Andrew Lam Quotes
America's story is largely an immigrant story. That hasn't changed since the Pilgrims ate their first turkey some four hundred years ago, and they were the original boat people.
Today, more people are crossing various borders in order to survive, thrive, change their lives. Even if you don't cross the border, with demographic shifts, the border sometimes crosses you.
I think in a larger sense, immigrant narrative is comprehensive and speaks to the core of human experience.
I am glad to see the wheels are moving at last toward comprehensive immigration reform after last year's election. I am glad that immigrants are speaking up.
That experience of losing home, longing for home, that yearning for meaning and rootedness and identity in a floating world, it's what often makes an immigrant story into an American story .
Precious things lost are transmutable. They refuse oblivion. They simply wait to be rendered into testimonies, into stories and songs.
It's unfortunate that the country of immigrants has turned its back on immigrants. The atmosphere after 9/11 is toxic.
In non-fiction you have to stay true to historical events, be they personal or national .
I am hopeful that the pendulum swings toward seeing immigrants in favorable terms once more.
I always say that writing non-fiction versus writing fiction is a bit like architecture versus abstract painting.
Missing from the national conversation are voices of pro-immigration reformers and civil rights leaders, who can speak on behalf of those who have no voice.
I've been writing short stories for twenty years now, on and off ever since I was in the creative writing program at San Francisco State University.
Isn't the first story told in the West about the Fall? Adam and Eve were immigrants too from somewhere, a lost Eden, a paradise lost. We all now are so mobile, so nomadic .
Though I later found a career as a journalist and an essayist, fiction is my first love and I never left it, even though there was no easy way to make a living from it.
