FILIAL PIETY, and the idea that the collective assigns and directs the destiny of the individual, overarches the lives of the children of Confucian Asia’s political and economic refugees, trumped only by pragmatism in the newcomers’ struggle to make a home among the western middle class. On the summer afternoon that I stole home and robbed my parents of their American Dream, it was as if all the air had been sucked out of the living room. Mother covered her mouth and cried; Father cursed in French. Older brother shook his head and left the room. I sat silent and defiant. I was only a small child when we fled Vietnam in 1975, but I remember how I trembled then as my small world collapsed around me. I trembled on this day, too, as I told my parents that I was following my passion and refused to become a doctor. I would, instead, be a writer.

     At Berkeley, more than half of the Vietnamese Students’ Association to which I belonged majored in computer science and electrical engineering. These fields were highly competitive. A few told me they didn’t want to become engineers: some wanted to be artists, or architects, and had ample talent to do so, but their parents were against them. It was worse for those with family still living in impoverished Vietnam. One in particular was an ‘anchor kid’ whose family sold everything to buy him perilous passage across the South China Sea on a boat full of refugees. He knew that others were literally dying for the opportunities he had before him, and failure was not an option.

     Many of my friends were driven; theirs was an iron will to achieve academic success. On the wall of the dorm room occupied by a Vietnamese friend was his painting of a mandarin in silk brocade and hat. Flanked by soldiers carrying banners, the young mandarin rides in an ornate carriage while peasants look on and cheer. It was a visual sutra to help him focus on his studies.

     And I, with a degree in biochemistry and on track for medical school to the delight of my parents, was, in their eyes, throwing it all away – for what? I had, in secret, applied to and been accepted by the graduate programme in creative writing at San Francisco State University. ‘Andrew, you are not going to medical school,’ said Helen, my first writing teacher after reading one of my short stories. My response was entirely lacking in eloquence. ‘But … but … my mom is going to kill me.’

     Filial piety was ingrained long before I stepped foot onto American shores. It is in essence the opposite of individualism. ‘Father’s benefaction is like Mount Everest, Mother’s love like the water from the purest source,’ we sang in first grade. If American teenagers long to be free and to find themselves, Vietnamese are taught filial obligation, forever honouring and fulfilling a debt incurred in their name.

     Mom didn’t kill me; she wept. It was Father who vented his fury. ‘I wanted to write, too, you know, when I was young. I studied French poetry and philosophy. But do you think I could feed our family on poems? Can you name one Vietnamese who’s making a living as an American writer? What makes you think you can do it?’

     This was the late 1980s and the vast majority in our community were first-generation refugees, many of them boat people who had subsisted for years in refugee camps in Southeast Asia.

     ‘I can’t name one,’ I said. ‘There may be none right now. So, I’ll be the first.’

     Father looked at me and with that look I knew it was not an answer he’d expected; it was not how I talked in the family, which was to say respectfully and with vague compliance. Perhaps for the first time, he was assessing me anew.

     I matched his gaze, which both thrilled and terrified me. And crossing that invisible line, failure was no longer an option.

 

*   *   *

My friend with the painting of a mandarin became an optometrist and gave up art. I remember the first time he showed the picture to me at Berkeley. He said, ‘Do trang nguyen ve lang’ – Vietnamese for, ‘Mandarin returns home after passing the imperial examination’. But the image needed no explanation, to me or any student from Confucian Asia: the dream of glorious academic achievement and with it influence and wealth for the entire family.

     Villages and towns pooled resources and sent their best and brightest to compete at the imperial court, hoping that one of their own would make it to the centre of power. Mandarins were selected and ranked according to their performance in the rigorous examinations, which took place every four years. Vietnam was for a long time a tributary of China and it was governed by mandarins, a meritocracy open to even the lowest peasant if he had the determination and ability to prevail.

     Of all the temples in Hanoi, the most beautiful is Van Mieu, the Temple of Literature, dedicated to all those laureates of Vietnam who became mandarins, their names etched on stone steles going back eight centuries. It was Vietnam’s first university, the Imperial Academy. That it became a temple to the worship of education seems entirely appropriate.

     Under French colonial rule, China’s imperial examinations were replaced by the baccalaureate, and in the 1940s and 1950s to have passed its requirements was something so rare that one’s name was forever connected to the title. My paternal grandmother’s closest friend was Ong Tu Tai Quoc – Mr Baccalaureate Quoc.

     My paternal grandfather’s baccalaureate took him to Bordeaux to study law and when he returned he married the daughter of one of the wealthiest men in the Mekong Delta.

     And for Vietnamese in America, education is everything. So, for someone lucky enough to escape the horrors of post-war Vietnam and be handed through the hard work of his parents the opportunity to become a doctor, to say ‘no, thank you’ was akin to Confucian sin. By refusing to fulfil my expected role within the family, I was being dishonourable. ‘Selfish’, more than a few relatives called me.

     But part of America’s seduction is that it invites betrayal of the parochial. For immigrant children growing up in two conflicting cultures, two antipodes, those of the old and the new, America demands of the child serious examination of the soul. Obey and honour the wishes of one’s parents. Think for yourself and look out for number one. America whispers rebellion of the individual against the communal: follow your dream. It also demands it: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

     The children of Asian immigrants learn early to negotiate between the ‘I’ and the ‘We’, between seemingly opposed ideas and flagrant contradictions, in order to appease and survive in both cultures.

     In Vietnam as a child during the war, I read French comic books and martial arts epics translated from Chinese into Vietnamese, even my mother’s indulgent romance novels. In America, I read American novels and spent my spare time in public libraries, devoting the summers to devouring book after book. When not studying, I was reading.

     If I was encouraged to mourn the loss of my homeland, I was also glad that I became an American because here, and perhaps nowhere else, I could follow my bliss, as mythologist Joseph Campbell urges.

 

*   *   *

 

In my freshman year at Berkeley I fell hopelessly in love and when that ended a year after graduation I took to writing, in part to grieve.

     Berkeley radicalised me. The quiet, bookish, apolitical, obedient boy who didn’t date in high school left his Vietnamese household and embraced the carnal pleasures of college, falling in love with M, in whose embrace and kisses I discovered that all I had thought important – my desire to please my chronically unhappy mother, good grades, the path to med school – was trivial.

     Berkeley also marked me. A Chinese student from my dorm climbed the campanile because, so the rumours ran, for the first time in his life he scored a ‘B’. I remember thinking, not without a certain vanity, that he wouldn’t have considered jumping had he been embraced by romantic passion.

     Then M was gone and my heart was broken and I began to write, not about my refugee experience of the Vietnam War, but what it meant to lose someone who was my life, my first love – with its private language and private world – and I felt I had been exiled forever.

     But my writing led me backwards to the undressed wounds of a distraught child who stood alone on a Guam beach, the refugee camp with its khaki green tents flapping in the wind, missing friends, his pet dogs, fretting about his father who said he would follow later, wondering if he’d ever see home again. Then the long lines for food under a punishing sun, people weeping themselves to sleep, the makeshift family altar and faded photographs of the dead, the long vertical ash of burning incense. I wrote it all. I began to go back.

 

*   *   *

 

Eavesdropping from upstairs during a visit home, I heard my mother greeting friends and learned of a new addition to our family. ‘These are Andrew Lam’s awards,’ she said. ‘Andrew Lam’ was important, and arranged on the bookshelf are his trophies and diplomas and writing awards. ‘My son the Berkeley radical,’ my father would say by way of introduction to his friends. ‘Parents give birth to children,’ says my mother, ‘God gives birth to their personalities.’

     I can’t remember for sure how long he stood up there, and how that studious Chinese boy was talked down, but they put a metal barrier on the campanile afterward so no one else could jump.

     Not long ago, having given a lecture at my own alma mater, I had a dream. It is me atop the campanile, alone at sunset. I hesitate but I am not afraid. Below, people are gathering. Before me, I see a beatific horizon. I leap. And soar high over the old Berkeley campus before heading out to where sky kisses sea.

     I haven’t landed yet.