It’s been years! What a surprise. Your email this morning is in no small measure a much welcome reprieve. It finds me in New Orleans, in the French Quarter, where I am one of the judges for the Faulkner Literary Prize. I’m in the middle of trying to figure out who, in this deluge of wonderful writing, should take first place, and who should take second.

But first I want to thank you for reading and enjoying my books. I’m sure you’ll have recognised yourself in one character or another, but that can’t be helped. You loomed so large in my imagination, and you showed up in my dreams and, well, fragments of you ended up in my prose.

TC, if you are, as you wrote, “surprised and pleased” by how far the Vietnamese refugee boy you knew has moved into the world of American letters, I am equally astonished. I still remember you fixing my English essays our freshman year back at Cal, how I struggled with the verbs “to be” and “to do”.

(Remember this typical dialogue between us:

TC: “So, Andy, is he happy?”

Andy: “Yeah, he does.”

TC: “No, Andy, it’s ‘he is happy, not he does happy’.”

Andy: “Right! He is happy. Very happy. Cuz TC is so hot?”)

• Tags: Andrew Lam, fiction, Issue 17, Vietnam