DNF @ pg 216 of 342

I'm not giving to give this book a rating because I just don't know how to be fair about this besides not rating it at all.

Pham's writing is beautiful, and his travels in Vietnam while looking for his roots as a Vietnamese-American immigrant who left Vietnam during the Vietnam war are nothing short of interesting and at times moving. He includes a great many details, and balances emotional observations with the odd funny bit of his trip.

The reason I gave up on reading this book though is due to issues I had with how his trans brother who commits suicide at the very beginning of the memoir is depicted. It does not feel fair to me to rate this book because of this - 1999 certainly did not offer much transgender visibility, and I understand why Pham continuously misgenders and deadnames his brother. However, as a trans man myself, reading Pham's poor understanding of what being transgender means was very difficult, and the ways he references his late transgender brother was just too much. It is obvious that Pham really cared for his brother and felt sorrow at his passing, and like I said, 1999 was not this great period of understanding for transgender people.

I flipped ahead a bit to see what happens with Minh in terms of Pham continuing to talk about him, and while it looks like some things are resolved, it's still too difficult for me to continue to that end.

For my own needs I NEED to stop reading this book. I doubt I will ever return to this book again. If anyone who can understandably get past the period-typical misunderstandings of transness, then this is a great book - for those who understandably cannot for whatever reason get past the period-typical misunderstandings of transness, flee like a bat out of hell.

From the only two english books available, I picked this one up from a beach library on the last stage of a two week North to South trip through Vietnam.

Attracting me was this unique chance of having an insider's view of Vietnam as the author, a Vietnamese-born refugee in American soil tells his own story and dissects Vietnam through eyes already accustomed to western culture.

And it delivers. The first half of this book tells the compelling story of one of the thousands of the so called "boat people": South Vietnamese families which, due their connection to the American backed Saigon Regime or general unwillingness to live under northern communism, fled the country in whichever way possible.

In between this narrative we follow the main character's desire to connect back with its past. The struggle of his foreign-born Vietnamese family in adapting to America and his desire to get to know the now forgotten motherland by biking all the way from California to Vietnam.

Apart from the initial memories, there is no additional plot guiding the narrative in this book. After a certain point, the narrative serves the reader only superficial photographs of different Vietnamese cities as seen through eyes that can no longer relate and the chit-chat of volatile random encounters.

The first half of this book left me glued to the pages and unable to let this book down. The later half became an effort employed just for the sake of finishing what started as such a promising book.

As a story, it gives voice to all the migrants in this world who effectively, in one way or another, might find themselves as Citizens of No Country: too disconnected with their motherland to relate, too marginalised in their adoptive country to truly feel at home.

I enjoyed this book as a I haven't read a good travel story in awhile. It is full of the clever writing and one liners you except in a book like this. And yet it also has a lot of heart and is a personal story of one man's quest to understand his life and identity after growing up in America when his family escaped Vietnam after the war.

I think the key note I took away from this is the importance of the human values of humor and tolerance. When understanding, sympathy, and agreement have yet to come you can find a joke (in all serious) to commiserate on the human condition. You can just agree to coexist and see what comes of the relationship - friendship also resulted for the author. It just made me consider the nature of tolerance and understanding that understanding comes with patience and with a healthy dose of humor (self-effacing, commiseration).

He also spent quite a bit of time in the book ruminating on poverty and fate. Why was I born into this life and another missed it to live in a crushing sort of poverty? I think this question is best asked against the desire to make real commitments to live with easy generosity. Wealth comes and goes and is with me by no doing of my own. I can share. I can do unto others as I would have them do unto to me. I can lose a little to give a little.

And in the end the travel aspects of the book were successful! It made me want to travel back to Vietnam and just travel in general! The journey really is the destination and there is so much to be learned from any kind of "getting away" even if it's not that far. So I look forward to when I can hit the road again for a little trip. Maybe even back to Vietnam! ;)

Author Andrew X. Pham was age 7 when his family fled during the fall of Saigon. He returned 20 years later to tour the country by bike.

Catfish and Mandala, a 1999 Pacific Rim Book Prize winner, is a phenomenal autobiography—with one of the best titles—about his 1995 experiences. I gained such an appreciation of the daily life struggles of the Vietnamese people in the not-so-distant past. I wondered if he would safely travail the countryside, laughed out loud at the humor, and shook my head in amazement at the resiliency of the population.

While I gagged more than once over the diet, I did indeed savor his mastery of the written word. Some of his descriptions are truly word perfect, especially, I learned, when I had to refer to the dictionary on my phone for a word's meaning. (How delightful is that to have to actually stretch when reading for recreation!)

So why 4 and not 5 stars? Two reasons: First of all, I think he, as others now it is in vogue, overused the flashbacks. This is a challenging book in that names and locations take a bit of time to sort out. Rather than interweaving his personal life past with present, I would much rather have had it been structured as a straight chronological read, thus better enabling me to compare & contrast both his Viet-kieu lifestyle and pre- and post-Viet Nam. Secondly, I would have slashed the first 50 or so pages and gone right into landing at the Saigon airport, bike in tow. The prior trekking to Mexico, Cali, Japan offered little to add to the impact of the story. The few references to characters encountered could have been done in passing, and the details deferred to short stories elsewhere.

Long story short, this is an admirable read and I would plead with the author to buy a new bike and make the ride twenty years hence; i.e., now in 2015. Enlighten the armchair travelers once again.

The subtitle pretty well sums this up. Andrew rode his bike up the western U.S. coast, then catches a plane to Japan where he rides for several weeks before going on to Vietnam. Some of the chapters are His memories from childhood before immigrating to the States. The remaining chapters are the experiences of the ride. From page 337: "Somewhere along the way, my search for roots has become my search for home-a place I know best even though there are those who would have me believe otherwise."
OK. At points I struggled with whether it was memory or present. Rough language in places that I don't know was necessary. I'd never read anything to this point focusing on Vietnam so it was a new country for me. Not something I'd want to read again.

An account of home and the importance of continually seeking self. Is it always necessary to visit a physical place for self awareness? Pham's writing is poetic and his depiction of self discovery is triumphant. In the end, though, he wonders if the trip was superfluous to the mission. Finding childhood vs coming to terms with its current state. Does that cause more damage? His return trip to the US felt like a return home to him which could seem like a sorrowful thing but one of honest realization. Would highly recommend!

I enjoyed this a lot. It reads well and there is plenty of interesting material, both in terms of stories and observations as well as self reflection and exploring what identity means. The author is pretty open in sharing things, even when might reflect poorly on him. It skips around sometimes, mostly that's ok and merely leaves the reader wondering what other stories lurk in those gaps.

An intriguing look at An Pham's process in coming to an understanding of himself as Vietnamese, American, Vietnamese American. His bicycle trip through Vietnam pushes the narrative of self, but is punctuated with remembrances from his early boyhood in Vietnam, his escape with his family, and his life in America. Great sense of humor, and some beautiful descriptions of scenery. There's a transgender intrigue here too, a sad one, in that the eldest child is alienated from the family at a young age, and the many missing years are left unspoken when Chi returns Minh, now a man. Pham centers that aspect of the family's lack of full acceptance of Minh, but doesn't seem to understand that the almost unbroken references to his "sister Chi" are an assault on Minh's (gender) identity, though Pham is sensitive -- with good reason! -- to assaults on his own (ethnic) identity. (I'm not giving anything away in disclosing the transsexual subplot: its basic contours are obvious from the dedication and the first few pages.) I found tiresome the extent of Pham's observations about his dislike of many of the Vietnamese people he encountered on his trip; a few would have been enough to illustrate that aspect of his struggle with his identity. At times I found the transitions (no pun intended) jarring, and I really wish memoirists wouldn't conclude with "profound" discoveries, but would integrate their self-realizations more thoroughly into the text.

This book is supposedly a memoir of a Vietnamese-American’s solo bike journey through Vietnam, the country of his birth, the country that he and his family fled post-fall of Saigon, the country of his elders and his ancestors.

I am going to generously give this book a 3/5 stars, though if I could give half stars, then I would say it is more of a 2.5/5 stars.

Updated: I am going through some of the books that were in between stars and downgrading my least favorite. This one gets a downgrade. It's still a 2.5-ish in my mind, but the more I think about it, the more angry I feel at him.

The reason for the 2.5 stars:
the author is a wonderful writer and very detailed oriented in his descriptions and many of those descriptions are funny and witty. I enjoyed the first half of the book, for the most part. I laughed out loud at his descriptions of his arrival into Saigon, with all those Vietnamese people starting to get their luggage out of the overhead bins as the plane is making its final descent and the flight attendants frantically trying to get them all to sit down. His bus ride from Vung Tau up the coast is amusing. The way the author paints the sights, smells and people of Saigon is vivid and creative. Up until about halfway through the book, I would have said that this book was just fabulous.

The other reason for the 2.5 stars:
as the second half of the books progresses, he describes numerous incidences with the impoverished locals and his disgust and condescension becomes more and more obvious. He has an equal number of positive and negative interactions but he highlights the negative ones and dismisses the positive ones. There were people who took significant risks to house and feed him, and people who showed him unconditional kindness, and yet he barely acknowledges this, while he focuses on the negative people and negative interactions to the most minute details, including way too many descriptions of his bouts of diarrhea and more descriptions of drunken stupor. At least half of his misfortunes were due to his poor planning and poor choices but he whines and whines. He feels more comfortable hanging out with Western tourists and backpackers than the countrymen with whom he had wanted to bond, and spends more and more time with them than with the locals.

Even when his one of his Western tourist friends tells him how much she loves Vietnam and the people and how beautiful the country is, he basically tells her that she is wrong, that the country is dirty and ugly and its people unlikeable. He says that there is nothing to see in Vietnam, especially compared to all the beautiful national parks and landmarks in the US, and that the only reason why tourists come to Vietnam at all is to gawk at the skinny dark people who defeated bigger and stronger imperialistic nations.

He gives no details about when he underwent this journey but the book was published in 1999 and Vietnam opened up its doors to tourism in 1986 and the first tourist-focused hotels came about in the early 1990s, while the US lifting of the embargo, which was mentioned in the book, occured in 1994. So based on this, I surmise that his trip was between 1995 and 1998. Vietnam was in the early stages of recovering from a devastating civil war, then a war with Cambodia and China, and a horrible 10 years of Communistic economic policies that rendered the country one of the poorest in the world. Imagine visiting a friend who had just been beaten to a pulp and then ridiculing this friend because of his inability to jump up and tend to your every whim. This is the author/protagonist. I found his lack of compassion and empathy just as disturbing as his lack of knowledge about his country of origin. I kept hoping that he would have some moment of clarity, and there were indeed glimpses of this in some of his conversations, but ultimately, his attitude that Vietnam and the Vietnamese are inferior in every way dominates the second half of the book.

I have been to Vietnam twice, in 1996 and 2017, as a non-Vietnamese appearing Viet-kieu, like the author. In the almost 20 years between my visits, Vietnam has grown from being one of the most poor countries in the world to one of the fastest growing economies in Asia, its poverty level went down from 70% in the 1990s to 38% or so currently, its GDP went from 3.8% to 8.1%. Where the streets of Saigon were littered with crippled and impoverished people in 1996, now there are skyscrapers and many 5-6 star hotels, Gucci and Louis Vuitton and almost all of the kids are now in school, not begging in the streets. There are 8 Unesco World Heritage sites in Vietnam and in 2017, Vietnam hosted 13 million tourists.

Not bad for an ugly country with “nothing to see” except for a bunch of lazy drunks.

Do I recommend this book? This is a hard one. The first half is so witty and colorful, and there are a few flashes of that in the 2nd half. But the character that came out in the 2nd half of the book made me angry and indignant and all the good writing just fell away to this ugliness. I guess if the reader has already been to Vietnam, and at least has some real-life experience, this book is okay to read. Based on the rave reviews on Goodreads and Amazon, it seems like a lot of people liked this book, so perhaps if you know nothing about the country and don’t really have any interest in going to visit or think of the book as just a fun travel book to read, then I suppose it is okay.

I would not recommend this book to anyone who feels any sort of loyalty or compassion for Vietnam and its history, culture and people.

I’ll give this 3.5 stars as there were multiple narratives going on that confused me at times.

I don't understand why the author made his journey. He didn't seem happy about any part of it. He certainly didn't make me want to visit Vietnam, which is too bad because I enjoyed it when I did visit. I have his other book about his Dad but I'm not sure I want to read it given how negative this book was.

Catfish and Mandala 12122007 by Andrew X. Pham
Story of Vietnamese immigratant that goes back to Vietnam and bicycles to Hanoi. Nice story.