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

Andrew X. Pham's personal quest for identity and healing, ‘Catfish and Mandala’ is about as good a memoir you will ever read. A cathartic journey of healing and adventure wonderously crafted, ‘Catfish and Mandala’ is a rare treat indeed.Pham, a Vietnamese-American, sets out to cycle the home he was forced to flee after the fall of Saigon. It's 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. It captivates and challenges, a story of tenacious survival and 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 in transition are spot-on. “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. As the adventures and privations pile up, Pham works through his troubled family past arriving at a tenuous self-forgiveness. Pham artfully weaves vignettes of his travels with tortured flashbacks from his immigrant past“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.”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 well as challenge. “His (Chi`s) ashes were scattered on the sea he never finished crossing. 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.”Despite his discomfort with lingering in the limbo between his old and new homes, Pham knows both places better than most. His description of Vietnam 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 swims in grief. And read this book if that bewitching jewel, Vietnam herself, has enraptured you. “A little girl, barefoot in mud, clutches a wooden doll, her eyes stabbing mine, wonders on her face.”

This book is worth a read if you could bear it. There are several dark elements to it. I suppose why not since when was the Vietnam war ever pleasant? The term sad-funny does not apply here. There's also a hint of mockery and humour. I take it as a criticism of how Vietnamese people look through the eyes of their own and the eyes of foreigners. How they look through the eyes of revolutionary comrades who overthrew the Imperialists, the eyes of the Imperialists who think the Vietnamese are nothing more than small tan skinned people with no likeable characteristics, the eyes of the unwilling soldiers who fought for what they really believe were good, the eyes of the ARVN officials who could never really let it go, the eyes of those that were caught in between, and on and on. This book does more for Vietnamese people reading it than it does for anybody else. To the Westerners it could be just another SJW piece shoved into our face. To Vietnamese people, it's a criticism of their society and people both in their homeland and abroad.It's well written for the most part and there are some really good passages in the book. I thought to myself, this guy really gets the Vietnamese condition. For example when he was staying at one of the inn in Vietnam and the inn keeper asked him what he could do to make more money by ripping off the tourist. What the author said about why foreigners willingly get ripped off just to see a pile of bricks really hit the mark. I suppose this was during the mid 90s when Vietnam was literally still a 3rd world country.The Vietnamese have suffered great losses even so after the War. Does this book bring any solace? No, it's an attempt to shed some light on what the Vietnamese went through, from living in dangerous poor communities (all too common) to not fitting in American school and so on. It's worth a read for Vietnamese people, especially Vietnamese-American, if they have the mentality cause it's brutal, just so they can see. The same goes for American Asians in general.The North Vietnamese repaid their debt after the war to the Soviet Union. Some Vietnamese that went abroad after the war repaid their debt by ending up as a SJW example or worse, one more toll to be paid back.

In this book you get into the mind of this Vietnamese-American as his story flip flops into and out of his family journey from Vietnam to refugee life in America and his epic journey of discovery and memory of his homeland. Pham's story is gripping and vivid in equal measure and makes for a book that is hard to put down.

This is a work by a Vietnamese American who lived most of his life in the States and then went back to Vietnam on a pushbike pilgrimage.It described as semi-autobiographical but the wonderful imagery, the characters, the real life events, leads me to say that just about all of it is based on the author's life.I felt I was on one of the most wonderful journeys to be taken on a pushbike - thousands of miles and reminiscing.Unputdownable and was much affected and was much saddened when I came to the end, as I was so engrossed and missed the world into which I was transported.

I read this book because I am about to travel to Vietnam (after various other trips to the area).It describes the author's journey across the country on a bike, with frequent and long digressions about his past as a Vietnamese refugee in the United States with his highly disfunctional family (where they eventually become naturalized).A lot of belly-gazing is involved but in the end the impression one gains is that the author rather enjoys moaning about things, including bouts of dysentery described in great detail.Vietnam as a country, seen through his eyes, seems to be a place populated by a poor, corrupt, greedy and altogether unlikeable population and, were one to believe the author, one would be put off from the idea of visiting.Altogether everybody in the book is rather nasty and unkind: the violent father, the thugs encountered on the road, the corrupt officials, the people ingratiating themselves with sad stories and lies in order to rip him off.In the end he goes back the United States and the only lesson he seems to have learnt is: "I want to be a better American". Not a big deal, it seems, after a year on the road.If you are looking for an interesting travelogue about Vietnam you may be disappointed: the author gives little information, historical or otherwise, apart from a few obvious (and always overly emotionally laden) references to the Vietnam war, the only period he has any (patchy and biased) knowledge of. For someone criticizing the Vietnamese for their tendency to use the war topic in order to gain sympathy, he seems to to the same rather a lot, without being able to bring any real compassion or understanding to the subject, and without having done any in-depht research (historical, cultural, personal). Everything starts and ends with his own and his family's experience and his point of view is dangerously ignorant, black and white and biased by the typical American tunnel-vision (rich=good, success=good, culture=overrated, history=rubble, ruins=boring, coca cola=only drink worth drinking in the whole world, even if the most expensive (why not drink tea, one wonders?), Communism=very very bad, ambiguity=intollerable).All in all an immature book, a post-teenage outburst about psychological and family problems, written more for the family to read than to make any real sense of what has happened, historically and psychologically, to said family, and with a rather embarrassing american patriotism which somehow fails to mention the war crimes committed and the absurdity of the havoc wrought, while at the same time implying it was inevitable, like an earthquake or a tsunami.

Prepping for a month trip in Viet Nam i picked this book up, and i found it very well written and an easy read but done so inteligently with loads of insight into the lives and culture gone past to the modern present. At times heart breaking and gut wrenching to surreal and beautiful. A melon-collie memoir of emotional (and literal) up and downs about a man searching for himself, his culture, his identity. I can only assume it just scratches the surface of the true vietnamese identity but it gives a great look at the mentality and motives of a few of this hard working and enduring culture. A very powerful read and well written.

I enjoyed the author's writing style. Both of my parents also read the book and were engaged to the end. I also learned a lot.