Summary Of Who Will Light Incense When Mother's Gone By Andrew Lam

“Who Will Light Incense When Mother’s Gone?” is a nonfiction text written by Andrew Lam, and published on the Huffington Post. With Lam as the narrator, he tells the story of his Vietnamese-American identity, which often clashed with his mother’s traditional identity. Lam’s narrative utilized the themes of filial love and the quest for identity. He expressed his love and the formerly tense bond between he and his mother, while searching for his own identity as a Vietnamese child in America.

Even from simply skimming the essay, it was easy to see how much Lam loves his mother and is finally realizing why her traditions are so important to her. Despite the clashing differences in their ways of life, they cherished each other, and that was clear

He seems to be perfectly content with this, as shown by the essay. Although he is happy with his current life, he is realizing how his family’s Vietnamese and Buddhist traditions and reflections hae been seeping into his current consciousness. Unlike his early childhood where he would, “… climb the table over which the altar stood. It was I who placed the incense in the bronze urn nightly.” Lam has developed new daily traditions. “Every morning I write, rendering memories into words. I write, going back further, invoking the past precisely because it is irretrievable” (Lam, 1). Although this is not the same as lighting “… few joss sticks for the ancestral altar” and saying “solemn prayers to the spirits of our dead ancestors, and to the all-compassionate Buddha” (Lam, 1). Lam has chosen to remember his past not through lighting of incense or mumbling prayers every morning, but by using his talents to memorialize not just his past but that of his Vietnamese

Lam did not feel that the traditional Vietnamese identity was for him, contrary to what his mother wanted, but his quest for identity definitely did come with rewards he has seemed to reap. With his mother wondering, “Who will light incense to the dead when I’m gone?” Lam is reflecting on how he will be able to honor her and his ancestors in his own way (Lam, 1). He truly loves his mother and her traditions, but as he comes into his own, Lam has grown to appreciate the Vietnamese rituals as remembrances and tributes. He expresses this at the end of this essay by realizing that “Yet, if some rituals die, some others have only just begun. I am, after all, not a complete American brat, dear mother,” (Lam, 1). He ends his essay with closing the gap, ever so slightly, between the two different worlds he and his mother live in.

“And this morning, with the San Francisco fog drifting outside my window, it occurs to me as I type these words that this too, strangely enough, is a kind of ritual, a kind of filial impulse to reconcile Mother’s world and my own. The solemnity of the act — my fingers gliding on the keyboard, my mind on things ethereal — is something akin, at last, to my mother’s morning prayers.”