Note: On Friday, June 14, I delivered a commencement speech to graduating seniors at UC Irvine School of Humanities, and received the School of Humanities Medal in recognition of distinguished contributions to the Humanities. The speech I gave is posted below.
Thank you so much. I am very honored and delighted to be with you all today.
And to you, Class of 2013, Congratulations!
Now, I know you didn't get to choose your speaker since Michael Cera is not standing where I am, but given your budget crisis, instead of the Arrested Development star who played a freshman at UCI on Netflix, what you got is a "Vietnamese Refugee Boy turned American Writer" instead, and he didn't even go to your school.
But considering UCI's demographic, this year they decided they didn't really want a "minority" to speak at the commencement.
I'm Vietnamese American. And besides being much cheaper to get, half of my relatives attended school here, and the other half continue to sell Banh Mi Sandwiches, Pho Soup and café sua da -- to feed the entire campus so I feel that I am very connected with UCI.
Now my mother is 80 and suffering from dementia, but the moment she heard that I was going to give the commencement speech at UC Irvine, she sort of regained her full faculties and perked up. Mind you, Mama didn't congratulate me or say that she was proud. No, that would be unbecoming of her Vietnamese tiger-motherhood. Instead, she offered a warning: "Listen," she said, "no matter what you tell them, don't you dare encourage them to become a starving writer."
"Tell them," Mama said, "it's never too late to study for 'ElmerCAT' and become doctor." Then she lapsed back into her dream world -- which is comprised mostly of Korean Dramas dubbed in Vietnamese.
You see, even with dementia, my mother can't forget my so-called betrayal a quarter of a century ago.
Like any Asian immigrant kid, I was obedient. I got good grades in high school and I got into Berkeley.
I was a pre-med student, majoring in biochemistry. I worked in a cancer research laboratory. I was going to be a doctor as my parents wanted. I did everything that I was told to do -- as I was, well, chiefly terrified of my mother.
But somewhere along that seemingly assured academic trajectory, LIFE happened. Or to be more precise: LOVE happened.
My freshman year, I fell hopelessly in love. My new love, whose smiles and kisses made me tremble, stole me away from my familial sense of duty. I found a new country, a new home. But then, soon after graduation, it was all over. And my heart shattered. While working at the laboratory on campus I took to writing, in part, in order to grieve. In the daytime I killed mice. I bombarded their mammary tissues with various carcinogens to see how they grew. At night I gave in to heartbreak. I typed and typed. I bled myself into words.
Mostly, I suppose, to describe my broken heart. But one thing you discover quickly enough is that if you're still falling it is very hard to describe the trajectory of that fall; and it's impossible to frame the meaning of one's Great Romance when one's heart itself is not done with the breaking.
Then one day I wrote something along the lines of this passage: "When one loses someone whom he loves very much, with whom he shares a private life, a private language, a private world, a routine -- he loses an entire country. He becomes, in fact, an exile."
And upon reading it again sometime later, I broke down and wept.
But it wasn't the broken romance that I was weeping for. I was weeping because it suddenly dawned on me that my heart had been broken before. The first heart break took place when I was 11-years-old, a refugee boy standing in a refugee camp in Guam, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, listening to the BBC describe the fall of Saigon -- communist tanks rolling into the city, the Independence palace ransacked, panic in the streets, a city veiled in smoke, refugees setting out into the open sea.
My sadness had opened a trapdoor to the past. Memories rushed up, made themselves clear once more. I remember a city made of khaki-green tents flapping in the wind, the bulldozed ground under my sandaled feet, the long lines for food under a punishing sun. A way of life stolen, a people scattered.
For a long time in America I had pretended all that sadness didn't exist. I blocked it out. I changed my name. I spoke no Vietnamese. I fancied myself American born.
But it all came flooding back as I wrote -- and I hungered for memories.
Yet no longer did I write about the broken romance. Instead I wrote about a broken people, about people who lost family members escaping an oppressive regime, people languishing in refugee camps, people who drowned in the South China Seas, people struggling to rebuild their lives in the new country.
For the first time in my adult life I began to grieve for my lost homeland, for a defeated people. And I began to recognize that the personal and the historical are but brooks and rivers to the sea. I saw that in order to rise above one's own biographical limitations one needs to do something beyond oneself -- and that the way out of one's own self-resenting morass, out of one's own sadness and confusion, was not self pity but compassion for others.
That is to say, I entered college with one particular set of blueprints and left it with a totally different sense of direction, one that for the first time in my life was something of my own choosing. I didn't do it while being a student. I did it afterward: I started thinking for myself and critically. And I dropped the test tubes and Mama's "ElmerKAT" -- and I kept the proverbial pen, as it were.
I struggled. I became a writer and journalist. I wrote. I won awards. And I traveled the world.
Yes, I betrayed my family's demands, but to the Tiger Mothers who insist that your children must be doctors, or else! my answer is simple: Love your children instead. For whatever they do with compassion and with heart, whatever they do to stay in touch with their inner truth - they are practicing medicine.
And if good medicine can help heal wounds, for me, stories and words, when rendered for a greater good, can surely attend to the spirits.
UCI Class of 2013
UCI graduates, I am terrible at giving advice so do forgive me as I try to distill something pithy from my own experience. (A friend said "Well, just give advise to your younger self," and the only thing I could think of was "Buy lots of Apple stocks" and that didn't sound right and another friend said, "The good thing about commencement speeches is by tomorrow with their hangovers they won't remember a thing.")
But just in case that you don't drink tonight, here it goes.
If you are unsure of the road, a friendly council: be open to all possibilities -- be open to change. Your education in many ways has only just begun. If you are so certain of your destination, a tender warning: life can throw you a curveball when you expect a slider, a screwball when you expect a splitter. Whatever vision you have of your future it most likely won't turn out the way you expect it.
So be willing to live with disappointment, with heartbreaks and difficult questions when you have no readily made answers. For as certain as the rain, disappointments will come. And you will have to live with them and embrace them. And work through them.
I myself lost a country. I've been homeless, and stateless. I lost friends and relatives due to war and the subsequent exodus. I had my heart broken. And yet I stand before you today feeling profoundly grateful and blessed.
Why? In my struggle to overcome grief and confusion, I found my self. And when I spoke up for those that couldn't, I found my tongue. And when I told stories of those oppressed and suffering in obscurity, I found my voice, and my direction in life.
UCI -- you must see the We, the Us, see the communal in relation to the I. The self does not exist in a vacuum, after all, but it's best defined and expressed in its relation to others. We live in a world that is out of balance. Technology connects people from impossible distances but it also isolates so many of us who live next door to one other. We fly from one continent to the next without thinking much, but that ability has caused the glaciers to melt and the storms to grow stronger and stronger at our shores. War and strife and human exploitation seem endless as resources dwindle and the population grows.
You are graduating today not simply into a career, but into a challenging time in which being a citizen of the world is just as important as finding a job. You must find the balance between the I and the we, between doing good for yourself and doing something for the greater good.
For you will find that they are -- ultimately -- the same thing.
Last night like a student with a paper due, I looked on Wikipedia and found your school motto. It said: Fiat Lux -- Let there be light.
And it feels quite enchanting to say it.
Fiat Lux. Like Something Harry Potter would chant when the Dementors show up.
Fiat Lux.
That light is you, Graduates.
So walk the path with heart, Class of 2013. Lead the way with empathy and love, and you can change the world.
UCI Class of 2013, I wish you safe journey on the open road.
And I wish you great joy, success and happiness.
And CONGRATULATIONS
Enjoy this day, and thank you very much.
Andrew Lam is the author of "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora," "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres," and his latest, "Birds of Paradise Lost," a collection of stories about Vietnamese refugees struggling to rebuild their lives in the West Coast.
