Winner of the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize A New York Times Notable Book of the Year Winner of the Whiting Writers\' Award A Seattle Post-Intelligencer Best Book of the Year 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.
A vibrant, picaresque memoir written with narrative flair and an eye-opening sense of adventure, Catfish and Mandala is an unforgettable search for cultural identity..
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.
Andrew X.
Winner of the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize A New York Times Notable Book of the Year Winner of the Whiting Writers\' Award A Seattle Post-Intelligencer Best Book of the Year 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
