Stories from the Edge of the Sea
with author Andrew Lam and Aimee Phan

Join authors Andrew Lam and Aimee Phan in conversation on Lam’s new book, Stories from the Edge of the Sea. At times humorous and ecstatic, other times poetic and elegiac, the fourteen pieces in Stories from the Edge of the Sea explore love and loss, lust and grief, longing and heartbreaks through the lives of Vietnamese immigrants and their children in California. A younger dancer is haunted by memories of almost dying on a boat when they escaped from Vietnam, a widow processes her husband’s death through frantic Facebook postings, a writer enters an old lover’s home and sees a ghost at twilight. If the human heart is a vast, open-ended terrain, then Andrew Lam’s short stories are its mountains, valleys, and lakes. Together they seek to chart a barely explored country.

“Andrew Lam might’ve entitled this book War and Love, so universal and personal are his stories. I promise you: read Stories from the Edge of the Sea, and you will receive gifts of wonder and grief, shock and delight.”

—Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, and others

Photos and/or video may be taken at the event.

About the Speakers

Andrew Lam fled Vietnam with his family during the fall of Saigon in April 1975 when he was eleven years old. He has written for many newspapers and magazines since, including National Geographic Traveler, Los Angeles Times Magazine, and The Nation. A regular commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered for over seven years, Lam is the author of three books and has won the PEN Open Book Award, the Josephine Miles Literary Award, and many others. In 2004 a PBS documentary about his life called My Journey Home, in which a film crew followed him back to Vietnam, was aired nationwide. Lam has lectured at many universities and colleges and taught as a writer-in-residence at San Jose State University from 2015 to 2016. 

Aimee Phan is the author of The Lost Queen, a young adult fantasy duology inspired by Vietnamese mythology; the first book was released in May 2025. Her other books include The Reeducation of Cherry Truong (St. Martin's Press, 2012) and We Should Never Meet: Stories (St. Martin's Press, 2004), which was named a Notable Book by the Kiriyama Prize in fiction, as well as a finalist for the 2005 Asian American Literary Awards. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, CNN, Time, and USA Today, among others. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center, Djerassi Arts Colony, MacDowell Colony and Hedgebrook.

Tickets can be purchased online below, or onsite in Office 406 during the following box office hours:

Monday: 10 am to 6 pm

Tuesday: Closed

Wednesday: 1 pm to 6 pm

Thursday: 12 pm to 4 pm

Friday: 1 pm to 4 pm

Saturday: Closed