Catfish And Mandala. A Two Wheeled Voyage Through The Landscape And Memory Of Vietnam

Cover Type: Softcover
Book Condition: Fine
Jacket Condition: None Issued
Publisher: Farrear, Straus And Gifroux
Publisher Place: New York
Publisher Year: 1999
Edition: First Edition

Description: 339 pages. Book appears to have hardly been read and is in Fine condition throughout.

Publishers Description: Winner of the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize. A New York Times Notable Book of the YearWinner of the Whiting Writers' AwardA Seattle Post-Intelligencer Best Book of the YearCatfish 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. 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, 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. 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.

ISBN: 9780312267179