The Plagiarist
by Pete A.R. Menard
for New York Magazine
I.
From the beginning, the story was too perfect to be real.
Here was Thuy Lam — thirty-eight years of age, raised on food stamps, a college dropout, clerk at a succession of dead-end retail jobs — fallen, as if by magic, into the kind of overnight literary success that seems to exist only in the imaginations of the most delusional of MFA first-years. Her novel, Little Pearls, drafted during her lunch breaks on receipt-backs and shoplifted legal pads, had become an instant critical and commercial success. The novel, which told the story of a boy born during the Vietnam War who travels to America to track down his GI father, had been acquired in late 2022 by Flatiron Books in a two-book, reported six-figure deal. It had been the first time Lam had ever submitted any of her writing before. When the book was released late last year, there was the kind of glowing, cliche, praise indicative of modern literary acclaim. The New York Times Book Review called it “lyrical and kaleidoscopic,” Vulture, “heartfelt and stirring,” and Slate, “a definitive glimpse into the immigrant experience.”
In its third week on sale, the book reached the New York Times Bestseller List — a rarity these days (let’s face it) for any sort of serious literary fiction. A deal with A24 to produce a streaming series was reportedly in the works. When Lam gave readings at bookstores, the standing-room crowds were so full they often overflowed out the doors and onto the sidewalk, with those on the street straining their necks to catch just a glimpse of her. She was all set, it seemed, for a career as one of the most preeminent Asian-American writers working today.
But this, of course, is not the way the story ends.
***
“He felt as though he lived a kind of half-existence, as an imposter. He’d walk through the market, through a thick pungent air, past the rows of vendors with fruit perched half-hazardly, those stacks of green, yellow and pink, and somehow feel keenly upon his scalp the lightness of his hair against a backdrop of black. He’d make his way through the crowd; they’d part around scooters and motor-cycles like the sea of fish. He kept his impression neutral and his face stoic, as if any change in expression would give himself away. At this time there was always a crush of people in the market, the lingering scent of bodies over that of motorcycle smoke; meat and salt and the chatter of birds overhead. But it was here, amongst it all, that he always felt most alone.”
(from Little Pearls)
***
Thuy Lam has dark, straight hair, and severe cheekbones. She is very thin in general. There is a sort of hollowness to her face. When she looks at you straight on, directly in the eyes, the skin in her cheeks seems to sink into itself. When I meet her, it’s six months to the day that her publisher removed her book from circulation. I can’t tell if that hollowness has always existed, or if it has recently become etched into her gaze.
We meet at her Los Angeles apartment, which she moved into soon after she received her advance; it’s an upscale building, in the heart of downtown. But Lam’s front room has no furniture to speak of; walking inside you are greeted with only a floor of light wood planks; they’re covered by a thin layer of dust that is thrown into relief by the afternoon sun, which streams in through two wide windows that stretch nearly from floor to ceiling. This, in an image, is what Thuy Lam’s life has become: promises of luxury and fame, now nothing but emptiness and solitude, as the world turns away from view.
“I’m moving from this place soon,” Lam tells me. Since there’s nothing to sit on in the living room, we sit beside one another at the kitchen’s breakfast nook, across from a bowl of overripe bananas and a half-empty bottle of cheap vodka.
“Is that why you don’t have any furniture?” I ask.
“No,” Lam says. As she says this, she looks around the apartment, as if seeing it for the first time. “I meant to buy some when I got the place, but I was just too busy — traveling and interviews and stuff. And then the rest of it just happened too quickly.”
The “rest of it” is, of course, the downfall. It began, as most downfalls tend to these days, with a thread on X (formerly Twitter). On September 3rd, three months after Little Pearls was released, an anonymous user named ‘TheeApophenia’ posted a thread which showed similarities between the novel and another book, self-published in 2019 by a man named Duc Pham. The book, titled Truyện Ma (“Ghost Story” in English) and written in a mixture of scattered Vietnamese and English, is buried deep within the recesses of the Kindle store’s “Biography and Memoir” section. It has no reviews.
The evidence of plagiarism was immediately obvious — and damning: the books follow the exact same structure, down to the number of chapters; though Lam’s book is written in third person and Pham’s in first person; the plot and characters it follows are identical: a boy named Minh who stows away on a container ship to track down his father in Cleveland, Ohio. Even aspects of Little Pearls that reviewers were critical of can be explained by plagiarism; the prose, which occasionally features mistakes atypical of a native English speaker, such as confusing word order and definite/indefinite articles, are the result of a somewhat clumsy attempt to translate a language with a grammatical structure quite different than English.
“There’s no question she plagiarized it,” says Eileen Ninh, a professor of Asian-American studies at the University of California, Palm Desert, and one of the few people who have read both books. “I actually think that plagiarism isn’t strong enough of a term. She stole it. It’s a theft, plain and simple.”
The backlash was swift. Barely a week after the online uproar began, Flatiron Books announced in a statement on social media that they would remove Little Pearls from store shelves. Lam’s literary agency, Gilded Baron, dropped her soon after. Lam says that the deluge of social media notifications was so great, her phone would overheat and be inoperable for days. At the time, she was still using the battered iPhone 8 she got in college; she hadn’t gotten around to buying a new smartphone yet.
For her part, Lam never gave a public statement on the controversy. Instead, she simply canceled her events, stopped replying to interview requests, and retreated back into her large, empty apartment. To the rest of the world, it was as if she could have never existed at all. A phantom, a false memory.
Literary plagiarism scandals are, of course, nothing new. The controversy around Little Pearls isn’t even the only notable plagiarism scandal this year. In January, Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate Jumi Bello’s debut novel, The Leaving, was canceled by her publisher after it was discovered that she’d stolen passages from a number of prominent writers. In May, she penned an apology essay for Literary Hub, which was later removed from the site because the essay had plagiarized its very definition of plagiarism. But the scope of Lam’s transgressions, Ninh says, are far beyond Bello’s.
“What Bello did was wrong, of course, but it’s at least a somewhat understandable mistake for a young writer,” Ninh says. “She was looking for the right words to say, and when she found that other writers had already said them, she tried to claim them as her own.”
But Lam’s actions, Ninh says, are far less forgivable.
“What she’s done is stolen a person’s life, their suffering, their being — and not only that, to turn around and say that it’s fiction, that none of it really happened, to pawn it off for her own financial benefit? I can’t fathom the selfishness in that.
“It’s almost as if she took someone else’s entire life for herself,” Ninh says. “What kind of a person does something like that?”
It’s unclear, though, what Mr. Pham himself would think about his work being stolen in this manner, because of one simple fact: he has been dead for three years.
***
“On Fridays, after work, they would meet at the bar. The three of them would sit on cheap plastic chairs, barely six inches off the ground. Minh was the tallest, so it was uncomfortable for him; his knees would go almost up to his shoulders and make his legs sore. The beer came out of a hose and was mostly water. It took a dozen glasses just to get a little drunk, so they often had to sit there and drink for hours. Always, the talk was of escape; the places they’d go in America, all the white girls they’d fuck like in those porno mags the GIs had left behind. They gave each other American names; Huy was Liam, Dinh was Andrew, and Minh — he was John, like John Wayne, from the black-and-white cowboy movies. He imagined himself muscular and strong, with a red beard, his skin clear and bright. He loved it when they sat there drinking for so long that a sun went down. At night, drunk, in the dark, he could be someone else, even for just a moment.”
(from Little Pearls)
***
Despite the amount of ink that has been spilled about her, Thuy Lam has surprisingly little to say for herself. When she speaks, she does it slowly and carefully, often pausing in the middle of the sentence to find the right word, as if she is editing herself in real time. There’s a highly practiced vagueness to many of her answers, which is understandable; after so much has been taken from her, there’s little now that she’s willing to give away. When she speaks, I notice her eyes often flit momentarily to the corners of the room, as if, despite the fact we are in her home, she is searching for an exit. When asked whether or not she plagiarized Ghost Story, Lam instead says she doesn’t have much of an interest in rehashing the controversy.
“What’s the point?” she says. “The truth of it is irrelevant; what matters is that everyone thinks that I did it.”
To her, the narrative, whether true or not, has already been set in stone, so it’s pointless to try to change it now. So why, I ask, did she not attempt to defend herself when the crisis first emerged, when the public opinion was still malleable enough to be salvaged? Surely she must have known that her silence would have been equated with guilt.
“You have to understand that before all of this I was a nobody,” Lam says. “I have no background in publishing, no friends in the industry, no connections. I didn’t go to conferences or no Master’s program, just me in my room, writing. These publishers, they’re so happy for you to be their cash cow, to sell books with your face and your identity. And then they turn their back on you in an instant, and you have nobody to defend you. So it was just easier to go back to being myself. Being invisible.”
But the question remains: after months of ghosting interview requests, why has Thuy Lam chosen now, after the dust around her has seemingly settled, to finally speak out? At this, Lam stands and begins to walk down the hallway, beckoning me with her hand as she does so.
“Let me show you,” she says.
We enter the bedroom first. There are clothes strewn haphazardly on the floor surrounding her bed and a small wooden cross mounted on the wall above it. Lam shows me that there are marks carved into her bed-posts; the gashes run nearly down the entire length of the wooden beams, about a quarter inch deep, wide at the top and tapered to a fine point at the bottom.
“Nothing human could have made this,” Lam says.
“Rats or mice, maybe?” I suggest.
Lam shakes her head with some vigor.
“What kind of rat has fangs that long, that serrated?” she says.
Next, she opens the walk-in closet and tells me to press my ear to its farthest wall, where she’s heard whispering from the other side. The voice of a young girl, maybe seven or eight years old. Just quiet enough that you can’t make out what’s being said.
“Something in this building,” Lam says, “is haunting me.”
She’s never been one to sleep well. And lately, she hasn’t been sleeping at all. It’s a classic ghost story: mysterious claw marks on the walls and bed-posts, thumps and rattles in the night. Voices that call her name outside her locked bedroom door. Lams tells me that the building is built atop catacombs; a system of tunnels that run for miles through downtown, once used for a long-abandoned part of Los Angeles’s feeble metro system. A couple blocks away as the crow flies is the hotel formerly known as The Cecil, infamous for the mysterious deaths that happened on its grounds decades ago.
“They say there are dozens of bodies buried underground,” she says. “One of the tunnels collapsed during construction and trapped the workers inside. But the company covered it up because they were using illegally hired workers so they wouldn’t have to follow safety regulations. Almost all Asian immigrants: Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese. They don’t tell you there were Vietnamese here before the war.”
History, Lam says, is the reason why she moved into this place.
“A Vietnamese born here has no history,” Lam says. “Your people came over less than fifty years ago. Your past is a war you’ve never seen. It’s like you’re floating in space, free, with no tether.” Living somewhere that has a past, Lam says, gives her something to hold onto — especially after the publishing world has cut her loose.
It’s a comforting thought. There is, however, a problem with this story. The building’s manager, Doris Park, says that, while it’s true that there are underground tunnels in the area of downtown Los Angeles, the building wasn’t built atop a metro station — nor are there bodies buried underneath it.
“We’re proud to be located in a historic part of the city,” she says. “But saying that there’s a hidden mass grave underneath our building? That’s just pure fiction.”
Likewise, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation says that there’s no record of a subway line passing underneath Lam’s building — and, in an email, notes that the Los Angeles tunnels are at this point a “well-mapped tourist attraction.”
When I tell her this, Lam just shrugs.
“Of course they’d say that,” she says. “It’s in their best interest for people to believe that. But the truth is the truth.”
She wants me to see for myself, show me that it’s not just some story. Walking into the closet, I press my ear against the cool plaster. But instead of ghosts, I hear nothing, except the bouncing echo of the blood rushing inside my ears.
***
Thuy Lam grew up about thirty miles away from here, in the nearly entirely Vietnamese American suburb of Garden Grove. Her father left a few months before she was born. Her mother still lives there, but she hasn’t been there in years. They’re estranged.
“Because of what happened with the book?” I ask.
“No.” Lam says.
According to an obituary published in the Westminster-Herald Journal, Duc Pham, the real author of Lam’s book, was born on December 12th, 1968 in Da Nang, a small village just outside of Hanoi. The obituary places his death just two weeks after his memoir was self-published. It does not mention any surviving family. Pham is buried in the Westminster Cemetery, just four miles from Lam’s childhood home. His grave is unadorned, just a gray headstone with his name, date of birth, and death. It’s not inconceivable that he and Lam could be related, or else have crossed paths some other way. But Lam, for her part, claims that she and Pham have no relation, nor that they had ever met. When I ask about the possibility, she seems almost offended by the suggestion.
“It’s not as though all Vietnamese know each other,” she says. “Maybe I did meet him before, somewhere on the street. But everyone here is the same: from the South; a refugee or a child of a refugee. I doubt I would have remembered his face.”
It’s difficult to find much other information on Mr. Pham, not least of which because of the relative commonality of his name — a cursory Facebook search reveals at least fourteen Duc Phams in the greater Little Saigon area alone. The Westminster Herald obituary doesn’t even have a photograph of him. When I contact the editorial staff of the Herald, they are able to forward me the email that submitted the obituary request, but when I send a message to the address, it just bounces back — the account has been deleted. Given that Truyện Ma — and, by extension, Little Pearls — is ostensibly non-fiction (though there’s no way to know for certain — it would be far from the first time for an author to exaggerate or fabricate parts of their own story), the best hope is filling in details of his early life with those of the book. But even this is frustratingly limited. The book places his arrival to the United States in 1985, when he was seventeen, and the government immigration records are only publicly available after 75 years. Specific records for an individual can be requested under the Freedom of Information Act, but only with the individual’s written permission — which, given that Pham is dead, seems unlikely to come by.
Lam’s life story is much easier to trace, not least of which because she’s around to tell it. Though by her own admission, there isn’t all that much to say. She’s been in the area her whole life, attending nearby Garden Grove High School and spending summers with her grandparents, both of whom have since passed away. She remembers being a somewhat reserved and lonely child.
“Writing was always my escape,” she says. “I was stuck here, but on the page, I could be someone else, anywhere else in the world, as light as a feather.”
Lam says that she did consider pursuing creative writing in college, but ultimately decided against it.
“I was so terrified of rejection,” she recalls. “Because when you write something, that’s you on the page right? Even if you call it fiction. So I couldn’t put anything out into the world unless I knew for a fact that my life was worth something.”
Instead, Lam took classes off and on at Cal State Fullerton, intending to pursue the stability of a career as a pharmacist. After two years she dropped out for good and worked retail instead: Albertsons, Target, TJMaxx — “What happens in the back rooms of those places are the actual stories of the human experience, not whatever some grad student who’s never worked a real job in their life writes,” she says.
By age thirty-seven, literary fame was an afterthought of an afterthought for Thuy Lam. She was living by herself in a one bedroom apartment — “A shithole compared to this one,” she says — and drove the same car she’d had since she turned eighteen. She spent most nights drinking alone on the steps outside her apartment. The rags to riches narrative of her rise proved nearly as compelling a story as Little Pearls itself, and Lam (and her publisher) were eager to lean into it, right up until the moment it collapsed. There’s a moment in an interview earlier this year with the New Yorker that is particularly striking. When asked about her existence before the fame, Lam said that for so long, “My destiny was an unremarkable life. And then, one day, I decided to change it. That’s what writing did for me.”
***
As he stepped off the boat, onto the mainland, the first thing he noticed was the air: clear and sharp and bright and smelling of salt. In Viet Nam the air was so dense with moisture that you had to push through with your body, as if wading through a river flowing the opposite way. Here it was as if he could push through reality itself with little effort at all, like a bird, as if he could leave his old body behind entirely; leave behind that shadow trapped in the heat and mud, watching him become something made anew. But that was the thing about shadows, he knew — that they are always there, always remain just behind you, out of sight.
(from Little Pearls)
II.
“Would it be so bad if I did do it?” Lam asks me. “Steal it, I mean.”
By our second meeting, she seems more comfortable, almost upbeat. This time, we’re sitting at a juice bar that’s around the corner from her apartment, the kind of place with $16 smoothies and as many Lulus as lemons. She comes here often, she tells me, when she needs to get outside. But only during the daylight hours — “Too many homeless at night,” Lam says.
“Do you regret what happened?” I ask.
Lam purses her lips, thinks for a while before answering.
“I regret the things I won’t get back,” she says.
And it’s true — she’s more or less back in the same position as before Little Pearls was released. Even if she wasn’t moving out of a supposedly haunted apartment, she can’t afford to stay there anyway. She doesn’t have a job; she still has unpaid student loans from the year and a half she spent at college. She’s had bad credit for years.
“But to steal a dead man’s story?” Lam asks. “What’s wrong with that? He has no need for money or fame.”
It’s notable, too, the casual way she says this.
“Everybody knows there’s no morality in being an artist. We’re all thieves. If I steal from the lives of my mother, my sisters, spin their pain and traumas into prose, into profit, does that make me any better than stealing a stranger’s?”
Strictly speaking, it’s true that Lam hasn’t committed any material harm. Her crimes, though severe, remain in the literary realm; she hasn’t caused physical injury, or destroyed property, or committed financial fraud. Her indiscretions strictly involve where the lines between inspiration, transformation, and plagiarism lie — lines that, at least for her, lie contrary to the perceptions of much of the literary world.
“I am Vietnamese,” Lam says, stirring her drink with a plastic straw (a green smoothie with kale, spinach, acai, and pink dragon fruit — paid for with the magazine’s card). “It’s a Vietnamese story. If it wasn’t for me, that story would still be somewhere in the recesses of the Kindle store, buried, gone. And I brought it to the light, brought it out for everyone to see. Wouldn’t you say that’s a good thing for literature, for our people?”
“But you claimed it as your own,” I say. “You didn’t write it.”
Lam tuts.
“I’m not a white person,” she says. “I’m not profiting from the words of some person of another race; it’s not literary Yellowface.”
“But it’s still not your story,” I say back. “That’s the issue here, not who you are or where it came from.”
Lam tuts again. She looks outside the cafe; a bedraggled looking old man with black hair, dressed in a dirty brown overcoat, shuffles towards us from the other side of the street, his head low. It’s not an extraordinary thing to see in this part of downtown LA. When he reaches the sidewalk, he stops and looks up, staring, for a moment, directly at us. From this distance, you cannot quite tell what expression is on his face.
Lam stands abruptly, knocking over her drink as she does, which sends the superfood blend spilling across the table. The man outside lowers his head again and shuffles down the sidewalk, going out of view. Lam sits back down. She takes a second before speaking, her voice lowered this time.
“You’re not listening.” she says. “It’s my story. It just is.”
***
“‘I’m your son,’ Minh said.
He hated the way the words came out, hated the roundness with which his tongue tried to grasp each syllable. His father looked at him from the crack in the door. He did not open it further. Minh could see his hand by his side, loosely clutching the neck of a glass bottle.
‘No,’ his father said. ‘I don’t have a son.’
‘But you were in Viet Nam,’ Minh said. His voice was high, plaintive. Someone else’s voice. A child’s. ‘Please, sir. You don’t know how far I’ve come to get here.’
He looked into his father’s eyes. They were blue, round like marbles. He imagined what he must look like to him; brown and dirty, skin pulled tight to the bone, only barely resembling a human. He was nothing; his name invented, his clothes stolen, his teeth rotting in his mouth. He was a speck of dust, floating in the wind. The two men stood there in silence watching each other, one with form and one without. Between the breaths of stillness he could hear, somewhere above him, the chirping of a bird.”
(from Little Pearls)
***
There is, however, another possibly even thornier question about the whole affair: on where Little Pearls lands as a work of diasporic literature — how its act of representation interacts with the wider literary world. Apart from Viet Thanh Nguyen and Ocean Vuong, there have been precious few Vietnamese American writers to break into mainstream literary success. And Little Pearls, despite how generally glowing its reception has been, has certainly faced its fair share of criticism, particularly among those critics who accuse it of falling into diasporic fiction cliches: the strain of double consciousness, the peppering of words from an untranslated mother tongue, a mystical, exoticized grief of barely knowing one’s homeland.
“Fiction like this,” writes Charles K. Bui, Vietnamese-American writer and critic for the Los Angeles Times Book Review (whose negative review of Little Pearls made minor waves upon its publication), “sets Asian American literature back more than if it had not been written at all.”
“It’s certainly no My Pafology,” he writes (referencing the National Book Award-winning novel by Stagg R. Leigh, better known retitled as Fuck). “But if you were to write a novel that orientalizes racial identity for the benefit of the American gaze, I’m not sure you’d do anything a whole lot differently: the main plot of the story revolves around the main character, a Vietnamese man, in his attempts to entreat his legitimacy in front of a white American father — with the narrative implication, of course, pointed squarely at this injustice. It’s the kind of framing that allows the reader of literary fiction (mostly white, educated) their performative guilt without having to do any real work of reflection on their own part. They think, ‘Look at how terrible white people have been! I must apologize on the Caucasians’ behalf to the first colored person I see because I, the learned white, know better’ — ignoring, of course, that this kind of work reinforces the structures they claim to despise: that the way many a diasporic writer achieves their fame and success is in fact to sell themselves in this exact manner, to perform the hardships of their identity in an attempt to achieve white approval; to reinforce this inbuilt racial hierarchy.
“There is remarkable beauty to be found in the prose of Little Pearls,” Bui writes. “But that beauty is the most insidious crime of all, because it obfuscates the truth of the matter: that this is the same, tired story as dozens of others that have come forth seeking white approval; stories that claim to represent Vietnamese experience, yet, in their practiced, intentional illegibility, position the Vietnamese-American experience as solely being of the other. And yet the novel makes these assertions so breathlessly, so sublime in its language and rhythm, that for a moment we too are swept into the air, until we, as all things do, come back to earth, and realize we have mistaken sentimentality for insight.”
Perhaps what is most intriguing with regards to Lam’s situation, though, is his discussion surrounding the question of authenticity within Little Pearls:
“We want diaspora fiction that is authentic, yes, but also fiction that possesses an awareness of what it is. Non-fiction at least has the pretense of a documentary obligation; in fiction, you can make up a character to do precisely the thing you wish to illustrate, say precisely the thing you wish to say. You could even, if you so desire, create a fake novel that perfectly represents the author’s literary grievances, complete with fake criticism to explain its shortcomings to the reader. And this is a dynamic the reader, by virtue of accepting a work as fictional, implicitly understands — that we are in essence submitting to this deception for the sake of the rhetorical exercise. So writing the cliche, the easy, the obvious — even under the veneer of ‘authenticity’ — in fiction feels far less authentic, less legitimate. Because, in acquiescing to the worn treads of convention, it lays bare the nature of its construction — and thus, the spell of the ‘continuous dream,’ as John Gardner teaches us, is broken. In short,” Bui writes, “when we hear something we’ve heard before, we wake up.”
But this argument (pretentious as it is) is also complicated by the fact that the story of Little Pearls, despite being marketed as fiction, is, supposedly, real.
“I don’t think I did anything wrong in saying this story was mine,” Lam says. It’s something she’s said multiple times over the course of our conversations; the more she says it, the more it seems as though she actually believes it.
“A story is about truth,” she says. “And it remains the truth no matter how many times it’s been said, no matter who says it. So if it’s already out there, why not use it?”
Perhaps this relationship to reality is part of the reason why Lam’s theft was not caught sooner; it was easy to fit her life into the identity she claimed to write about. The book was supposedly fiction, but it was easy to map Lam’s upbringing and experiences onto her protagonist’s in Little Pearls, in the same way that many authors’ fiction reflects aspects of their own lives.
Both Lam and Minh, the protagonist in Little Pearls, grew up with alcoholic mothers who struggled to hold steady jobs. Both left home at age seventeen; Minh to the United States, and Lam to Fullerton. Both took winding paths to their eventual destinations; Minh’s Greyhound buses and the multitude of odd jobs he takes to finance them, Lam’s dropping out of college and retail jobs. And, as it turns out, both suffer a cruel twist of fate upon reaching the precipice of their goals; Minh turned away cruelly by a racist, jingoistic father who wants nothing to do with him, and the discovery of Lam’s theft ostracizing her from the literary world she had dreamt for so long to be a part of. During her promotional tour for Little Pearls, Lam often emphasized the fact that she, just like the protagonist in her novel, had never met her father. But by writing the book, she said, in a way, she actually did.
“And the truth is, there is only one story of being Vietnamese American — mine. Would I have made it as far in my life without that story, without taking the American dream for myself?”
But if this is true, I ask, couldn’t any Vietnamese person claim Ghost Story as their own? Surely there must be some delineation between story and life, between what someone puts down on the page and what someone simply restates.
“Of course,” says Lam. “But there can only be one name on the front of the book. And I got there first.”
***
“He slept on the ground, on the sidewalk, with his head resting on the curb. And when he awoke there were two of him; his body and its reflection. The other Minh taunted him. It rose above his head and moved in unnatural ways; a smokeless shadow dancing. It formed its hands into a beak and bit his ear until it bled onto the concrete. He opened his mouth to scream, and the shadow flew inside. He choked as the figure stole the breath from his lungs. He screamed in pain for all the things he would never be.
And then, as suddenly as it began, Minh woke, and it was morning, and he was curled into a ball on the pavement, and he was, for the final time, alone.”
(from Little Pearls)
***
The final time we meet, the conversation turns, for the first time, towards Lam’s own writing. So much has been made of the theft of Ghost Story that it’s easy to forget that Lam still claims to be a working writer. I ask Lam if she’s ever tried writing a novel before Little Pearls.
“Of course,” she says. “I have always been a writer.”
We’re back at her apartment again. This time it’s even more barren than before; the counters are empty and the floor of the living room is now peppered with cardboard boxes. Some of them are still open, and inside you can catch glimpses of the life they contain — cheap cutlery from the discount store, cookbooks for Italian food, turtleneck sweaters. Lam tells me she’s leaving for good in a little over a week. She doesn’t know where she’ll go yet; her plan is to rent a storage unit for her belongings and sleep at motels for a while — perhaps back in Westminster, or Fullerton where she went to school. Even considering the circumstances, she still says she’ll miss this place.
“It was a good home,” she tells me. “Even though I should have charged the ghosts for rent.”
I ask whether somewhere in those boxes on the floor is her own writing. To my surprise, she says there is. To get to it, she has to unpack a box that’s already been taped shut; inside there’s stacks of brand-new copies of Little Pearls (she offers, sarcastically, to sign one for me), and at the very bottom, a battered composition notebook.
“Can I read it?” I ask. Lam shrugs. “As long as you don’t mind me packing while you do,” she says.
The writing inside the notebook is unquestionably beautiful; the language tumbles and turns in unexpected directions, ambitious and complex in its construction, seemingly teetering on the edge of disaster and yet somehow managing never to tip over the side. It’s written in the third person, with an objectivism that both labors to describe its characters’ humanity and yet, in its distance, simultaneously seems to remove itself from it. The prose feels somewhat reminiscent of Pham’s writing from Ghost Story, not simply in its delicacy but in the pervasive melancholy it’s imbued with; the sense of grief, not just for what has been lost, but for the possibilities left formless.
I also know, unquestionably, that it’s Lam’s own work. I know this because much of the story seems to come from the life she recounted living these past few months. There is a woman protagonist, a high-rise apartment, and a system of tunnels underneath the building. The woman in the story is a writer too. She is haunted by ghosts; they leave scratches on her furniture, keep her awake by whispering in the night. She tells the building manager, but nobody believes her. Eventually, on the ground floor of the building, she finds a service door that leads to the tunnels, but it’s too old and heavy for her to open past just a crack.
Despite this, there’s also elements where the fictionality remains unclear. The woman in the story, for instance, is plagued by guilt at every turn, for some past offense that remains unsaid. She doesn’t wish to banish the ghosts from her home, but to apologize to them; she wanders the hallways of the apartment at night, calling out to no response. It remains unclear what these ghosts mean to the story, to the protagonist — and to Lam herself.
When I ask her about the notebook, she scoffs at first.
“That?” she says. “I wrote that years ago, before I even went to college. I only keep it around for sentimental purposes. I haven’t written since Little Pearls came out.”
I tell her she should read it. When she does, I see the blood drain from her face. Once she’s done, she doesn’t say anything. Instead, she rips the pages from the spine and strides over to the stove. She turns a burner on and holds the pages onto the open flame; a corner catches and turns them alight. She lets the paper burn almost down to her fingers, then turns and dumps them into the sink, the smoke rising from the basin.
“I don’t know what you think you read,” she says. “But that story’s gone now. It’s not real.” She looks at me, her eyes without light. “And I think you should go.”
***
“‘Are you sorry?’
There was no reply; the door was closed. There was nobody there.
Perhaps, Minh thought, there never had been anyone there at all.’”
(from Little Pearls)
***
Two nights before I file the story, I get a call from Lam, at four in the morning. She seems to be slurring her words, just slightly; she might be inebriated. She said she called to tell me that she wrote, for the first time in a long while.
“I thought of it tonight,” she says. “Just as I was turning off the lights for bed. And I was tossing and turning trying to get to sleep, but I couldn’t get it out of my head, like it had burrowed into my brain, like a worm, or a parasite. And when I sat down to write it, it all came out in one long strand, smooth and bright and clean, as if instead of imagining it, I was simply recounting it from memory.”
There is a faint clinking sound on the other end of the line, and then the clunk of a heavy object being placed upon a table; probably a bottle and a glass.
“What happens in it?” I ask. “In the story?”
“There’s a little girl,” Lam says. “About seven. She’s Vietnamese, like me. Her parents have left her with her grandparents for the weekend; they live in a mobile home neighborhood in Westminster. They’re having problems with rats — there’s a hole in the crown molding in the kitchen, and they have rats. They’re coming through at night, getting in the rice, getting in the cereal. That weekend, her grandfather makes her help place glue traps around the house, in each of the corners — the heavy duty ones, from Home Depot. He tells her this is how they did it in the war, placing traps for an unseen enemy, digging pits with spikes at the mouth of the forest, because that’s where the VC came out of. Her grandmother tells her this is nonsense, that her grandfather was just a boy working at his family’s jewelry shop in Saigon — but, anyway, she’s old enough to start helping with tasks around the house. And so the girl walks around the house placing the traps down one by one, peeling off the covers.
“Is she you?” I ask. “Were you this little girl?”
Lam doesn’t answer me; she just keeps talking, the tempo and volume of her voice increasing.
“But the thing is that the girl makes a mistake. The last trap she forgets to put on the floor, leaves it on the countertop next to an open window. And so when she wakes up in the morning she finds that there’s a bird trapped in it, a blue jay. And it’s small, still a juvenile maybe, a brilliant, deep shade of blue, like a marble, and it’s screaming so loud and so shrill she can’t believe something that small could hold that much pain in its body and the sound is almost piercing her chest. And she wants to free it, but her grandfather tells her that it’s no use, that the glue is too strong, that once the body is fixed in place it can’t be removed, tells her to look at the bird in the trap, how its wing is broken, folded back over itself unnaturally, tells her that the kindest thing to do would be to put it out of its misery, to make the pain stop. And so they fill the kitchen sink with water, and her grandfather says to look, says I won’t make you do it with your own hands but you need to watch, you need to see the way something dies, and so he puts the whole thing under the water, the trap and the glue and the writhing bird. And then it twitches, maybe once or twice, and then it’s still.”
“That sounds compelling,” I say, and I mean it. It could be the start of a book of your own, I tell her.
“No,” Lam says. And then she says it again, more forcefully — I imagine her shaking her head, her hair sweeping back and forth.
“Why not?” I ask.
“I can’t sleep until I know,” she says. “Until I know who the girl is. Whether she’s real or imagined. Whether she’s me.”
There is now a long silence on her end of the line.
When she speaks again, she seems near tears.
“I had it so clearly in my mind a minute ago,” she says. “When I closed my eyes. But now it’s fading. It’s floating away like broken glass. They have it in their hands. They’re floating above my head. And they’re whispering, they’re in my ears, and I don’t know what they’re saying, and my ears are swollen with voices, and they’re whispering, telling me nothing, but they’re there, they’re there in the walls and the catacombs and behind my eyes, they’re there whether you believe me or not, and it all smells like rotten lemongrass and all I can see is that bird, bluer than the sky and screaming, screaming for a release that won’t come.”
She stops speaking, and all I can hear for a moment is the sound of her breathing heavily.
“Are you okay?” I ask, alarmed. “I can send for someone —”
“It’s alright,” she says suddenly. Her voice is calm and even. “There’s nothing to worry about now.” There are noises in the background; rustling of papers, the sound of scraping furniture, and then — something else I cannot describe but makes my blood run cold. After a moment of silence, I tell myself that it’s simply the call glitching from the bad reception. It must be.
“Are you sure?” I ask.
And just before the call disconnects, she says, “Of course. Nothing to worry about. It’s just a story, after all.” ✦
