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Catfish and Mandala A TwoWheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam Andrew X Pham 9780312267179 Books

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Catfish and Mandala A TwoWheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam Andrew X Pham 9780312267179 Books

The 25th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon was approaching, as was a conference at NYC's Asia Society on Vietnamese American authors, so I purchased this book for a friend. But before I gave the book away, I started to read the preface. And I was as hooked as a net caught in a propeller. I gorged myself on this book's language. It was so poetic, I wanted to deconstruct the sentences to see how Pham built them. How this book did not win a National Book Award I can not fathom. (although it was honored with the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize). As was said in the reviews above and below, Pham's book is an adventure book as worthy as any Outside Magazine story, a memoir, and an extended essay on cultural identity, immigration, guilt, and family dynamics. The metaphor filled, flowing chapters alternate between his current bike trip, the immigrant experience, and his family's flight from Vietnam two decades ago. The book is honest, humorous (as in when he relates his Dilbert-like experiences working as an aerospace engineer in California, or when his brother's boyfriend offers him a supermarket of armaments for road biking protection), psychologically complex (the duty of the first son, the guilt over a suicide), frightening (when relating the experiences of his father in a post-War Vietnamese prison, their escape as boat-people, finding lodging at the home of what may be an escaped mental patient), gutsy (finding a bike path from Narita Airport), sensual, exhilarating, sad, profound, and subtle (can you save every beggar, can you marry every poor Vietnamese woman). Simply a must read.


Tags : Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam [Andrew X. Pham] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <b>Winner of the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize</b> <b>A New York Times</i> Notable Book of the Year</b> <b>Winner of the Whiting Writers' Award</b> <b>A Seattle Post-Intelligencer</i> Best Book of the Year</b> Catfish and Mandala</i> is the story of an American odyssey―a solo bicycle voyage around the Pacific Rim to Vietnam―made by a young Vietnamese-American man in pursuit of both his adopted homeland and his forsaken fatherland. Andrew X. Pham was born in Vietnam and raised in California. His father had been a POW of the Vietcong; his family came to America as boat people. Following the suicide of his sister,Andrew X. Pham,Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam,Picador,0312267177,Asia - Southeast,Cultural Heritage,Personal Memoirs,Pham, Andrew X.,Pham, Andrew X. - Journeys,Vietnam;Description.,Vietnamese Americans,Vietnamese Americans;Biography.,010603 FSG Picador-All Prior Years TP,1967-,20TH CENTURY DESCRIPTION AND TRAVEL,Asia Southeast,BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY Cultural, Ethnic & Regional General,BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY General,BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY Personal Memoirs,Biography,Biography & Autobiography,Biography Autobiography,BiographyAutobiography,Cultural, Ethnic & Regional Asian & Asian American,GENERAL,General Adult,HISTORY General,Non-Fiction,Pham, Andrew X.,,South & Southeast Asia,TRAVEL Asia Southeast,Travel,Vietnam War,Vietnam;Description.,Vietnamese Americans,Vietnamese Americans;Biography.,Asia Southeast,BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY Cultural, Ethnic & Regional General,BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY General,BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY Personal Memoirs,Cultural, Ethnic & Regional Asian & Asian American,General,HISTORY General,TRAVEL Asia Southeast,Biography Autobiography,1967-,Biography,Pham, Andrew X.,,Travel,20th Century Description And Travel,Biography & Autobiography,BiographyAutobiography,History: World,Vietnam War

Catfish and Mandala A TwoWheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam Andrew X Pham 9780312267179 Books Reviews

What a well written journey! Totally honest and forth telling. The author met many trials and tribulations on his voyage back to his native land, but...he is definitely a survivor! I loved learning more than I knew (at this date) about Vietnam. As a budding sociologist, it was very interesting. I am so glad that I came upon this book! You will learn a lot by reading it too, if you are from the West.
I absolutely loved it....5 stars!
An extraordinarily well-written memoir of a young Vietnamese-American who bicycled back to his roots. During the year of his strange, sad, tough bittersweet journey through Vietnam, Andrew Pham recalls his youth, his recent past, and his love for his family, Vietnam, and America.

Pham weaves his life story with that perfect blend of humor-sadness-humor that has the reader laughing one moment and choking down tears the next. An excellent read!
Life was tough for vietnamese families surviving the civil was but was also tough being a kook in american culture, and tough within the vietnamese family culture. Why did fathers try to beat discipline into their kids - it happens world wide and is passed down generation to generation. We s it because we work so hard and sacrifice for our kids and then they threw it back
CATFISH AND MANDALA Is a magical memoir, a wonderful story of Andrew's journey from Vietnam to America and back again with a detour around Japan. Growing up as a boat person, then gang banger in East San Jose before his bicycling the length of Viet Nam, his memoir here is a search for identity, which he shares with us with so many of the outrageous encounters he encounters in his travels. Sprinkled with amazing meals and an appreciation of Vietnamese food that some will find discomfiting, they also serve as a prelude to his later cookbook. This book is a recounting of his family's travails and provides a keen, lyrical insight into one sensitive person's immigration and identity experience. A wonderful read--enjoy.
Andrew X. Pham `s personal quest for identity and healing, ‘Catfish and Mandala’ is about as good a memoir you will ever come upon. A cathartic journey of healing and adventure written with beauty and power, ‘Catfish and Mandala’ is a rare treat for the bibliophile.

Pham, a Vietnamese- American, sets out to cycle the home he was forced to flee after the fall of Saigon. Thus begins a profound and unsettling voyage into family dynamics and the American immigrant experience. More than anything, ‘Catfish and Mandala,’ is the author`s moving requiem for his transgendered sibling, Chi. This memoir captivates and challenges, a story of tenacious survival and overcoming a painful loss.

Pham tasks himself with biking from Saigon to Hanoi. Though family and friends warn of the dangers, Pham is not to be dissuaded. His observations of a country transitioning from severe one-party rule to a partial embrace of private enterprise are pithy and wry. “Saigon traffic is Vietnamese life, a continuous charade of posturing, bluffing, fast moves, tenacity and surrenders.” Often times his descriptions touch the lyrical. “Saigon was thick with almsfolk, every market, every street corner maggoty with misshapen men and women hawking their open sores and pus yellow faces for pennies.” Other times Pham crafts aphoristic sentences to be savored and remembered. “Vietnam is a country of food, a country of skinny people obsessed with eating.”

Pham manages to survive his trek, but just barely. He endures dysentery, ravaged roads, avaricious relatives and drunken yokels bent on denting in both head and cycle. As the adventures and privations pile up, Pham works through his troubled family past, finally arriving at a tenuous self-forgiveness. Pham artfully weaves vignettes of his travels with flashbacks from his immigrant past. Along the way, he pens jewels of wisdom. “Her death left a silent dark hole in our family like an extinguished hearth no one could relight. We talk around her history, unknowingly lacing her secret and our shameful failures deeper into ourselves.”

Pham dissects his difficult relationship with his father, a man burdened with surviving in a new land and providing for a wife and six children. Pham pays homage to man brought up with different values struggling to re calibrate in his new universe. “Chi…I shouldn`t have beat her like that ….My father beat me. I didn`t know any other way.” Pham writes with awe and sadness of a man with whom he couldn`t quite connect. “He was a worrier, a planner, a schemer, his brain an algorithm with too many variables which frequently crashed and never yielded the optimal solution.”

‘Catfish and Mandala’ reads as a poem to the emotional pitfalls of straddling cultures, of leaving something behind and yet not finding something to replace the past completely. “I move through your world, a careful visitor, respectful and mindful, hoping for but not believing in the day when I become native.” It blends personal history with that of a nation, that of a people.

Andrew Pham is a master prose stylist whose sentences sparkle with originality and ornate metaphors. “Happiness, sorrow, and abuse were mixed up like vegetables in a soup.” Simple and often deeply personal, they charm as they challenge. “His (Chi`s) ashes were scattered on the sea he never finished crossing.”

There are a few places where his simile-rich sentences stray, but by far the norm is excellence. At times, Pham`s artistry models the very best of traditional Japanese haiku. “Morning brings a drizzle as fine as fish bones.” “Like striking vipers, the canes blurred through the air.”

Other times, Pham descriptions are simply perfect. “Hands braced on the table, they sit with their knees up near their ribs, three hyenas tearing into the ruptured belly of a deer.” Despite his discomfort with lingering in the limbo between his old and new homes, Pham knows both places better than most. His description of his birth people could easily fit his newly adopted home as well. “We are, by our own closed admissions, a fractious, untrusting tribe unified only because we are besieged by larger forces.”

Read this book if you love exquisite, dazzling prose. Read this book if you have lost someone close and your heart is full of pain and regret. Still more than anything read this book if that bewitching dragon of Southeast Asia, Vietnam herself, has beguiled you in some way or another. “A little girl, barefoot in mud, clutches a wooden doll, her eyes stabbing mine, wonders on her face.”
The 25th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon was approaching, as was a conference at NYC's Asia Society on Vietnamese American authors, so I purchased this book for a friend. But before I gave the book away, I started to read the preface. And I was as hooked as a net caught in a propeller. I gorged myself on this book's language. It was so poetic, I wanted to deconstruct the sentences to see how Pham built them. How this book did not win a National Book Award I can not fathom. (although it was honored with the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize). As was said in the reviews above and below, Pham's book is an adventure book as worthy as any Outside Magazine story, a memoir, and an extended essay on cultural identity, immigration, guilt, and family dynamics. The metaphor filled, flowing chapters alternate between his current bike trip, the immigrant experience, and his family's flight from Vietnam two decades ago. The book is honest, humorous (as in when he relates his Dilbert-like experiences working as an aerospace engineer in California, or when his brother's boyfriend offers him a supermarket of armaments for road biking protection), psychologically complex (the duty of the first son, the guilt over a suicide), frightening (when relating the experiences of his father in a post-War Vietnamese prison, their escape as boat-people, finding lodging at the home of what may be an escaped mental patient), gutsy (finding a bike path from Narita Airport), sensual, exhilarating, sad, profound, and subtle (can you save every beggar, can you marry every poor Vietnamese woman). Simply a must read.