“Lam confronts the barriers of language, experience and aspiration that separate his Vietnamese origins from his American destiny… Lam is a journalist by profession, but he writes with the delicacy and intensity of a poet.” -Jonathan Kirsch, LA Times Book Review “Some people who have seen what Andrew has seen would foreswear humor or recoil from it thereafter. Whereas Andrew has cultivated wit—repartee, sarcasm, irony, the writer’s knowledge that words can be constructed so as to topple on cue.” -Richard Rodriguez, News Hour Commentator, Author of Brown: The Last Discovery of America “The Vietnam that writer Andrew Lam left at age 11 has moved on without him. Fortunately for us, Lam has held that Vietnam close to his heart as he navigated between two cultures.” Asian Week “Andrew Lam’s description of what he faced as an 11-year-old in a refugee camp is so powerful that I literally stopped people on the street and insisted that they read these pages. Perfume Dreams brings a fresh, provocative perspective to our understanding of Vietnam—as a country, culture, war and emblem of American public policy failure—all the while reminding us that the U.S. is not at the center of this narrative.”—Elaine Mar, author of Paper Daughter “Andrew Lam writes with the honesty of a true journalist and the feeling of a born storyteller. On his many journeys between Vietnam and the U.S., he sees first-hand the global consequences of war. Perfume Dreams is a meaningful book for our times.”—Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Fifth Book of Peace and Woman Warrior “Much will be made—and rightly so—of the eloquent commentary Andrew Lam’s essays provide on Vietnam and the Vietnamese. But his collected essays have a far deeper reach. Lam brilliantly illuminates the universal issues of self and home and human striving. Andrew Lam speaks to each of us quite individually and personally, with wit and compassion, about the things that connect us all at the deepest level. Perfume Dreams is a fascinating and important book by a truly gifted writer.”—Robert Olen Butler, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain “In this powerful collection of essays, Lam, a syndicated columnist and National Public Radio commentator, explores his identity as a Viet Kieu (a Vietnamese national living abroad) residing in the United States. On April 28, 1975, 11-year-old Lam and his family fled Saigon aboard a crowded C130 cargo plane just two days before the fall of Saigon to Communist forces (a day Lam would come to know as an "American rebirth"). His father, a respected South Vietnamese general, followed soon after, reuniting with the family in California, where they would begin at the bottom rung as they struggled to fulfill the American Dream. Looking deep within himself and his fellow Viet Kieu, Lam seeks to "marry two otherwise dissimilar and often conflicting narratives." He cites cultural critic Edward Said as he shows that to transcend one's national limits one must not reject attachments to the past but work through them. Lam, who grows to realize that home is "portable if one is in commune with one's soul," embraces the journey of self-discovery and concludes that one's identity is not fixed but "open-ended." What results is a cohesive presentation with broad appeal, allowing non-Viet Kieu to understand Lam's experiences…”- Library Journal