His father had been a POW of the Vietcong his family came to America as "boat people." Following the suicide of his sister, Pham quit his job, sold all of his possessions, and embarked on a year-long bicycle journey that took him through the Mexican desert, 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 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. Pham was born in Vietnam and raised in California. Catfish and Mandala is the story of an American odyssey-a solo bicycle voyage around the Pacific Rim to Vietnam-made by a young Vietnamese-American man in pursuit of both his adopted homeland and his forsaken fatherland.Īndrew X.
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