In Stories from the Edges of the Sea, Andrew Lam writes not from the center of trauma but from its quieter afterlives. These are not conventional Vietnamese refugee stories. They emerge from the margins, from the spaces between languages, memories, cities, and lovers. There is no grand narrative of escape or triumph here, only mood, drift, and moments that shimmer with unspoken feelings. What we find is not arrival or departure, but the tension of what lingers, swirls, and sometimes brings about quiet joy.
Similar in length to his earlier Birds of Paradise Lost, this new collection includes fourteen stories. But where Birds felt more rooted in the disorientation of postwar resettlement, Stories from the Edges of the Sea feels looser, more cosmopolitan, and more deeply interior. More than a decade after his last collection, Lam returns with stories that unfold through Craigslist ads, Facebook posts, rap verses, parodied boxing matches, and diary fragments. The characters move between San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, and Saigon, from public buses to business class cabins. They are charming and difficult, glamorous and broken, sometimes profane, always searching. Cultural references range from Asterix and Obelix to cải lương, from Tintin comics to the stray intimacy of being publicly spooned by a stranger on the Muni.
Desire is the strongest current running through the collection. Often queer, often misaligned or deferred, it hums just beneath the surface. In “Bleak Houses,” two high school best friends, once lovers, reunite in middle age at one of their homes in Berkeley. The host is now married with a teenage son, a dog, and a modern home carved into a ravine. The narrator arrives as a visitor, unsure whether he’s come for closure or something else. Their conversation is subtle but charged. Over wine and small talk, old feelings resurface. “It was hard to say,” the narrator reflects, “facing an old lover’s child… everything about the past seems so distant and opaque, yet ever-present.” He wonders, “Were they ever that vulnerable, that passionate, that young?” The effort to remember is like trying to see “the bottom of a lake in turbulent waters.” Nothing is resolved, and that is the point. The story offers grown-up acceptance, the maturity to know when to release the past.
“Agape at the Guggenheim” takes a different register—part romantic neurosis, part philosophical monologue. A narrator becomes distracted by a stranger in a chestnut Polo shirt with alabaster skin and flushed cheeks. He follows him in silence, fantasizing, then loses him in the crowd and later sees him through a window at a French bistro. He does not pursue his Adonis. Instead, he freezes, mouth “agape,” a clever echo of astonishment and the Greek concept of selfless love. He journals, questioning his own pattern of pursuit and retreat. “What is this thing in me,” he asks, “that wants to pick up and go, to chase, and then after the chase, evade?” The story captures the ache of rootless desire—of chasing recognition in strangers, of longing that is more about self-discovery than fulfillment.
“Muni Diaries” unfolds through the narrator’s rereading of adolescent diary entries. He recalls a time when he first became aware of his sexuality, performing awkward sex acts with other boys that felt both thrilling and confusing. As an adult, he recalls a moment on a crowded San Francisco bus when a stranger with dirty blond hair presses against him from behind, spooning him gently while standing as the bus lurches forward. That it happens “in front of a mostly elderly Chinese audience” adds a layer of humor and social discomfort. The scene passes without comment or resolution. It is remembered not as trauma or triumph, but as one of those brief, strange flickers that mark queer coming-of-age.
In “5A, 5B, DEST: SGN,” a Vietnamese woman and a white man with a southern Vietnamese accent strike up a conversation in business class en route to Saigon. She has more family in Paris and California than in Vietnam. He was once a foreign exchange student in Hanoi and fell in love with a woman who no longer lives there. “But he was in love with the city too,” Lam writes, “couldn’t separate the love affairs from the delicious sense of displacement.” Their exchange is part confession, part flirtation, part melancholic reflection. Like many of Lam’s characters, they share a longing not just for people, but for places that shaped their past selves. As the plane descends, nothing is resolved, but something between them holds.
Nostalgia ripples through the collection, but Lam never lets it curdle into sentimentality. The past emerges in flashes: a pho recipe, a French phrase, the echo of cải lương, a childhood comic, a glimpse of Saigon’s cercle sportif. These are not artifacts, but emotional residues. Memory doesn’t function in arcs, Lam reminds us. It drifts. It interrupts. It flickers.
The sea appears occasionally but never dominates. Like the title suggests, the sea is more atmosphere than allegory—a shifting edge, an emotional tide. It suggests movement, crossings, and return, but refuses to be pinned to a single meaning. In “To keep from Drowning,” the sea starts at the hiking trail aptly named, “Land’s End,” or as interpreted by a daughter to her mother, “hết đát rồi”(“no more land”), to which the mother responds, “mất nước luôn”(“no more water either,” a somber reminder that we lost South Vietnam. The sea, like Lam’s storytelling, is fluid, open, never fully anchored.
Lam resists reducing the Vietnamese diaspora to a singular experience. His characters span classes, languages, and degrees of cultural belonging. Some fly business class in European brands, others live with aging parents or drift between precarious jobs. Their common ground is not identity but tone: a persistent ache, a sense of dislocation, a search for something unnamed. Lam’s characters are not here to represent anyone but themselves.
Some of the shorter stories verge on vignette, offering moments of tone more than plot. Yet even in their brevity, they carry emotional weight. Lam’s gift lies in his ability to suggest entire emotional histories with a glance, a hesitation, a line left unfinished.
The book ends with “The Tree of Life,” a story in the form of a eulogy for a beloved Vietnamese mother figure. This mother, who once fed soldiers in wartime Vietnam and later held a family together in exile, teaches her husband to arise from his post-war stupor to be present to raise their family. Lam renders the mother not as myth but as memory—a woman of strength and precision, who could cut through pretense, and work with what remains of their history. The story is an act of mourning, but also of gratitude, ending with a positive message to spread love unconditionally against all odds .
To read Stories from the Edges of the Sea on the fiftieth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon is to look back on our collective past with open arms to one another. It is to sip on the toast of our fragile history, marked by resilience and shared mortality, and, like the edges of the sea, to recognize that what holds us together is not certainty, but the willingness to drift beside one another, to let time and memory, like tides, soften the sharp edges between us, and to attune ourselves to the echoes that persist in the silences and stories we share.
Vinh Phu Pham is an artist, literary scholar, and critic based in New York City. His writing covers Vietnamese contemporary art, the musical legacies of the Republic of Vietnam, and Asian American literature in diaspora. He has a background in 19th-century Spanish Peninsular literature, the literature of the Spanish Philippines, and Vietnamese francophone literature. Currently, he serves as assistant professor of World Literature at Bard High School Early College (Queens).
