Education
Andrew Lam is a Vietnamese American writer. He was born in South Vietnam, where he attended Lycée Yersin in Đà Lạt. 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. While still in school he began writing for Pacific News Service and in 1993 won the Outstanding Young Journalist Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. A PBS documentary produced by WETA in 2004, My Journey Home, told 3 stories of Americans returning to their ancestral homelands, including of Lam's return to Vietnam. He is currently the web editor of New America Media. He is also a journalist and short story writer. In 2005, he published a collection of essays, Perfume Dreams, about the problem of identity as a Vietnamese living in the U.S. Lam received the PEN Open Book Award in 2006 for Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora. 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-West relations, and how Asian immigration changed the West. It was named Top Ten Indies by Shelf Unbound Magazine in 2010. 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.