Vietnamese-American Andrew Pham writes about his search for cultural identity in a book that is both a memoir and a biking travelogue. He remembers the fall of Saigon, his father's imprisonment in a communist reeducation camp, and the family's escape from Vietnam in a leaky fishing boat when he was a ten-year-old. After a stay in an Indonesian refugee camp, the family came to the United States and eventually settled in California. Although he recognizes the sacrifices made by his parents, he also recounts how the Pham children were subjected to his father's temper and beatings. The suicide of his transgendered sibling was the impetus for Andrew Pham's journey of self-discovery.

The author quit his job as an aerospace engineer, and traveled by bike up the Pacific Coast, through Japan, and up the length of Vietnam. He visited important places in his family's history and found them completely changed. While he had some enjoyable times, he also saw terrible poverty and extreme corruption. Dysentery was an unwelcome companion over part of the trip. He weaves together two story lines--about his family and about his bike trip.

He was called "Viet-kieu" (foreign Vietnamese) in Vietnam, a slur by people who envy his success. In America, he also feels like an outsider. He experiences survivor guilt, explores his roots, and feels the pull of two cultures. He still seems to be searching at the book's end--and maybe it will be a lifelong search--for who he is. Laced with adventure and humor, this was an engaging story that held my interest.

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.

Eine Reise zu den Wurzeln und die Suche einer Heimat.

Andrew Pham, ein vietnamesisch-stämmiger US-Amerikaner blickt auf eine schwierige Familiengeschichte zurück. Seine Eltern flohen mit ihren Kindern in einem winzigen Boot aus Vietnam, nachdem Andrews Vater eingesperrt wurde, weil er im Krieg mit den Amerikanern kooperierte. Die Familie versuchte danach in den USA Fuß zu fassen, was ihnen auch mit vielen Entbehrungen und durch den Fleiß und Erfindungsreichtum der Eltern gelang - und doch gab es da immer eine große Differenz zwischen Herkunft und neuem Leben, an der die Familie ein Stück zerbrach. Zu viel ist passiert, das Andrew erst einmal hinter sich lassen will. Er schwingt sich aufs Fahrrad und radelt los, zuerst Amerikas Westküste hoch, dann durch Japan und schließlich quer durch sein Herkunftsland. Dort versucht er seine Wurzeln zu finden, muss aber feststellen, dass er sowohl in den USA als auch in Vietnam nicht so richtig dazugehört.

Der Autor beschönigt das einfache Leben der Vietnamesen nicht, nein, er beschreibt deren schmerzhafte Armut schonungslos und ehrlich, genauso ehrlich wie seine Gefühle den Vietnamesen gegenüber. Zu viele schlechte Erfahrungen muss er machen, zu viel Elend sieht er, aber auch nette Menschen kreuzen seinen Weg und schöne Landstriche durchfährt er. Trotzdem ist der Grundton des Buches eher negativ, enttäuscht - und am Ende zauberte er mir zu nichtssagend und schnell einen Sinn seiner Reise her. Trotzdem gefiel mir die Ehrlichkeit eines Abenteurers zwischen zwei Welten.

Prägendes Zitat:
"Eigentlich würde ich von ihm [...] gern hören, dass er dieses Land wirklich liebt und dass es auf eine Art zauberhaft und wunderschön ist, die ich noch herausfinden muss." (S. 395)

What a dreary, narcissistic book this is! Here he is, in one of those most interesting travel destinations on earth, a place that challenges and inverts the ideas of any Westerner whose history meshes with Vietnam because of the Vietnam war, and all he does is moan about himself. Coming from the wealthiest country on the planet, he has the temerity to scorn their energetic efforts to improve their pitiful standard of living: he thinks they're too interested in making money. He hasn't made the slightest effort to learn about the history and culture of the country before arriving, and he doesn't learn a thing while he's there.
Don't bother.

Catfish and Mandala is story about a Vietnamese-American who arrived in the US following the fall of Saigon in the 1970's, who returns to Vietnam to cycle from Saigon to Hanoi, visiting places of his childhood in an effort to learn more about his roots and himself.

Andrew Pham does a very successful job of juxtaposing the history of his childhood and flight from Vietnam/eventual settlement and youth in the US with the stories of his adventures and experiences while cycling in Asia and the Pacific Northwest of the US. While the overall story itself may not captivate the imagination like Riaan Manser's Around Africa on my Bicycle, Pham's story is not approached in the same way. His is an exploration of self, an inner-journey to understand more about his family and their experience. Also, Pham's writing ability is of an elite class; he is incredibly talented and the reader quickly becomes thankful that he traded his life as an engineer for that of a writer. He constantly takes us into to the dingy huts and one-room cafes of the Vietnamese villages he visits, and is able to elucidate the feelings of growing up without a proper mother-country to relate to.

This book is highly recommended for the reader of travel literature and personal adventure. The bicycle part of it seems to be more of a vehicle, no pun intended. The real journey we are taken on here is that of an innocent cast away exploring the shores from which he originally escaped while seeking insight and closure for his soul.

When people ask me what living in Vietnam was like, I point them to this book. Andrew X. Pham is honest about the complex realities of Vietnam in a way I haven't seen in other English-language books. Americans tend to have a myopic, self-centered view of Vietnam that keeps them looking backward to the American-Vietnam war, when most Vietnamese are looking to the future. A good prescription for having one's guilt-tinged eyes cleared to see Vietnamese individuals for what they are: individuals.

Ultimately a sad book, the story captures the author's bicycle ride from California through Vietnam, the nation of his birth from which he and his family fled after the American War.

Pham is seeking his identity. Is he Vietnamese? Is he American?

As he wander through Vietnam, he experiences the country's people, the poverty, the beauty, but also the discrimination against Viet Kieu--Vietnamese who live outside the country.

Where does Pham fit? Ultimately, he decides it is America, his adopted country, where his fate lies.

The story alternates between scenes of Pham's complicated family life both in Vietnam and America and chapters reflecting on his travels in his native land.

Although I enjoyed the ride, the author conveys a sense of melancholy. You can sense that his search for the answers to questions that have long haunted him may not have provided a satisfactory response.

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.

An and his family escaped Vietnam in the 1970s aboard a barely sea-worthy fishing vessel. His father, a supporter of the defeated South, had spent time in a communist prison (“re-education”) camp after the war. The family eventually settled in California and grappled with their new status as Vietnamese-Americans, the all-too-obvious evidence of America’s great defeat. Many years later, after the death of a family member, and with his family apparently dysfunctional in, arguably, an appropriately American way, An (“Andrew” in America) sets outs out on a bicycle tour to and through Vietnam. Almost broke, he is unlike the the other returning Vietnamese - “viet-kieu” - conquering heroes who are replete, overborne by gifts, a sign of their victory, their wealth, their status as Vietnamese Americans, Capitalists, ultimate;y victorious. An carries none. He was an engineer but he quit his job to cycle penniless. His distant relatives in Ho Chi Minh City, presumably disappointed but not showing it, receive no bounty. Although his relatives beg him not to, fearing traffic accidents, he completes his oddysey anyway, finding an unofficial berth in a freight train to Hanoi, then cycling back to his relatives in Ho Chi Minh City. An is usually recognised as a foreigner - often mistaken for being Korean or Japanese, but when it is known that he is viet-keiu this often brings resentment - “you think you’re better than us?”. An, although able to communicate perfectly, is therefore a tourist, a foreigner in a land that should be his, but is no longer. In both the US and in Vietnam he is considered an outsider. Despite all surviving the war, seemingly all of An’s family are casualties of this catastrophic war, even 25 years after its culmination. Considering the potential sensitivity of some of the family material discussed - and this is non-fiction, though could easily be read as fiction, this is a brave as well an insightful work.

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.

I loved the writing in this memoir. Andrew Pham has a beautiful and distinctive way of creating a scene that's easily pictured by the reader. His word choices are unique and precise in a way that does more that paint a picture...his words evoke a mood. I enjoyed the story, both as a journey of personal discovery and introspection as well as an engaging description of Pham's experiences traveling by bike through several countries, primarily focused on his year in Vietnam. My only criticism is that there were points in the book where the in-depth descriptions slowed the action down so much that I lost the thread of the story. I felt the same about some of the backstories that were woven throughout the novel.

This is definitely a book that you will enjoy best if you are reading with your full attention. I read this as a model text for my "Writing your Memoir" class and I found it to be a useful tool to inform my own writing.

A few notable lines:

My bike topples like a wildebeest felled by one well-aimed bullet.

The sun sets in apocalyptic colors as though the air itself is burning, turning the smog gold, the clouds molten, dangerous.

Their liver-spotted hide, the texture of week-old tofu-skin, did not sweat but drooped, flaccid on their chests and bellies, stretched taut over the ridges of their spines.

They perfumed the air with opium sweetness, making it wet and soft, filling it with the watery gurgle of two old men drowning.

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.