The Fight for Identity in Andrew Lam’s “Who Will Light Incense When Mother’s Gone?” Andrew Lam’s creative nonfiction essay “Who Will Light Incense When Mother’s Gone?” is a testament of finding one’s own identity through having to fight for it. In Lam’s case, he fought against his mother to find his own identity, while his mother fought to save her’s. Lam and his mother both rebelled and conformed in their struggle to find or preserve their own individual identities. Lam’s struggle for his own identity began when a huge change occurred in his life— he moved from Vietnam to America with his family at a young age. He went from being a devout child—helping his mother light incense in remembrance of his dead ancestors and relatives to rejecting his mother’s rituals and customs. While living in a new country, his views and sense of belonging to his Vietnamese culture changed; “In America, however,” he writes, “I became rebellious, distant” (Lam). When refused to speak Vietnamese he was rebelling against the ways of his heritage. He was also conforming to America’s customs …show more content…
Even with his mother trying to force him to be who she desires for him to be, he doesn’t feel as if he’s a part of that culture, but he’s only doing it for her sake as he says when he writes, “And when upon my mother’s insistence, I light incense I do not feel as if I am participating in a living tradition so much as pleasing my traditional mother” (Lam). He’s not lighting incense because he wants to but because he’s appeasing his mother. Lam picks his battles, as many do when finding their own identities. To Lam, it wasn’t worth the fight to argue about lighting incense, especially as he grew older, and understood more of what it meant to his mother. In that way he’s conforming to his mother’s tradition for the sake of once again driving a divide between them once