Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam

Pham, Andrew, X.; Andrew X. Pham

ISBN 10: 0312267177 / ISBN 13: 9780312267179

Edité par Picador/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1999

A propos de cet article

344 pp. Solidly bound copy with moderate external wear, crisp pages and clean text. Lightly creased cover corners. Synopsis: In narrating his search for his roots, Vietnamese-American and first-time a uthor Pham alternates between two story lines. The first, which begins in w ar-torn Vietnam, chronicles the author's hair-raising escape to the U.S. as an adolescent in 1977 and his family's subsequent and somewhat troubled li fe in California. The second recounts his return to Vietnam almost two deca des later as an Americanized but culturally confused young man. Uncertain i f his trip is a "pilgrimage or a farce," Pham pedals his bike the length of his native country, all the while confronting the guilt he feels as a succ essful Viet-kieu (Vietnamese expatriate) and as a survivor of his older sis ter Chai, whose isolation in America and eventual suicide he did little to prevent. Flipping between the two story lines, Pham elucidates his main dil emma: he's an outsider in both America and VietnamAin the former for being Vietnamese, and the latter for being Viet-kieu. Aside from a weakness for h yphenated compounds like "people- thick" and "passion-rich," Pham's prose is fluid and fast, navigating deftly through time and space. Wonderful passag es describe the magical qualities of catfish stew, the gruesome preparation of "gaping fish" (a fish is seared briefly in oil with its head sticking o ut, but is supposedly still alive when served), the furious flow of traffic in Ho Chi Minh City and his exasperating confrontations with gangsters, dr unken soldiers and corrupt bureaucrats. In writing a sensitive, revealing b ook about cultural identity, Pham also succeeds in creating an exciting adv enture story.

N° de réf. du vendeur 1FislCb0015

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam
• Éditeur: Picador/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York
• Date de parution: 1999
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 0312267177
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9780312267179
• Reliure: Trade Paperback
• Illustrateur: David Tran (Cover Design)
• Édition: Copyright © 1999
• État de l'article: Very Good
• Catalogues du vendeur:
  • Memoirs, Literary Studies
  • Asian & Far Eastern History, Culture & Studies
  • Travel & Tourism, Adventure, Sight Seeing, etc.

A propos de ce titre

Synopsis

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. Intertwined with an often humorous travelogue spanning a year of discovery is a memoir of war, escape, and ultimately, family secrets.

Andrew X. Pham was born in Vietnam and raised in California. 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; on a thousand-mile loop from Narita in South Korea 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.

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.

À propos de l?auteur

Andrew X. Pham was born in Vietnam in 1967 and moved to California with his family after the war. He lives in San Jose, California. Catfish and Mandala is his first book.