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! ;)

I loved this book! Found it in a hotel in Hanoi, it was the perfect book to read as I returned home and reflected on our trip. Pham captures the rawness, beauty, chaos, and striving that characterized my brief visit better than I ever could. His own story is remarkable: escaped Vietnam with his family after the war, boat nearly sank, refugee in America, growing up in a rough neighborhood, family drama and trauma, and of course his journeys peddling through mexico, the Pacific coast of the us, and finally, Vietnam. His writing was beautiful and I felt, deeply, his story of such a necessary journey.

Some descriptions I like:

"I try to explain to her about life in America. And that I don't know her. I try not to let my disappointment show. I come searching for truths, hoping for redeeming grace, a touch of gentility. But, no. The abrasiveness of Saigon has stripped away my protective layers. I am raw and bare and I ask myself, Who are these strangers? These Vietnamese, these wanting-wanting-wanting-wanting people. The bitter bile of finding a world I don't remember colors my disconsolate reconciliation between my Saigon of Old and their muddy-grubby Saigon of Now. Saigon gnaws at me . . . its noise . . . its uncompromising want . . . its constant . . . Mememememememememememememe . . ."

. . .

"Could I tell Calvin I was initiated into the American heaven during my first week Stateside by eight black kids who pulverized me in the restroom, calling me Viet Cong? . . . Although we often pretend to be modest and humble as we preen our successful immigrant stories, we rarely admit even to ourselves the circumstances and the cost of our being here. We elude it all like a petty theft committed ages ago. When convenient, we take it as restitution for what happened to Vietnam."

In the end, Pham realizes just how "home" America really is-- imperfections and all. I've been happy to feel similarly when returning from my travels, as much as I love being away.

"But now, I miss the white, the black, the red, the brown faces of America. I miss their varied shapes, their tumultuous diversity, their idealistic search for racial equality, their bumbling but wonderful pioneering spirit. I miss English words in my ears, miss the way the language rolled off my tongue so naturally. I miss its poetry. Somewhere along the way, my search for roots became my search for home-- a place I know best even though there are those who would have me believe otherwise."

"Forgiveness is a hollow gift when there is no mountain to move as compensation for the wrongs. For our truths change with time. There is noting else. No mitigating circumstances and no power to undo the sins. No was. Only is. Between us, there is but a thin line of intention."

An intimate meditation on family, heritage, poverty, trauma, and privilege, Catfish and Mandala is deeply moving. It as much a journey through grief and identity as it is a tour through Vietnam. Pham's prose is beautifully rich and dreamy, his grasp of language a delight, even when the subject matter is anything but.

The issues he addresses are immense and complicated, both deeply personal and international in scale. For this reason I think some of his conclusions can come across as adjacent to Western exceptionalism. However, I think it would be unfair to dismiss him as such. His reflections display a self-awareness about his Americanized perspective. Above all, it is important to consider this is a memoir of personal turmoil, not intended to reckon with the geopolitical history of a nation. His personal feelings of resentment and seclusion, and his ability to forgive, don't equate a universal statement.

I couldn't finish this. I so wanted to like it and the guy does write beautifully. There are some wonderful moments. There is just too much of it. Too many delicately intricately described scenes of street squalor. Too much existential despair and identity questioning. And this is one very depressed guy which makes it all the more difficult. I'd hoped to find an insiders view and its probably there among the navel gazing but... For my own mental health I had to stop. Maybe I'm just not strong enough.

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.

This book added more fuel to a fire I had to bike across Vietnam. (Someday, when I'm gray.) However Catfish and Mandala is more than cultural travelogue. Mr. Pham so eloquently ponders the complicated experience of never quite finding "home". An immigrant to the United States when he was a child, a trip to his parents' homeland was meant to be a reconnection with his roots. Sadly, a need for belonging felt keenly during his transplanted American childhood is never fully satisfied upon his return to Vietnam.

In my tiny opinion, Mr. Pham is so unfairly blessed with fearless talent and rebellious intellect that he might be too smart for his own good. He's also biked across Mexico and Japan, built his own home by hand, pursued a dual degree in aerospace engineering along with his Masters degree in writing, and published a cookbook. A mind such as his, endlessly examines the complex cultural ironies and shades of meaning in the smallest details. It made for a bittersweet read and his view of the world is utterly unique.

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.

I read this many years ago, around the time it first came out. From what I remember the language is beautiful. It is heartfelt and touching, yet somehow still remaining distant. I feel this is the point. After all, no matter how close humans get to figuring our own lives and humanity out, we never receive full disclosure, do we?

Sometimes I wonder if I went overseas to the places of my ancestors would I feel more at home? Would I find some lost part of my self that I left there? Would I make more sense to myself?

This type of personal searching and eloquent language (some thought provoking lines and beautiful descriptions) are what I remember from reading it long, long ago.

I couldn't decide whether this was a 3 or 4 star book. It's an enjoyable story and easy read about finding your own path in life. On the surface, it's a about a family displaced from their native land by the Vietnam war, Communist retribution and oppression, escape to the promise of America and the identity crisis of being the newest immigrant in a land of immigrants. Deeper down, the author explores the challenges of belonging, dysfunctional family dynamics, prejudices, and stereotypes. He is every kid whose parents expect him to become a doctor, lawyer, or engineer but want to be something truer to themselves. He's also every new immigrant who has arrived in the melting pot of the U.S. to find it is less the dream they had thought but also better than they had imagined. All of this takes place mostly in Vietnam where the descriptions of corruption, inflated prices for foreigners and loud-drunken-chain-smoking Vietnamese is a lamentable and common experience from my time in Vietnam and many developing countries where opportunity exceeds economic opportunities. Andrew Pham's similes are mostly beautiful and original but he does take so many grammatical liberties his writing feels like a Svengali usurping English for his own benefit. The stew of grammatical identity crisis sometimes grows tiresome with verbs becoming nouns, nouns becoming verbs, and too many invented words. Ultimately though, Catfish and Mandala is entertaining, entertainingly written, and a coming home story that leads to a greater understanding of how we fit into an increasingly globalized and confusing world.

Reading in preparation for my travels to Vietnam, and was blown away! Not only does it give a great vantage point for modern day Vietnam, it is a beautiful story about a personal pilgrimage. The author's descriptives about his travels on his bike, through the countryside is not to be missed! Serious at times, emotionally charged, but with just the right amount of humor! Loved it and can't wait to see Vietnam with my own eyes!

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 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.