Several decades have passed sinceharrowing and miraculous tales of "boat people" splashed across theheadlines. In the eclectic and engrossing collection of short stories by AndrewLam, readers are bound to rediscover a profound sense of awe at the vastness ofsuch journeys, both literal and metaphorical, from Vietnam to America.

In "Birds of ParadiseLost," Lam depicts an array of immigrant experiences, including thehopeful expectations and heavy burdens inherited by the generation born in the"beautiful country" (what Vietnamese once called the United States).Whether narrated by AmericanQborn offspring or refugees themselves, each storyQ many of which are set in the Bay Area Q portrays a multifaceted understandingof the tribulations and opportunities available in a new cultural landscape.Unique to this particular community is the paradox of encountering Vietnamveterans who carry their own traumatic or even nostalgic recollections of thehome country.

In "Bright Clouds Over theMekong," a former soldier and a Vietnamese widow struggle to reconcileimages that dangerously collide and contradict. In "Love Leather," aonceQ prosperous Vietnamese entrepreneur works as a tailor in a store dedicatedto S&M paraphernalia.

By way of a flamboyant customer who"once served in the 101st Airborne Division in Nam," he discoversthat there must have been more than one Saigon, just as there is clearly moreto San Francisco than he had read about in his "English for Today!"textbook.

At the Folsom Street Fair, Mr. Lesees that "his dream has taken him farther ... [than] the jumbo jet planenever could. How everything has changed, as if the skin, once broken, will insome way remain forever open to the larger world, just as the borders, oncecrossed, remain forever porous to the traveler."
In one of the most vivid andheart-wrenching pieces, "Step Up and Whistle," Lam reimagines a scenemost of us witnessed by way of one iconic photograph: the last helicopterairlifting refugees after the fall of Saigon. Here is the excruciating momentof letting go, when a husband helplessly loses the grip of his wife and baby.

Lam's narrator, a young boy at thetime, witnesses: "It was the end of my Vietnamese childhood and thebeginning of my American one. But for Uncle Bay, it was the end of his marriageand fatherhood and the beginning of his profound tragedy."

Images of drowned children, lostspouses and siblings and parents haunt these stories, along with variations onthe theme of starting over while observed by ghosts. Reminders of boats, oceansand the thin line between being saved and not saved, echo the almostQinterchangeable presence of the living and the dead. Children play a gamecalled Drowning and Rescue.

As a magically resurrected ancestorin "Grandma's Tales" says, "Mine is a story of suffering andsorrow, sorrow and suffering being the way of Vietnamese life. But now I have asecond chance and I am not who I was, and yet I have all the memories, so whereverI go, I figure, I will keep telling my stories and songs."

Andrew Lam's Birds of Paradise Lost captures the universal immigrant experience -- where versions of paradise are both lost and gained -- through the very particular experience of the refugees who fled Vietnam during the Fall of Saigon in 1975. Lam grew up in the American Vietnamese community of San Francisco and the experiences he heard about as a child (and some which he lived through himself) are the source of his storytelling, but it is his supple and daring imagination that turns the bones of the events into living and breathing portraits of love, sacrifice, sorrow, and endurance.

Lam's stories weave in and out of the insularity of suburban California, to the luxury of pre-Communist Vietnam to the horrors of the Communist invasion and the resulting Vietnam War, and then back to the United States again, to the Vietnamese communities built by immigrants and fostering so-called "first generation" Americans. As a first generation American myself, I know we children bear the weight (or wear the wings) of both where our parents came from and what dreams or fears brought them here in the first place. For Lam, the two forces meld into a perfect taking off point for searing, hilarious, and moving stories of what it takes to be an immigrant -- and to be the children of immigrants.

An older immigrant, skilled in working with leather, takes a job in a San Francisco S&M leather store; a waitress finds herself serving the American soldier who shot her husband in a field decades ago; a grandmother uses Karma to escape death and flash freezing; a gay man comes out at the funeral of a first generation American who has given the ultimate sacrifice for his family's adopted country. These are just a few of the unforgettable characters and scenarios created by Lam and given to us, his fortunate readers.

Lam crystallizes the tension of immigration -- the pull between wanting to hold onto the old world while needing to accept the strangeness of the new -- with sensitivity, beauty, and yet with a welcome lack of sentimentality or bathos. He celebrates the strength required to immigrate and then adapt, while understanding the price paid for such upheaval, often in scars that persist through generations. He also understands the complexity of the motivations of the immigrant. There is perhaps no greater optimism than the optimism of the immigrant and yet the fact of immigration is often founded not in hope but in fear: so many have come to this country in flight from horror and violence. How is it that immigrants can turn such potential for self-destruction into reincarnation, rebirth, renewal? They lose everything they know and are thrust into a world totally new and often quite bewildering. The weight of change is borne by the immigrants and then falls, like a gift, upon their children: against terrific and terrible odds, the next generation has been brought to a place of relative safety and opportunity. Now it is up to us to make good. Lam pays back whatever debt is owed with his terrific storytelling, built from the bones of desperation and filled in with the blood and muscle of struggle, conciliation, and hope.