From cuisine and martial arts to sex and self-esteem, Vietnamese-Ameriocan Andrew Lam, referencing the essays in a new book, will shine some light on the bridges and crossroads where two hemispheres meld into one worldwide "immigrant nation." In this new nation, with its amalgamation of divergent ideas, tastes, and styles, today's bold fusion becomes tomorrow's standard. But while the space between East and West continues to shrink in this age of globalization, some cultural gaps remain.
Lam will bounce his observations off of Richard Rodriguez himself an essayist and journalist who writes about class, ethnicity, and race and is author of Brown: The Last Discovery of America.
Admission
Members of Mechanics' Institute & Asia Society: Free
Public: $12
Co-sponsored with SF Brainiacs meetup. As I note each time, the meetup component will happen after the presentation. We'll adjourn to a nearby reasonably priced restaurant, Café Metropol, for our own conversation.
Andrew Lam is an editor and cofounder of New America Media, an association of over two thousand ethnic media outlets in America. His essays have appeared in dozens of newspapers and magazines across the country, and his short stories are anthologized widely. Followed by a film crew back to his homeland, Vietnam, he was featured in the documentary My Journey Home, which aired nationwide on PBS in 2004. His book Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diasporawon a PEN American Beyond Margins award in 2006.
Richard Rodriguez is an essayist and journalist who has written a trilogy in a series of memoirs about class, ethnicity, and race in America--Hunger of Memory, Days of Obligation, and Brown: The Last Discovery of America. He is writing, at present, two books, one on beauty and the other on the influence of the desert ecology on the experience of God for the Jew, the Christian and the Muslim.
