Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam Book

"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 ChampionRead More