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Also by Andrew Lam:

Perfume Dreams, November 2005
Trade Size (reprint)

Perfume Dreams
Andrew Lam

Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora

Heyday Books
November 2005
140 pages
ISBN: 1597140201
Trade Size (reprint)
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Non-Fiction Memoir

Along the Perfume River there lives an old woman who has never left her village, who has raised children and grandchildren, never having seen the other side of the river. A nightclub owner from Saigon travels the world, hobnobbing with international celebrities. A young man goes to college in America, only to return to the Perfume River with made-up stories and forged photographs of himself with President Clinton. And another grows up both an American teenager and a Vietnam warrior’s son…the author himself.

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.

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