Catfish and Mandala

From AwardAnnals

Reviews

Amazon.com

“America is full of young old Vietnamese, uncentred, uncertain of their identity. The old generation calls them mat goch—lost roots”, writes Andrew Pham. He should know: he was one of them, describing himself as “the rootless one.” One day—unable to hold down the engineering career his father encouraged—he left California on a cheap bicycle to search for his roots. Catfish and Mandala is his memoir of these travels.

Catfish And Mandala is the Vietnam story from a different perspective. When Nam vets apologise to Pham for what they did to “his people” he feels fraudulent, “Who are my people?”. For his family, it was the Americans pulling out which caused the most hardship. His father, an army officer, was imprisoned by the Vietcong, narrowly escaping death. The family made a terrifying escape by boat to become refugees when Pham was just 10 (“America fished us out of the ocean like drowning cockroaches and fed us and clothed us…”)

Catfish And Mandala is as much an autobiography as a travel book, jumping back and forth between Pham’s adult cycle adventure through his lost homeland and his childhood memories. As Pham freely admits, he feels American, yet to Americans he is an Asian but in Vietnam he is an outsider too ( a privileged “Viet-kieu”—foreign Vietnamese). He remains deeply confused and has overwhelming guilty about almost everything—those left behind, his dead sister, the Americans who died, the Vietnamese who died and the poverty of those he meets in Vietnam now. It’s painful but moving to read. You’ll find yourself caught up in his agony. His writing is so beautiful and poetic that it draws you into his history until you feel he is an old friend.

This wonderful book both modernises the classic beatnik notion of a search for identity and brings alive the sensory rollercoaster of Vietnam—from the fish sauce town of Phan Tiet to Saigon’s helter-skelter of cycles.—Sarah Champion

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A great memoirist can burnish even an ordinary childhood into something bright—see, for instance, Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood. So what about a really good writer with access to a dramatic and little-documented story? This is the case with Catfish and Mandala, Vietnamese American Andrew X. Pham’s captivating first book, which delves fearlessly into questions of home, family, and identity. The son of Vietnamese parents who suffered terribly during the Vietnam War and brought their family to America when he was 10, Pham, on the cusp of his 30s, defied his parents’ conservative hopes for him and his engineering career by becoming a poorly paid freelance writer. After the suicide of his sister, he set off on an even riskier path to travel some of the world on his bicycle. In the grueling, enlightening year that followed, he pedaled through Mexico, the American West Coast, Japan, and finally his far-off first land, Vietnam.

The story, with some of a mandala’s repeated symbolic motifs, works on several levels at once. It is an exploration into the meaning of home, a descriptive travelogue, and an intimate look at the Vietnamese immigrant experience. There are beautifully illuminated flashbacks to the experience of fleeing Vietnam and to an earlier, more innocent childhood. While Pham’s stern father, a survivor of Vietcong death camps, regrets that Pham has not been a respectful Vietnamese son, he also reveals that he wishes he himself had been more “American” for his kids, that he had “taken [them] camping.” Catfish and Mandala is a book of double-edged truths, and it would make a fascinating study even in less able hands. In those of the adventurous, unsentimental Pham, it is an irresistible story. —Maria Dolan

Barnes and Noble

I took a break from reading Andrew X. Pham’s brilliant, haunting memoir of his trip through Vietnam, Catfish and Mandala, to watch TV. My remote control landed me on MTV, right in the middle of a Road Rules: Semester at Sea marathon. Confession: I am a Road Rules junkie. This travelogue-cum-voyeuristic adventure soap opera series has the power to reel me in like nothing else on television does.

And as I sat on my couch, savoring this mind candy, I got an extra treat. I had happened upon the episodes where the cast is in Vietnam. These episodes of Road Rules were full of images to complement my day’s reading.

Pham’s descriptions of riding his bicycle through the clogged streets of Saigon were made all the more vivid when I watched the cast trying to race around the congested, polluted city. The cast ate many of the Vietnamese delicacies that turned Pham’s stomach. The cast was confronted by beggars, as was Pham, who was plagued with guilt about them throughout his trip.

As the episode drew to a close, I realized that surprisingly, despite a massive difference in perspective, the Road Rulers and Pham had similar observations of Vietnam that stemmed from the bizarre experience of being an American in a country America was at war with. I also realized that not only is Pham’s book wonderful in its own right, but it’s also an important addition to the growing body of literature about the relationship between America and Vietnam.

However, Catfish and Mandala‘s premise—Pham bikes from California to Vietnam, the land of his birth, in an attempt to make sense of his trans-national identity—renders it a challenging and extremely complex read. There is more here than just a story of a native son returning home.

A recurring theme throughout Catfish and Mandala is the fact that Pham doesn’t feel at home anywhere in the world. His ethnicity and familial obligations prevent him from truly assimilating in America. In Vietnam, his American passport earns him the moniker Viet-kieu, a term that means “foreign Vietnamese” and that is highly stigmatized. Often in Vietnam, his claims to his ethnicity are challenged violently.

But epithets, fists and dysentery don’t stop Pham from traveling to through Vietnam on his bicycle; the town of his birth is his final destination. Although the places of his youth bear no resemblance to the country he remembers, Pham draws a grounding sense of knowing, and ultimately, closure from them. It’s as if seeing how different Vietnam is from his memories gives him the courage to make peace with the role his roots play in his American life.

Pham is a “boat person” who came to the US in 1977. His father, a former Nationalist Army propagandist, is a survivor of a communist reeducation death camp. His mother meticulously plotted their family’s harrowing escape from Vietnam under constant threat of incarceration.

Pham spends most of his life trying to reconcile his desire to live his own life with the remnants of the life his parents’ left behind. “Our father sacrificed for us as his father had sacrificed for him, each one of us racking up a debt so large we’d never dare to contemplate pursuing our own dreams. No, there are no independent visionaries in a line of sacrifices,” Pham writes.

His decision to pick up and bicycle to Vietnam, something he views as wholly “unethnic,” stems from these frustrations. Pham’s journey is also prompted by the suicide of his transsexual sister Chi.

Intertwined with stories of his time in Vietnam, Chi’s troubling relationship with Pham’s father is recounted throughout Catfish and Mandala, as are the tales of his parents’ personal histories, and Pham’s own life story. This makes Catfish and Mandala less a travelogue and more an autobiography. But Pham’s narration, and the stories themselves, make Catfish and Mandala breathtaking. In Vietnam, Pham bridges the gaps between past and present, and leaves with a true sense of himself.

And along the way, he gives the reader a painfully intimate look at whom he is, and what Vietnam has become, that a reader will be richer for taking the time to understand. Pham’s fascinating book is a very heavy, but ultimately an incredibly worthwhile read. —Emily Burg