California magazine

Thunder Team Greats

Vard Stockton '38 (left) was posthumously inducted into Cal’s Athletic Hall of Fame this October.
Sam Chapman '38 (right), already a member of the Hall of Fame, was the star of the 1938 Rose Bowl and went on to play professional baseball.

Andrew Lam
So far from home

In Perfume Dreams, his collection of essays published this month by Berkeley’s Heyday Press, journalist and NPR commentator Andrew Lam ’86 recounts his quest for identity as a Vietnamese refugee in search of a home. At age 11, as Saigon was falling to Communist forces, Lam, the son of a South Vietnamese general, fled with his mother and brother to California. His father rejoined the family, but living out the American dream became a personal struggle.

In your book’s final line, you gaze in the mirror and consider your reflection: “Mine is what it should be, a traveler’s face.’’ Explain.

For most Vietnamese, being able to travel the world was impossible. We were confined inside our borders. To have gone around the world five times as I have is such a privilege. I have been able to create a large distance from my own past. In my book, there is a picture of me on a camel. I’m going to Jordan in two weeks to see the Dead Sea and Petra. I’m always thinking, what if my clan could see me now?

In much of your book, you describe yourself as a fugitive from your own emotions. Yet you eventually embrace personal transformation.

Travel is a pilgrimage. You cannot travel without undergoing an internal transformation. In my case, travel was forced on my family and me. We were forced out of our home. Yet this was a mixed blessing. We learned that borders can be crossed, externally and internally, whether it’s a desert or in the mind. But I also cannot help being reminded of our flight from Vietnam as I see images and hear the stories of Hurricane Katrina refugees. One cannot help contemplating the meaning of the word refugee in the aftermath of Katrina.

You didn’t enroll at Berkeley intending to be a writer.
What changed you?

I had always wanted to be a doctor. In the late 1980s, when I was a student researcher following my undergraduate days as a biochemistry major, I was doing cancer research by day and taking UC Extension courses in creative writing by night. I started writing about a lost love and compared my loss to being a refugee in exile. The words just began to pour out of me. I came home and told my parents I wanted to be a writer, not a doctor. They were shocked. I was the first in my family to get into the UC system. This just broke their hearts. My father considered my words and said: “Maybe medical school will be too hard for you. You can become a dentist instead.’’ He also said: “Name me a Vietnamese making a living as a writer in America. I could not. So I answered: “Well, I’ll be the first one.’’ Writers have to be a little bit cocky.

Do you write with someone in mind?

This book is to reach out to my nephew. He was born in America into a privileged, upper-middle-class life. The experiences I had as a young boy in Vietnam don’t resonate [with him] at all. He can’t speak Vietnamese. He doesn’t want to. His family’s past does not sink in. I’m writing this book for him and others who are like him, confined by their own borders.

Note: See Andrew Lam’s Berkeley Moment essay in this issue.

Ching-Hsien Wang
The Spirit of Berkeley

When I first arrived at Berkeley, I decided to major in European medieval literature and continue to study Old English. I had every intention of becoming a medievalist. Along with classics (Greek and Latin literature), it was one of the two great pillars of Berkeley’s comparative literature department. Usually when we think of medieval studies, we tend to think of the attitude of academic purists who bury themselves in books into old age, unconcerned with the affairs of the world, who run circles in religion, myth, legend, and symbolism. For them, literature is just another way of expressing mysticism, an appendage to religion. I believed the same thing at the time, but I was still eager to give it a try and put my endurance to the test.

The professor who taught us Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was Alain Renoir, a Frenchman whose father was a great modern film director and whose grandfather was the great late-period impressionist painter. Professor Renoir would shout himself hoarse in class, sometimes playing dumb and feigning ignorance of current events. At first, I thought it was just a medievalist quirk, but one day he told a story that gave me a new understanding of what a medievalist was. At the beginning of World War II, a medieval historian of Dutch nationality on sabbatical in London had barely escaped the tiger’s jaws when Hitler’s tanks and main army conquered Holland. When a London journalist asked him to comment on the annexation of his home country, the medieval historian declined, saying, “I study medieval history, not modern history!”

It’s possible that Professor Renoir made up this story to make fun of the archetypical medievalist. What he meant was that this Dutchman was a pedantic stick-in-the-mud. If we wanted to be real scholars, we could never let ourselves fall into that trap. While studying medieval civilizations, we should never ignore the modern world—read books, yes, but to be a courageous scholar one must care about the affairs of the world. The Chinese say, “The scholar must have breadth of mind and vigorous endurance.” The traditional learned man had a strong sense of social responsibility, but he would sometimes go overboard in expressing his personal feelings, and before he had finished speaking, the enemy would have forded the river. The Ming dynasty collapsed in this way, and once a country has fallen, it’s too late to run about raising the alarm.

Ching-Hsien Wang, Ph.D. ‘71, better known by his pen name Yang Mu, is Taiwan’s most celebrated poet and a noted scholar of classical Chinese poetry. Translated by Christopher Rea.

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