季風人文講壇第77期：Andrew Lam

Stories from the Edge of the Sea

with Andrew Lam

October 17, 2025｜In English

At times humorous and ecstatic, other times poetic and elegiac, the fourteen pieces in Stories from the Edge of the Sea explore love and loss, lust and grief, longing and heartbreaks through the lives of Vietnamese immigrants and their children in California. A younger dancer is haunted by memories of almost dying on a boat when they escaped from Vietnam, a widow processes her husband’s death through frantic Facebook postings, a writer enters an old lover’s home and sees a ghost at twilight. If the human heart is a vast, open-ended terrain, then Andrew Lam’s short stories are its mountains, valleys, and lakes. Together they seek to chart a barely explored country.

About the Speaker 

Andrew Lam and his family fled Saigon at the end of the Vietnam war at age 11 and resettled in the Bay Area where he grew up. A writer of many essays and stories, Lam was among a handful of Vietnamese who wrote in English and whose work made it to the mainstream media. His books include the Pen Award winning memoir "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora," "East Eats West: Writing in two Hemispheres," A collection of stories "Birds of Paradise Lost," which won the Josephine Miles Literary award, and his latest "Stories from the Edge of the Sea," exploring love and loss and identity among Vietnamese in the Bay Area.