THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF H. LAN THAO LAM
by Lana Lin
Dorothy, a publishing project. 224 pages, $18.
LANA LIN both critiques and expands the range of Gertrude Stein with The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam. Taking as a model Stein’s 1933 classic The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which blurred the line between portrait and self-portrait, Lin narrates her story from the perspective of partner H. Lan Thao Lam. Also encouraged by Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, by queer British author Jeanette Winterson—who considers that book a novel and not a memoir because life is “part fact, part fiction”—Lin attempts in her work to “expand the ‘I’ such that ‘I am I and I am Not-I.’” Her “autobiography” explores what happens to one’s sense of self in a long-term relationship.
An experimental filmmaker and associate professor at The New School in New York, Lin and her partner Lam, an interdisciplinary artist and associate professor of fine arts at the Parsons School of Design, have been creating work together since 2001. As Lin + Lam, they have exhibited mixed-media projects exploring history and collective memory at venues and film festivals throughout the world. Lin’s book can be read as part of the pair’s overarching goal of challenging how historical narratives are constructed and mediated. Lin writes: “Memory is selective. As I write this autobiography, I isolate moments that I can remember, divorcing them from other moments, and my life changes, its meanings change as I remember and misremember.”
The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam begins with “Lan Thao Lam” passing along to readers what Lana Lin has told them of her youth as a burgeoning genderqueer Taiwanese American moving to New York City from Naperville, Illinois (Lam uses they/them pronouns). The narration of the couple’s lives then shifts, as Lin embodies Lam, recalling their early life in Vietnam and the harrowing experience of being a refugee before their family resettled in Canada. Lam sees poignant echoes of their own feelings while watching Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. To them the visitor from another planet is “stranded in the San Fernando Valley as I felt in North America. … I, who would have been a boy in a heartbeat if I could … never identified with Elliott, the boy who befriends E.T. The nongendered alien was truer to my heart.”
Both Toklas and Stein offhandedly made vaguely racist references to the couple’s many “Indo-Chinese” servants throughout their writing. Lin points out that in Everybody’s Auto- biography, for example, Stein recalls “having had so many that she cannot remember them all.” A close identification with the marginalization that Asians in North America often face was another impetus for The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam, a way of “bringing the understory to the surface.”
Although structured chronologically, the book weaves through the couple’s lives candidly but with minimal markers to clearly establish when events happened. The objects and subjects of interest to them range from tropical fruit to photography, to Lin’s surviving breast cancer and searching for a home in New York, and to queer theorist Eve Sedgwick’s eyeglasses and how clothing frequently does not “become us,” rather that we become who our clothes project us to be. Any attempt at synopsis could make Lin + Lam’s writing appear confusing; rest assured, the reader gets drawn in by its intimate storytelling. The smoothness of the book’s prose adds to the desire to flow along with them as they tell tales of their lives before and after meeting. The lives of long-term partners often merge, and large and small details of the couple’s years together come forward and recede like waves. As Lin writes: “I am I, Lan Thao Lam, and I am Not-I, Lana Lin. Perhaps in some ways we are transitional objects for one another, allowing ourselves to live in transition, to and from ourselves and each other, in between.”
Longlisted for the National Book Award, and a triumph for the small woman-centered Dorothy, a publishing project, The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam is an absorbing work commemorating 25 years of queer love and artistic partnership. As Lin writes: “It may be that a great love is shown through listening to another’s story. It may be that a greater love is shown through telling another’s story. A different kind of love arises when merging another’s story with one’s own.”
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Reginald Harris, a frequent contributor to this magazine, is a writer and poet based in Brooklyn.
