Andrew Lam > Quotes

“Precious things lost are transmutable. They refuse oblivion. They simply wait to be rendered into testimonies, into stories and songs.”
― Andrew Lam, Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora

“He knew it even before he could fully articulate it: between East and West lay a terrain that needed to be charted by stories, fused by his new eyes and imagination, and he needed to tell those stories if he ever hoped to be whole again.”
― Andrew Lam, East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres

“So although I still understand my brother in the coffee shop, while he speaks of vengeance, I have learned a different lesson, the American lesson: the knack of reinventing oneself. To survive in the New World, we must, likewise, challenge the old world’s blood-for-blood ethos and search for a new story line.”
― Andrew Lam, Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora

“When one loses someone one loves, with whom one shares a private life, a private language, a private world, one loses an entire country, one becomes an exile.”
― Andrew Lam, East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres

“With few exceptions, the white man leads, the minority character follows -- for such is the shape of the culture and the unwritten rule taught subliminally not so long ago, a curse of superior-inferior fiction that many ingested as fact.”
― Andrew Lam, East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres

“The house was a time capsule. A grave, he thought. Even a clock’s tick would have been welcome music. The dead room gave Daniel the creeps. Inside, the distant pulsation of the cicadas felt far away. Inside, time had died—life gone elsewhere. Even the past had passed on.”
― Andrew Lam