A voyager of mind, history, and heart. Andrew Pham is a very good writer. His ability to describe a situation, a scene, and emotion, is exquisite. Everywhere he went on this journey I could see and smell the place. This is not a travelogue, this is a journey that Andrew must take to revisit the Vietnam that lingers in his childhood mind. He arrives in Vietnam and often isn't recognized as a Viet-kieu (a person who is Vietnamese but left Vietnam during the war). He rides his bicycle having encounters that range from funny, to heart-warming, to scary. He also travels the landscape of his family's past and little by little, not in chronological order, we are given the difficult history of his family, their escape from Vietnam, their life in the United States, and all their trials and successes. Their life was not easy. Andrew is a person who thinks a lot about what he sees, seeks, feels. It is a great experience to go on this bicycle ride with him.

Vietnam seems to be calling me recently. The graphic novel of "Artemis Fowl" startles me with its opening depiction of the central market in Saigon. A student researches Nixon's presidency and the fall of Saigon. I read "Tree of Smoke," and go to the internet to pull up maps, pictures and stories of Saigon, its surroundings, and the larger Mekong delta region, to look at the places I saw so many years ago (1969-1970). I am drawn into this work, on a summer reading list for another student. Pham seamlessly interweaves who he is today (bravely exposing his flaws), his homeland as he tours it, mostly by bike, and his family's troubled history and extraordinary escape as boat people, with insight and humor. While recommending the book to another Vietnamese expatriate, the father of one my students, he tells me about his own amazing journey to America, just as harrowing and dramatic as that of Pham's. And he lends me a DVD of the excellent and moving movie about the boat people, "Journey from the Fall." Read the book; see the movie.

Very poignant story. Pham is a very poetic writer. It has such sad moments and sad realizations of Viet Nam today and also gives great insight into the people who lived/ live there now.

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.

Any book that takes me that long to read is not that good. When I love a book I am all in and this never was like that. It was interesting and had some good imagery but the plot/layout of the story was too jumpy and confusing.

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.

Andrew Pham paints a vivid picture of Vietnam: the food ("We wolf down our plebeian meal of catfish, rice, pickled firecracker eggplant with shrimp paste, and steamed string beans from his garden"), some not so appetizing native dishes ("their chopsticks hovering above plates of boiled gizzards curly like cashews, pig hearts sliced like truffles, intestines chopped up like rigatoni"); the people ("You can tell a Vietnamese by the way he wears his sandals. Is the stem firmly held between the toes? Or does the ball of the heel drag beyond the sandal? Do the sandals flap like loose tongues when he walks?"); the poverty ("They walk to the highway and ride a three-wheeled Tuk-tuk to Hanoi four days a week. Rice-girl makes her own rice dumplings and Papaya-girl picks her fruit from the family orchard. Neither has enough merchandise for a stall at the market or makes enough to pay for a permit to sell on the street, so they go door-to-door").

Pham has a talent for visual description and he brings the landscape of Vietnam into sharp focus. This is the strength of the book. We are with him as he bicycles through Vietnam as a Viet-kieu (how natives condescendingly refer to foreign Vietnamese) and we come to know the people (cruel to kind) he encounters.

The flashbacks to his family, particularly scenes with his overbearing father, his sister (Chi), and a girlfriend from his past are well-rendered.

Though this memoir has many strengths, the narrative is distant at times, as if the narrator is afraid to let the reader in too close. Despite the fact the story is told in first-person, I didn't feel fully engaged. There were times when I wasn't sure what was at stake in this journey, and I wanted to know more about the meaning of this trip.

Definitely enjoyed this book as a great peak into the many challenges faced by Vietnamese-Americans, not only at home, but abroad as well. Pham does a great job of relaying the inner-turmoil that arises, not so much from his own identity issues but those that others try to pin on him. While he clearly identifies himself as an American, it seems that others have extreme difficulty in doing so and this does nothing but create problems, for everyone!

Finishing up a month long Vietnam tour, taking the time to absorb Catfish and Mandala was well worth it. Thanks for sharing Mike.

While I don't have a real 'homeland' to return to, Pham's search for, meaning, if you will, in Vietnam is similar to the mission I find myself carrying out as I land back in the States after 16 months abroad. Life is familiar, yes, but also very new and strange at the same time. Sure, people are a bit more welcoming to me than the Vietnamese were to Pham but I still don't quite feel at home when walking through the grocery store or driving down a four lane highway, obeying traffic lights. Home to me feels like the one Pham went looking for off the beaten path of a war torn country, eating on kindergarten furniture and dodging kamakazie motorcyclists. And, oh, how I miss that 'home' right now as Michigan settles into the frozen winter!

Certainly a good read for anyone interested in Vietnam, life as a Vietnamese-American, or simply the issues that one is faced with when trying to fully understand their ethnic heritage. Do enjoy!

Fantastic memoir. There is much to be learned from this story about the legacy of the Viet Nam war as it has affected one family who eventually emigrated to America.

Wow, this was a really incredible book. Pham has a tight narrative that jumps timelines between the present, his childhood in Vietnam, and then his early life in the United States. While his main theme is, in my opinion, about the disconnect between the young immigrant and his homeland, he also dealt well with family relationships, particularly Vietnamese, immigrants and their new home, the spectacle of poverty, and the relations between the Vietnamese and Americans. There were many different times in the book where he'd write a passage so tight but so profound I just had to pause and reflect on it. There was so much that just exceeded the boundaries of the book and became universal.

Of all the themes, and keeping in mind the universality, I think his most profound was, what I will call, the roll of the dice. There were numerous times where Pham would meet someone his own age in Vietnam, usually poor, and when talking to them would be struck that the roles could easily have been reversed, and he was living in poverty talking to a returned immigrant. Recently I've been thinking about "America for Americans" and this entitlement mentality when, for the vast majority of Americans, they are Americans because of absolutely nothing they did. They happened to be born here and thus feel entitled to all it offers, when they could just as easily have been born to a different couple someplace else. This entitlement that we deserve the fruits of America's labor because of a fluke of birth is really not something I think holds much water. And so Pham recognizing that it was really through the efforts of his parents that he arrived in America really rang true for me.

Overall an excellent work, very easy to read, very enjoyable, and so highly recommended.

Only 78 pages into the book, but I already know this is going to be one of my favorite books of all time.

A fantastic read of a first generation Vietnamese American discovering his roots back to Vietnam. Pham writes his protagonist from a first person point of view which really helps to encapsulate the inner turmoil he goes through on his journey of self-discovery.

On a whole, it half reads like a self-reflective journal of the main character, and the other half, of his bike ride through various countries. The pace is well maintained, but I would have liked to see a faster pace in some sections - it reads pretty mellow throughout. Although I guess this could just be the personality of the protagonist.

Otherwise, it was both educational (about the history of Vietnam) and gave insights into the Vietnamese society post-war. Additionally, Pham depicts the stark difference between those who immigrated versus those who stayed.