for the Pacific News Service, a newspaper wire ser-
vice that specializes in news concerning the Pacific
Rim. Since then his articles have appeared in major
newspaper outlets such as the New York Times, Los
Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune. In 2001
Lam was awarded with the John S. Knight Fellow-
ship for Journalism at Stanford University. Lam
contributed greatly to increasing the power of eth-
nic community media voices when he cofounded
New California Media, which developed into New
American Media, a trade association of more than
700 ethnic media organizations with offices based
in San Francisco, New York, and Washington, D.C.
In addition, he has lectured widely at universities
in the United States and taught writing at Hong
Kong University.
During his career, his short stories have been
featured in literary journals such as Amerasia Jour-
nal and Zyzzyva and included in anthologies such
as The Other Side of Heaven: Post-War Fiction by
Vietnamese and American Writers (1995), Vietnam:
A Traveler’s Literary Companion (1995), and Wa -
termark: Vietnamese American Prose and Poetry
(1998). Collaborating with De Tran and Hai Dai
Nguyen, Lam coedited the nonfiction anthology
Once Upon a Dream: The Vietnamese American
Experience (1995). In 2005 Lam published his first
collection of essays, Perfume Dreams: Reflections on
the Vietnamese Diaspora, in which he considers his
difficulties as a Viet Kieu, a Vietnamese national
who was raised and lives outside of Vietnam.
After the United States began to normalize po-
litical and economic relations with the Vietnamese
government, Lam’s life was featured in the PBS
documentary My Journey Home (2004), in which
a film crew journeyed with him to his birthplace.
In the documentary, he returns to the sites of his
once-elite and privileged childhood and attempts
to reconnect with relatives and friends left behind
after the Communist takeover. Finding he has
to reconcile the memories of his homeland with
the country’s modern ambitions and troubles, he
uncovers the illusiveness of home and belonging,
whether in Vietnam or America.
Andrew Lam’s work has been honored by the
World Affairs Council for Excellence in Interna-
tional Journalism Award and the Asian American
Journalists’ Association. Currently, Lam is an as-
sociate editor with the Pacific News Service and a
regular commentator for National Public Radio’s
“All Things Considered.”
M. Gabot FabrosLau, Evelyn (1971– )
Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, to Chinese
parents, Evelyn Yee-Fun Lau has written poetry,
short fiction, a novel, and two memoirs. Lau
dreamed of being a writer since she was six years
old and began publishing poems in her early teens.
At the age of 16, Lau ran away from home, feeling
stifled by the constant pressure to excel academi-
cally and her father’s emotional withdrawal due to
unemployment. Lau’s account of her experiences,
Runaway, Diary of a Street Kid (1989), published
when she was 18, was an immediate best seller.
In Runaway, Evelyn seeks independence from her
parents while resisting the ill-fitting solutions of-
fered by a well-meaning state bureaucracy. Fea-
turing candid and introspective meditations on
the author’s drug use, prostitution, and bulimia,
Runaway was adapted into a television movie, The
Diary of Evelyn Lau, in 1993.
Much of Lau’s work explores the experiences
and perspectives of social and cultural misfits, such
as prostitutes and disempowered women, and the
futile search for fulfillment with older men. Draw-
ing heavily on her own experience, Lau’s fiction oc-
cupies a space between fiction and autobiography,
which has sometimes been problematic: A 1997
short story based on her relationship with writer
W. P. Kinsella, “Me and W. P.,” led to a lawsuit for
libel. Lau’s poetry collections include You Are Not
Who You Claim (1990), Oedipal Dreams (1992, a
Governor General’s Award nominee), In the House
of Slaves (1994), and Tr e b l e (2005). She also pub-
lished story collections, Fresh Girls and Other Sto-
ries (1993) and Choose Me (1999), and the novel
Other Women (1995), and a second memoir, Inside
Out: Reflections on a Life So Far (2001). Across
forms and genres, Lau’s searing and audaciousLau, Evelyn 159