Vietnamese American journalist and writer Andrew Lam will be speaking as part of a free lecture series on Thursday, November 21 from 12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. at The Black Box Theatre at Edmonds Community College.
Lam left Vietnam with his family during the fall of Saigon in April 1975. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he majored in biochemistry. He soon abandoned plans for medical school and entered a creative writing program at San Francisco State University.
In 2005, Lam published a collection of essays, Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, about the problem of identity as a Vietnamese living in the United States. Lam received the PEN Open Book Award (formerly known as the Beyond Margins Award) in 2006 for the collection. He is a regular contributor to National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”
His second book, East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres, is a meditation on east and west relations, and how Asian immigration changed the west. Birds of Paradise Lost, his third book, is a collection of short stories about Vietnamese newcomers struggling to remake their lives in the San Francisco Bay after a long, painful exodus from Vietnam. Lam blogs regularly on Huffington Post.
Andrew Lam lecture
Thursday, November 21
12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.
The Black Box Theare
Edmonds Community College
20310 68th Ave W.
Lynnwood, WA 98036