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Amazon.co.uk Review
"America is full of young old Vietnamese, uncentred, uncertain of their identity. The old generation calls them mat goch--lost roots", writes Andrew Pham. He should know: he was one of them, describing himself as "the rootless one." One day--unable to hold down the engineering career his father encouraged--he left California on a cheap bicycle to search for his roots. Catfish and Mandala is his memoir of these travels.
Catfish And Mandala is the Vietnam story from a different perspective. When Nam vets apologise to Pham for what they did to "his people" he feels fraudulent, "Who are my people?". For his family, it was the Americans pulling out which caused the most hardship. His father, an army officer, was imprisoned by the Vietcong, narrowly escaping death. The family made a terrifying escape by boat to become refugees when Pham was just 10 ("America fished us out of the ocean like drowning cockroaches and fed us and clothed us ... ")
Catfish And Mandala is as much an autobiography as a travel book, jumping back and forth between Pham's adult cycle adventure through his lost homeland and his childhood memories. As Pham freely admits, he feels American, yet to Americans he is an Asian but in Vietnam he is an outsider too ( a privileged "Viet-kieu"--foreign Vietnamese). He remains deeply confused and has overwhelming guilty about almost everything---those left behind, his dead sister, the Americans who died, the Vietnamese who died and the poverty of those he meets in Vietnam now. It's painful but moving to read. You'll find yourself caught up in his agony. His writing is so beautiful and poetic that it draws you into his history until you feel he is an old friend.
This wonderful book both modernises the classic beatnik notion of a search for identity and brings alive the sensory rollercoaster of Vietnam--from the fish sauce town of Phan Tiet to Saigon's helter-skelter of cycles. --Sarah Champion --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
As a Viet-kieu - a foreign Vietnamese - Pham had a lasting memory of the war-torn country he left as a young boy. Arriving in the States in 1977, he is provoked into exclaiming to his fifth-grade teacher: 'America left Vietnam. America not finish war. One more day bombing, Viet Cong die. One more day! No. America go home! America chicken!' Two decades later, a quieter, cooler and more reflective Pham sets out to rediscover his homeland, which has been transformed by Third World capitalism. Pham cycles around the Pacific Rim on a year's trek, and meets family members and uncovers family secrets: the claims of a fish-sauce baron, the great escape led by his father, and the confusion of his transsexual sister, Chi. He has a good eye for the dramatic, and full of anecdotes and poignant remembrances, his story draws a vibrant contrast between the flavours of Vietnam and those of America, his adopted homeland. (Kirkus UK)
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