Travels in a Gay Nation: Portraits of LGBTQ Americans

Andrew Lam

194 Andrew Lam It was strange to have had a privileged life as a child while the world around you was sinking into horror,” Andrew Lam tells me. “Strange to escape the bulk of it when the rest of your people went through reeducation camps, died on the high seas, were raped by pirates. While I tried my best to remove myself from that, I couldn’t run far enough.” We are talking in a small conference room in the cluttered, bustling offices of San Francisco’s Pacific News Service, where Lam works as a writer and editor. As a Vietnamese immigrant, Lam is a powerful witness to what he calls “the obligation of memories.” For him, telling stories—about being a refugee, about survivor’s guilt, about forging a new American self—is a duty, one Lam has carried out with subtle and measured eloquence in both his nonfiction and fiction. Lam began freelancing for Pacific News Service when he was still in graduate school, working on a master’s degree in creative writing. By 1996, he had cofounded the PNS-sponsored New California Media, a consortium of more than four hundred ethnic news organizations , which later grew into New America Media. Today, NAM represents two thousand news outlets and is accessed by almost a quarter of the adult population of the United States. 195 Andrew Lam As an immigrant and a homosexual (or bisexual)—I never quite get him to pinpoint where he locates his sexuality—Lam brings to his writing an acute sense of what it is like to be different. “For the refugee child in America,” he writes in Perfume Dreams, his book of reflections on the Vietnamese diaspora, “the world splits perversely into two irreconcilable parts: Inside and Outside.” This contention between dualities—between the private and the public, the Confucian and the modern, or, as he puts it in “Close to the Bones,” one of his longest short stories, between “old shame and new exhilaration”— is a major theme in almost all his work. Now in his forties, Lam, who still retains the boyish good looks of his youth, is most comfortable identifying himself, as he once did in an essay entitled “Re-imagining the Self . . . Re-imagining America,” as a “San Franciscan and a citizen of a global society.” Lam’s childhood, which he calls “sheltered” and “pampered,” hardly suggests this later global perspective. His father, a highranking general in the Vietnamese army, was the paterfamilias of a rigid, “Confucian-style clan.” Lam recalls having to “fit within that sense of harmony and hierarchy and cookie-molded behavior. I never challenged it. I never knew there was another option.” There was a country villa, limousines, chauffeurs, and servants. Lam attended the prestigious Lycée Yersin in Dalat, where he learned French, a language that still creeps into his conversations. The self-declared bookworm was soon reading Tintin adventure comics and simplified versions of the French classics. “Perhaps it’s bit précieux for one to say that this childhood was everything and live in that sense of nostalgia. But my childhood world did have its own insularity and, therefore, its beauty. To grow up in a wartime country like Vietnam with a father who had access to such things as a helicopter was just out-of-this-world crazy.” Lam recalls chopper rides to the beach and releases from school in order to attend parachuting competitions. All that changed in 1975, when, two days before the country fell to the Viet Cong, Lam and his family escaped Saigon in a C-130 cargo plane. He was eleven. “I don’t think I knew that I was leaving for good. There had never been a Vietnamese diaspora before. The idea that you would leave the homeland en masse was unheard of. There were so many people jam-packed into the plane. I watched people on the ground screaming and crying. I was mesmerized by the surreality of it all.” Hours later, they landed on Guam. “To go from someone who lived in a walled garden and couldn’t tie his own shoes to living in a refugee camp with army tents and shared latrines was abhorrent. Part of me shut down. I went numb to protect my senses. I had a deep desire to run away as fast as possible from the memory.” Despite his willed numbness and the destruction of all...