Things get a little better when they get to the US, but they still have the isolation, the insincere “conversion” to Christianity (ironically, also a sincere attempt to make their American sponsors happy), the decision to travel across the country for the pleasure of living in a ghetto of fellow-exiles, plus the inevitable cross-cultural misunderstandings – deliberate and otherwise. I mean, as a child, the guy endures the danger and chaos of the lurching end of a war, his father is imprisoned and nearly killed, the family endures a nerve-wracking illegal journey out of the country in an open boat, followed by a prolonged period in a refugee camp where fellow inmates try to force his siblings into prostitution. In the case of this book, one review of this book reads, in its entirety, “Just because you go on a cool vacation doesn't mean you have to write a book about it.”Ĭall me all hyper-sensitive, but that seems just a smidge unfair. One of them is reading one-star reviews on Goodreads. I have a variety of odd and vague unappealing habits. History is a nightmare from which Andrew X. A vibrant, picaresque memoir written with narrative flair and an eye-opening sense of adventure, Catfish and Mandala is an unforgettable search for cultural identity. His father had been a POW of the Vietcong his family came to America as 'boat people.' Following the suicide of his sister, Pham quit his job, sold all of his possessions, and embarked on a year-long bicycle journey that took him through the Mexican desert, around a thousand-mile loop from Narita to Kyoto in Japan and, after five months and 2,357 miles, to Saigon, where he finds 'nothing familiar in the bombed-out darkness.' In Vietnam, he's taken for Japanese or Korean by his countrymen, except, of course, by his relatives, who doubt that as a Vietnamese he has the stamina to complete his journey ('Only Westerners can do it') and in the United States he's considered anything but American. Pham was born in Vietnam and raised in California. Catfish and Mandala 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.Īndrew X.

Catfish and Mandala by Andrew X. Pham