Make my pilgrimage.” In his first book, Pham details his solo cycling journeys, mixing in stories of his and his family’s life before and after leaving Vietnam. “I have to do something unethnic,” he says. Much to his parents’ displeasure, he set off on bicycle excursions through Mexico, Japan, and, finally, Vietnam. A few years ago, rebelling against family pressures to succeed and a patronizing, if not racist, work environment, Pham quit his job. Raised in California, he worked hard, went to UCLA, and landed a good engineering job. Pham (born Pham Xuan An) fled Vietnam with his family in 1977 at age ten. Now comes a stunning first: a family tale by a Vietnamese-American that centers on an eye-opening trip to his native land. So, too, has the multigenerational Vietnamese-refugee family saga. The veteran-penned “going back” book has become a subgenre of the American Vietnam War canon. A vibrant, picaresque memoir written with narrative flair and a wonderful, eye-opening sense of adventure, Catfish and Mandala is an unforgettable search for cultural identity.A brilliantly written memoir in which a young Vietnamese-American uses a bicycle journey in his homeland as a vehicle to tell his eventful life story. He sold all of his possessions and embarked on a year-long bicycle journey that took him through the Mexican desert, where he was treated as a bueno hermano, a "good brother" around a thousand-mile loop from Narita to Kyoto in Japan and, after five months and 2,357 miles, to Saigon, where he finds "nothing familiar in the bombed-out darkness." In Mexico he's treated kindly as a Vietnamito, though he shouts, "I'm American, Vietnamese American!" In Vietnam, he's taken for Japanese or Korean by his countrymen, except, of course, by his relatives, who doubt that as a Vietnamese he has the stamina to complete his journey ("Only Westerners can do it") and in the United States he's considered anything but American. His father had been a POW of the Vietcong his family came to America as "boat people." His sister committed suicide, prompting Andrew to quit his job. Born in Vietnam and raised in California, he held technical jobs at United Airlines-and always carried a letter of resignation in his briefcase. A Vietnamese Bicycle Days by a stunning new voice in American letters.Īndrew X.
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