Sons of war

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Perfume Dreams

Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora

Andrew Lam

Heyday Books: 144 pp., $14.95 paper

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Come Back to Afghanistan

A California Teenager’s Story

Said Hyder Akbar and Susan Burton

Bloomsbury: 340 pp., $24.95

WAR is one of the great engines of immigration, a fact that helps to explain the richness and diversity of the California landscape and, in particular, the experiences of recent arrivals from places as disparate as Afghanistan and Vietnam. “Perfume Dreams” and “Come Back to Afghanistan,” parallel tales of war and peace, let us witness the immigrant saga from the inside out.

Both books are written by men whose fathers were high-ranking figures in their homelands. Both had their origins in radio broadcasts. Andrew Lam contributes commentaries to National Public Radio, where some of the pieces collected in “Perfume Dreams” first aired, and Said Hyder Akbar’s “Come Back to Afghanistan” is based on two radio documentaries on Public Radio International’s “This American Life.” Both authors attempt to understand and explain, as much to themselves as to their readers, the accidents of history that landed their families in the United States.

Lam’s father was a general in the South Vietnamese army. During the last days before the fall of Saigon in April 1975, 11-year-old Andrew was assigned to burn the family photo album -- photographs of his father in the company of his U.S. comrades-in-arms, which the victorious Viet Cong would see as evidence of treason. “I put them all in a pile in the backyard and lit a match,” Lam recalls. “When I was done, the mementos of three generations had turned into ashes.”

Lam and his family managed to leave Vietnam, and the short prose pieces collected in “Perfume Dreams” represent Lam’s struggle to retrieve what they left behind and make sense of what they found on their arrival in America. “But no matter how articulate a Vietnamese becomes ... when we set foot on the American shore, history is already against us,” he muses. “Our mythology is merely a private dream in America.”

In each chapter, Lam confronts the barriers of language, experience and aspiration that separate his Vietnamese origins from his American destiny. “If Vietnam has become, to Americans, a buzzword for ill-fought wars, a metaphor for disaster, America has become, to the Vietnamese, the symbol of freedom and happiness,” he writes. And yet, ripped from an ancient culture deeply rooted in its native soil, the Vietnamese in California are strangers in a strange land: “Ours is an epic filled with irony: the most fatalistic and sentimental people in the world found themselves relocated to a state created by fabulous fantasies, high-tech wizardry, and individual ambitions.”

Lam shatters the assumptions of readers who have encountered the Vietnam experience only through American pop culture. The horrors depicted in “Apocalypse Now,” “The Deer Hunter” and the “Rambo” movies are laughable to Vietnamese of a certain generation, a caricature of the complexities and contradictions of the war. But the Vietnamese, too, buy into the war’s myth.

For example, according to Lam it was a common belief among Vietnamese leaving their homeland that the recovered bones of a dead GI, “carefully washed by impoverished Vietnamese hands and carried along as a treasure,” would bring a bounty from the American government. “ ‘A set of GI bones is worth a whole family’s tickets to the United States,’ so goes the gossip in Vietnam,” he writes. The “boat people” who launched themselves into the South China Sea in the hope of rescue by a passing U.S. ship would display a poignant hand-painted sign: “U.S. remains on my boat.”

Lam is a journalist by profession, but he writes with the delicacy and intensity of a poet. At a Vietnamese restaurant in San Francisco, he contemplates two wooden clocks, one in the shape of Vietnam and the other in the shape of the continental United States: “‘Tick, tock, tick, tock. I was born a Vietnamese. Tick, tock, tick, tock. I am reborn an American. Tick, tock, tick, tock, I am of one soul. Tick, tock, tick, tock. Two hearts.” And when he describes the disparagement of his rebellious older brother by family and friends, Lam renders the whispered condemnations as a poem:

“He’s not Vietnamese!

So American, a cowboy.

How quickly he changed!

Can’t trust him: he

opposes his father.”

Said Hyder Akbar grew up in California, where his Afghan father sold hip-hop apparel in Oakland’s inner city. He returned to his family’s homeland when his father was invited to serve as spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai and later as governor of Kunar province. With the assistance of journalist Susan Burton, Akbar recalls his experiences as an American adolescent who is an eyewitness to the rebirth of his country.

Whereas Lam is anecdotal and impressionistic, Akbar is intent on capturing every colorful detail of his adventure in Afghanistan. “My father called and said he wanted me to bring some things he couldn’t get in Afghanistan: dress socks, Tylenol PM, and Krazy Glue. ‘A lot of Krazy Glue,’ he said.... In America my father used that stuff for everything. Now he was going to use it to repair Afghanistan.”

Akbar is aware that he is witnessing a historic moment. “Do you want to see the rebuilding,” his father asks on his first morning in Kabul, “or the destruction?” A sudden loud noise as they drive might be a blow-out or the first shot in an ambush; as it turns out, Akbar finds himself in a firefight. Despite such dangerous encounters, Akbar remains an American adolescent at heart. “I pine for standard forms of entertainment the way someone in a teen movie might pine for love,” he confesses, “even if I just had the Internet or something, I despair. I can’t even go out for a snack, since everything makes me sick, including French fries.”

He makes compromises with the realities of life in a war zone. Intent on keeping down his weight, he goes jogging in a traditional garment called a kameez partoog and a pair of Nikes. But he is mindful of the risk to flesh-and-blood human beings, and he studies how to break down and reassemble an AK-47: “There will be people here who want to kill my father, not so much for who he is as for what he represents,” muses Akbar. “Yet everyone will be unfailingly gracious and polite. To put it mildly, I’m having a hard time getting used to the dissonance.”

Lam and Akbar are a generation apart, which may explain why Lam’s book is a collection of bittersweet musings and reveries while Akbar’s is more like a teenager’s diary, full of excitement and enthusiasm. Both books, however, share a certain magical quality. “A tunnel I started in Concord might shoot me straight through to Kunar,” writes Akbar, noting that “California and Afghanistan are on the opposite sides of the planet.” These two books, in fact, are literary equivalents of precisely the kind of tunnel Akbar imagines. *