More memoir than travelogue, the author struggles with the burdens of being an immigrant to America (a refugee from Vietnam), a violent old-fashioned and tormented father (who survived the reeducation camps), a transgendered sister who killed himself, and two gay brothers. This is not a happy, lighthearted tromp to an idyllic foreign country described by a wide-eyed American tourist. The family history and personal memoirs are interwoven with the tale of his soul-searching bicycling trip through modern Vietnam. The work is that much more fascinating in its unflattering description of the Vietnamese and their country. Not an easy read in some respects, but revealing, not only about the country, but himself. I will be mightily unhappy if this turns out to be a work of fiction, like so many other recent nonfictional accounts. There is so much detail, little beautiful nuggets. I would think it a good book for travelers thinking of tackling Vietnam, or any Third World country. Much animus is aimed at the lazy, corrupt officials (especially the police), who siphon off money from tourists and citizens alike.

Having just finished this books a few minutes ago, I was reluctant to admit that I had reached the end. Andrew X. Pham is a brilliantly gifted author; the history of his country, his family's journey, and his own personal adventures are woven together in an intriguing and flawless manner. I found myself captivated not only by Pham's honest descriptions and inner dialogues, but by his emotionally charged and philosophical testimonies of being a Vietnamese immigrant in America and, upon his return to Vietnam, a loved and hated "Viet Kieu." A memoir, a historical account, a study of social behavior (both American and Vietnamese)... Catfish and Mandala is a book of many depths and a journey in and of itself that I highly recommend.

History is a nightmare from which Andrew X. Pham is trying to awake.

I have a variety of odd and vague unappealing habits. One of them is reading one-star reviews on Goodreads. 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.”

Call me all hyper-sensitive, but that seems just a smidge unfair. 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. 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, all of that would tend to make one's return to one's home country more than “a cool vacation” – more like an attempt to find some peace in a world that hasn't given much peace voluntarily.

At times, this book reminded me of the genre (which I tend to associate with the British) I've heard called “comedy of embarrassment”, in which the hero is fairly, perhaps endearingly, dorky. This is not everybody's idea of a fun read. For example, the author, in spite of both a background as well as a family situation rife with unpleasantness, could reasonably be expected to know that, when you land at Narita airport in Toyko in the middle of the night, deciding to take the bicycle that you've just taken out of baggage claim and ride it right out of the terminal unto the highway is not a life-choice that is likely to yield a pleasant result. In fact, the temptation to rhetorically ask your ereader if this guy had the sense that God gave dirt is well-nigh irresistible.

Still, there's a part of human experience and human history which cannot be summed up in histories and memoirs of the great and powerful, and this book does a good job going into it. The story is really more than a cool vacation – it's an attempt to come to terms with a particularly difficult past. People who can't understand that lives like AX Pham's are more difficult than their own should probably try to acquire some of empathy by getting out more or, if not fond of interacting with the world, reading books with greater empathy.

3.5 stars. Catfish and Mandala is a travelogue of Andrew Pham’s cycling trip through Vietnam and serves as a launching pad for excavating his family’s past. Because he’s Vietnamese American, he gets treated with resentment from the Vietnamese who stayed but because he is also a partial native, he gains access to a part of Vietnam that most Western tourists wouldn’t get to witness. Like many Asian American stories, Pham is searching for home, a place where he doesn’t feel like an outsider.

He speaks about his Asian American experience with passion, simplicity, specificity, and insight and he excels at description and metaphor, evoking an emotional response from me even when he doesn’t offer too much of his own emotions. His description of his family and their struggles as new immigrants are particularly poignant. And I think he was really honest in how he expresses the guilt he feels about being the oldest son, a fraud, and a failure in the eyes of his parents. I feel like Pham is also trying to come to terms with the death of his sister as well. I was particularly interested his relationship with Chi and I like how admits he is not the authentic eldest son because his older sister should have been it.

I started off really excited by this book because I identified with Pham’s descriptions of his immigrant family and his struggle with trying to find himself. But after about 100 pages my excitement started to wane because he kept on cutting from past to present to dreamlike chapters—he builds up the suspense in a past event and switches to the present and by the time he gets back to the past the momentum is lost. The book was an honest portrayal of his experience but some parts lacked emotional depth. I wanted less description of his bowel movements and almost getting his ass kicked by drunken Vietnamese men and more about his emotional journey.

A perfect description of eating star fruits:
“The fruit tasted sun-baked, for in full ripeness it was golden, the color of cloud underbellies tickled by a slanting sun. It had a flowery texture halfway between a melon and an apple, though it was less substantial that either. Its juice was sharp, indecisive between sour and sweet, resulting in a dizzied tanginess….

It was like reading about my own family in so many ways I was disturbed at how accurately he portrayed the experience of a Vietnamese family and the conflicted childhood of their Vietnamese-American children. This author has never met me or my family but I instantly understood what he was describing, and I instantly understood why people interacted with him in their own way. His mother, father, girlfriends, local Vietnamese, Vietnamese shop owners, airport guards, tourists, etc. I know that Mr. Pham was riding his bike because he was searching for something, and if he is like me, maybe he still is. It touches a very familiar place for me. Even with this personal view aside, I think he did an excellent job of transporting us into his world wide adventure, onto his bike (just say Ouch!), and into the floating limbo of a Vietnamese-American in a post-war world. Getting to destination on his bike was a relief for my body and mind, and then I realized the entire book was about something much more than just a bike ride.

It was a fun read and eye opening to the struggles of a Vietnamese-American straddling two worlds...plus a bunch of other life experiences and whatnot. I'd recommend it, but I'm not sure to who. To both everyone and no one I guess, it doesn't seem to fit in many categories in my head.

A raw, searching memoir about Andrew Pham’s journey from Vietnam to the United States as a first-generation immigrant. There’s a lot of powerful reflection about identity in these pages and Pham travels back to Vietnam to try and understand his own cultural background more. I liked the honesty and detail about the hardship his family faced coming to the United States. Pham writes openly about the derision he faced when he went back to Vietnam as a Viet-Kieu (i.e., a foreign Vietnamese) while at the same time encountering some glorification/idealization of the West.

One aspect of this memoir that took me by surprise was Pham’s writing about his transgender brother. This book was published in 1999, and my sense is that even gay and lesbian identity, much less trans identity was barely getting covered then. Thus, I appreciated the earnestness in which Pham wrote about his trans brother as well as his other brothers who came out as gay. Pham’s trans brother died in a tragic way and I felt that Pham wrote honestly about his sorrow and heartbreak regarding his brother’s death. I think Pham did a nice job of portraying his family as multidimensional in general.

The writing in this memoir did feel a bit chaotic to me, some staccato prose and jumping around between description and images and dialogue even within the same scene or memory. Still, despite some of the difficulty I had with the writing, the content of this memoir felt valuable enough to me, especially as a second generation Vietnamese American, to give the book four stars.

This book was left to me by a friend who was passing through Singapore in early 2008. I started the book about that time but only just completed it.

Not that it was unreadable or anything like that. In fact, I enjoyed it. (Another friend who visited me finished the book in a day.) It's just that the story never developed a tempo/pace that propelled me forward.

It's a book about identity and history, about self, about family and all the things we don't say but wish was understood. The book is also a travelogue of a Viet-American's journey and exploration of Vietnam, of memory versus reality.

In some ways, it's the typical Asian American, who-am-I, what-am-I-looking-for, where-do-i-belong book. (Is it me or do Asian Americans go on this search for "self" a lot?)

It's an easy read, at times fun and, at others, bland. I found the experiences about a Viet-Kieu traveling in Vietnam and the animosity he encounters more interesting than the soul-searching. Not to discount these personal, family moments. They just didn't interest me as much.

Experienced and written about 10 years ago, I wonder how and if attitudes towards Viet-Kieu's have changed since?

And Goodreads eats another review ... sigh.

Short version: an excellent account of the author's exploration of what it means to be both Vietnamese and American. Pham's quest to find himself reveals enormous insight into both Vietnamese and American culture; it helps that he is an excellent writer and pays no heed to political correctness -- there is no sugarcoating in Catfish and Mandala.

This ... this is what travel writing should be.

This book was slow to grow on me; Pham's style of writing seemed choppy at first - it jumped points in time quickly, without much in the way of description. But, as you get into the book, and, of course, when he gets to Vietnam, the story really comes to life. This may simply be because of my own time spent in Vietnam a couple of years ago. His sparse descriptions of life in Saigon and Hanoi evoked my own memories of time spent in those cities. In the end, I came to enjoy his quick descriptions and choppy sentences; I don't necessarily think with correct grammar either, and this is a book about a man and his bicycle.

About halfway through, I started asking myself what the mandala was. Where is it? Why isn't it mentioned at all in the book? My basic understanding of a mandala was that of a visual representation of the universe and life itself. It's circular and vast, building upon its own inner layers. As I thought about this, I realized that more than anything else, his bike represented the mandala. The wheels brought him full-circle - from America to Vietnam. The journey allowed him to relieve all of the guilt and shame that came with his particular life story: the difficulty adjusting to life in America, coping with being a first son that doesn't live up to expectations, and the suicide of his sister. The constant spinning of his tires brings all these up to the surface and back down again - joy and grief, pleasure and pain, shame and pride. Each one surfaces again and again, and, in the end, he can finally come to terms with the good and bad of every action and decision that led him back to Vietnam.

While leading a summer community service trip throughout Vietnam, this felt like the perfect companion memoir for the long flights and bus rides throughout the country. I expected this book to be a bit more about his bicycle adventure throughout Vietnam, which only sort of ebbed and flowed as the main theme. But Pham dealt with his personal and family cultural identity in this book, as he does not quite feel wholly American nor Vietnamese.

I remember Tien asking me if I thought someday I could take my own life as Chi had done. Could you do it, Andrew, if everyone you loved had forsaken you—no hope left, nothing to live for? Maybe, I told him, I don’t know but I always think I have one last ticket, one last hand to gamble. What would you do then before you die? I’d walk out the door to destinations unknown, spending the sum of my breaths in one extravagant gesture. (Loc. 493-496)

When your older sister-brother hangs himself after having run away from home more than 14 years earlier, what do you do? If you are Andrew Pham, you bike up the west coast of the US, fly to Japan, then bike throughout Japan and Vietnam. Pham describes this journey in Catfish and Mandala: A Two-wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam.

To be fair, Pham's journey was motivated by many confusing things that needed to be put to rest: war and starvation; his family's journey by boat from Vietnam in 1975 and their unlikely rescue; his beloved older sister's running away and later return as a man; Minh's suicide; the generational abuse that threaded throughout and damaged the family; his search for a home in a country that said he didn't belong.

In the US, Pham was "Chink, gook, Jap, Charlie, GO HOME, SLANT-EYES!" (Loc. 107). Any white face could be a face of violence—a quiet fear we live with (Loc. 584-585). In Vietnam, he was accused of being Viet-kieu (foreign Vietnamese), threatened with violence. As one Vietnamese cousin said: “Viet-kieu’s fickleness causes a lot of problems. Refusing to eat the same food as your hosts makes them think that you think you’re too good for them. Their food is filthy, unfit for you” (Loc. 1272-1273).

Shame and guilt circle around Pham: guilt for not being there for Chi-Minh, for not having volunteered to work with runaways or the homeless, shame for having been luckier than any of the "more deserving" Vietnamese he met in his travels: In this Vietnamese muck, I am too American. Too refined, too removed from my que, my birth village. The sight of my roots repulses me. And this shames me deeply. (Loc. 2850-2851)

This could be a peculiarly Vietnamese (or Vietnamese–American) story, but most of us have experienced something outside our realm of understanding – suicide, abuse, violence, bullying, grief –and need to discover some way of putting it at rest. Pham does so by interweaving descriptions of his travels with many descriptions of food, eating, and loose bowels; childhood memories (watching over his father in prison camp; exploring his hometown, Phan Thiet; expecting to drown in their escape from Vietnam); and his long ago and recent past in the US. His stories sometimes feel like a broken necklace, where not all of the beads are found and threaded together. I swear that he didn't complete some stories – but isn't that the nature of memory?

Talking about things may not make all memories lie flat and clean (and this is not a flat and clean review), but it can help make more sense. Pham was able to hear his father's lamentations about not being a better father: “I didn’t know better. It is the Vietnamese way. You beat your children if you love them. You beat them to show them the right way to live. You beat them to let them know they are important to you.” (Loc. 4980-4982)

“What will you do in America?” Son asks, reverting back to English as he usually does when he is serious.

The answer falls on me, a drop of water from a blue sky: “Be a better American.” (Loc. 5262-5264)

Kindle edition: About 80% of my reading is on my kindle, which I love for its light weight and convenience, easy searches through a book, and effortless reading at night. However, when I read classics, the editions often have transcription errors. My version of Ellison's Invisible Man was completely unreadable. Unfortunately, even though Catfish and Mandala was first published in 1999, it had many small errors that marred its story.