who thought they had moved beyond the nightmares of war and exodus. It comes back on TV in the form of a confession from a cannibal; it enters the Vietnamese restaurant as a Vietnam Vet with a shameful secret; it articulates itself in the peculiar tics of a man with Tourette’s Syndrome who struggles to deal with a profound tragedy. Andrew Lam’s debut short story collection is an emotional tour de force, intricately rendering the false starts and revelations in the struggle for integration, and in so doing, the human heart.

Andrew Lam is the author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, which won the 2006 PEN Open Book Award, and East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres. Lam is an editor and cofounder of New American Media, an association of over two thousand ethnic media outlets in America. He was a regular commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered for many years, and was the subject of a 2004 PBS documentary called “My Journey Home”. His essays have appeared in newspapers and magazines such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Baltimore Sun, the Atlanta Journal, the Chicago Tribune, Mother Jones, and the Nation, among many others. His short stories have been widely taught and anthologized.

Web Link: 

 Andrew Lam - Birds of Paradise Lost

Location: 

1 Ferry Building

City: 

San Francisco

State: 

Ca 94111

Each time I visit my homeland, Vietnam, I find that many of my relatives have gotten wealthier and progressively fatter, especially their overly pampered children. One cousin in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) in particular is raising an obese child. When asked why she was feeding him so much she simply shrugged and said, “Well, we barely had enough to eat during the Cold War. Now that I have money, I just let my son eat what he wants.”

Unfortunately what that entails for her boy is access to an array of American-owned chains like KFC, Pizza Hut, Carl Jr.’s. His favorite meal? “Pizza and Coke,” the boy answered with glee.

Besides the tasty draw of fatty foods and sweet sodas, there’s another reason why such establishments are making inroads in countries that are otherwise known for their excellent culinary traditions. Unlike in the U.S., where fast food is perceived as time-saving and cheap and often the preferred meal of the working poor, in Asia places like Burger King and Pizza Hut are the fare of choice for those with dispensable incomes. For a regular factory worker in Vietnam who makes around $5 a day, eating at KFC is completely out of the question. For those who can afford to eat at one of Pizza Hut’s air-conditioned restaurants in a chic sparkling shopping mall in Hanoi or Saigon, however, eating is only part of the experience. The other part is equally, if not more, important: Consuming American fast food is the proof of one’s economic status in the world.

The writer Ha Jin captured this modern tendency in a hilarious short story called “After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town.” It’s about a family of nouveau riche who book their wedding at a brand-new fast food chain called “Cowboy Chicken” — never mind that the Chinese know 150 better ways to cook the bird — to celebrate their new wealth in capitalistic China. If the story is hilarious, it is also a sad statement as to how quickly a thousand years of culinary expertise is thrown out for the new — which in this case, is deep-fried chicken and steamed corncobs served up in a paper box.

And if common sense and taste are often the first casualties in a world where western fast food and brand-name sodas proliferate at an alarming rate, the ultimate casualty is health itself. According to the World Health Organization, one billion people are malnourished in the world and another billion — many in developing countries — are overweight. At least 300 million of them are clinically obese, and the economic costs of related illnesses are staggering.

China is home to more than 380 million-plus people with weight problems. And recent studies indicate that the problem is especially prevalent among youth. In 2005 there were 18 million in China who were considered obese. In 2011, that number jumped to 100 million.

It would seem that not only are the Chinese catching up with the American economy, but with the American size as well. According to the Chinese Health Ministry, in 2007 Chinese city boys age 6 are 2.5 inches taller and 6.6 pounds heavier on average than their counterparts three decades ago. “China has entered the era of obesity,” Ji Chengye, a leading child health researcher told USA Today in 2007. ”The speed of growth is shocking.” Almost 100 million Chinese now suffer from diabetes.

In this regard, Vietnam too is catching up with China. While 28 percent of rural children suffer from malnutrition, according to the National Institute of Nutrition, 20 percent from urban areas suffer from the opposite: obesity. “The number of overweight and obese kids is increasing at a fast pace in Ho Chi Minh City [formerly known as Saigon] where the highest ratio of children with the problem is recorded,” Do Diep, deputy direct of the Ho Chi Minh City Nutrition Center, told Tien Phong newspaper two years ago.

For many Vietnamese, the irony is all too obvious. Previous generations known as boat people fled out to sea on rickety boats to escape starvation and extreme austerity under communism during the cold war. But they are quickly being replaced by a new generation, one that needs to go to the gym or a fat farm to drop excess weight — or if they can afford it, “flee” abroad to shop for the latest brand name items like Hermes belts and Louis Vuitton Bags.

Years of struggle against imperialism resulted in an odd defeat: Anything western is automatically deemed superior, no questions asked. It is a situation that one intellectual in Vietnam coined as, “Selling the entire forest to buy a stack of paper.” A case in point: When asked what he wanted from the U.S., a cousin in Hanoi didn’t hesitate: “Starbucks coffee.” Yes, he’s quite aware that Vietnam is the second largest coffee producer in the world, second only to Brazil; and yes, on practically every block in the city there’s a coffee shop. “But no one has tasted Starbucks coffee in Vietnam,” the cousin explained. “Everyone wants to know what it tastes like.”

These days one reads quite a few articles about the decline of the American empire and the rise of Asia, and in the same breath, how the Chinese are gaining the upper hand in the global economy. But one wonders if that’s true. Because even if declining, America still manages to sell its “superior” lifestyles to the rest of the world in ingenious ways, from food to movies to clothing to music — and in the area of food at least, our obesity problems as well.

Andrew Lam is editor of New America Media and the author of “East Eats West: Writing In Two Hemispheres,” and “Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora.” His latest book, Birds of Paradise Lost, was published  in march 2013.

ANDREW LAM, AUTHOR OF BIRDS OF PARADISE LOST

1. WEDNESDAY, MAY 8
10:30 am – 12 noon
Downtown Center 4th and Mission Street
Room 821
City College, San Francisco

2. THURSDAY, MAY 9
10:30 AM – 12 NOON
Chinatown North Beach Center
Room 201

City College, San Francisco

3.Book Passage May 09/2013… 

1 Ferry BuildingSan Francisco, California94111United States

 http://www.bookpassage.com/event/andrew-lam-birds-paradise-lost

The thirteen stories in Birds of Paradise Lost ($15.95) shimmer with humor and pathos as they chronicle the anguish and joy and bravery of America’s newest Americans, the troubled lives of those who fled Vietnam and remade themselves in the San Francisco Bay Area. The past—memories of war and its aftermath, of murder, arrest, re-education camps and new economic zones, of escape and shipwreck and atrocity—is ever present in these wise and compassionate stories. It plays itself out in surprising ways in the lives of people who thought they had moved beyond the nightmares of war and exodus. It comes back on TV in the form of a confession from a cannibal; it enters the Vietnamese restaurant as a Vietnam Vet with a shameful secret; it articulates itself in the peculiar tics of a man with Tourette’s Syndrome who struggles to deal with a profound tragedy. Andrew Lam’s debut short story collection is an emotional tour de force, intricately rendering the false starts and revelations in the struggle for integration, and in so doing, the human heart.

Andrew Lam is the author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, which won the 2006 PEN Open Book Award, and East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres. Lam is an editor and cofounder of New American Media, an association of over two thousand ethnic media outlets in America. He was a regular commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered for many years, and was the subject of a 2004 PBS documentary called “My Journey Home”. His essays have appeared in newspapers and magazines such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Baltimore Sun, the Atlanta Journal, the Chicago Tribune, Mother Jones, and the Nation, among many others. His short stories have been widely taught and anthologized.