Stories from the Edge of the Sea by Andrew Lam

Pasadena, California. Red Hen Press. 2025. 206 pages.

Twelve years ago, Andrew Lam, a writer and journalist who left Vietnam as “a plane person” at the end of the Vietnam War at the age of eleven, published Birds of Paradise Lost (2013), his first short-story collection. His current collection, Stories from the Edge of the Sea, and the focus of this review, is just as varied and unique as the first, alternating between the tragic and the humorous, the romantic and the gothic, sometimes in the same story. Though not all the stories possess a clarity of effect, others leave a deep impression, offering glints of the wisdom Lam has derived from a life of philosophical wandering. His intention as stated in the foreword, “to try to heal—to retrieve those fragments as best I can—one story at a time,” unifies the collection.

Between 2019 and 2025, Lam contributed three essays to World Literature Today that offer insight about his writing process and sources of inspiration. “Living in the Tenses in Saigon” from the Summer 2019 issue, part of the Puterbaugh Essay series, describes returning to live in the city he left as a boy. Encountering the fast-paced life of present-day Vietnam while coming across places that speak of a former life, which he hesitates to explore, creates temporal disorientation, something he investigates in his fiction. In “Once More to the Beach,” published in the March 2025 issue, he writes of a visit to Vung Tau. The man he is today uncovers “a tenderness and compassion for his younger self” who stood on the same beach in 1975, trying and failing to protect the magic of childhood through incantations. He invites readers to respond with tenderness and compassion to the characters in these stories.

The final piece in this collection— a eulogy for his mother entitled “The Tree of Life”—is a revision of “To Feed, to Nurture, to Protect,” published in the July 2023 issue of WLT. A careful reader, comparing the two versions, will notice how Lam leans more into the central metaphorical image in the revision. The strongest stories in this collection do the same.

“This Isle Is Full of Noises,” the standout in this collection, flips to the gothic sublime in a surprising and convincing way. In the following lines, Lam provides the image before explaining how it happened to extend its effect: “On the ledge of the fraternity’s second story window . . . A naked young man crouching there” is “framed by red velour curtains, its backdrop the succulent night.” He is “clutching that grotesque thing like a precious gem.”

In this zero-degrees-of-separation story, Cao Le Y-Bang (Koala), a pre-med student and refugee from Vietnam with a harrowing story of loss and survival, has everything going for him with a beautiful girlfriend and a great chance of getting into medical school. That all changes one Halloween night when he becomes inextricably linked to the ear of a Vietnamese soldier killed by an American GI years before. Returning to the essence of temporal disorientation referenced in his essays, the ear is a portal to a past that uniquely calls to Koala.

Stories from the Edge of the Sea offers variety for readers. The representation of queer desire is poignant, especially in depictions of diasporic Vietnamese men seeking the essence of home in a lover’s body in “Bleak Houses” and “The Shard, the Tissue, an Affair.” The haunted modern home in “Bleak Houses” perfectly parallels the eeriness of meeting a former lover’s family. “Love in the Time of the Beer Bug,” which recounts the breakup of a marriage during the Covid pandemic lockdown from the perspective of a high school student using social media acronyms, is as fresh and funny as it is sad and relatable.

It is fascinating that Lam sets most of these stories in the United States, considering that he has been living in Vietnam on and off for a few years. It seems that distance, in place or time, helps him see through to the emotional core of his characters. I hope to read more short fiction from Andrew Lam. Perhaps the next collection will feature stories set in Vietnam.

Janet Graham
University of Nebraska at Kearney