Perfume dreams
Subtitle: reflections on the Vietnamese diaspora
By: Andrew Lam ; foreword by Richard Rodriguez
Publisher: Heyday Books
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Berkeley, Calif
Language: eng
Number of pages: 143
ISBN-13: 9781597140201
Subjects: Ethnic identity; Family; Vietnamese; Vietnamese Americans; Migrations; Social conditions; Refugees; Biography
Description: '''When Americans say Vietnam, they don't mean Vietnam.' 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"--Publisher description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
Table of contents: title: Lost photos; title: Child of two worlds; title: Letter to a young refugee; title: Notes of a warrior's son; title: Love, money, prison, sin, revenge; title: National defeat day, national liberation day; title: The stories they carried; title: They shut the door on my grandmother; title: My Vietnam, my America; title: Vietnam : coming of age in a changing nation; title: Trash; title: The accent; title: Viet Kieu; title: The dead travel; title: Christmas in Dalat, Christmas in America; title: Two Passports.