Refugee Crossings on the Fortieth Anniversary of the Vietnam War: An Interview with Andrew Lam

Andrew Lam's Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora (2005), East East West: Writing in Two Hemispheres (2010), and Birds of Paradise Lost: Stories (2013) reflect the heterogeneous and ideologically scattered quality of Vietnamese American identities and identifications. Born in Saigon in 1964 to a father who served as a general in the South Vietnamese Army and a mother from a rural village in north Vietnam, Lam grew up with the comfortable economic privileges of his father's post until 28 April 1975, when he and his family became refugees. Lam's work spans various themes and issues, from state communism to exile, nationalism, and multiple transpacific geographies from Vietnam to Hong Kong and the United States. This conversation between Lam, Troeung, and Lê began in Taipei, Taiwan, as a part of the Summer Institute in Asian American Studies titled Asian American Studies through Asia: Fields, Formations, Futures (1-4 August 2013). In this interview, Lam discusses topics as wide-ranging as empire, asylum, language, and the geopolitics of food, gratitude, and desire. While Lam's responses do not always fit easily into the ideological contours of Asian American studies, his contributions to the collective understanding of the legacies of the Vietnam War remain significant and impactful.