It has been a long, long time since I have been so moved by the work of a new American author. "Catfish and Mandala, A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam", by Andrew X Pham, is a book that invites one along on a trek through the minds, hearts, and souls of two nations. As a veteran of the Vietnam War I tagged along willing with Mr. Pham----at first. I soon found myself being pulled deeper into the past, a past that long ago laid waste to my youth and my spirit. Having read this book, I view the world in another light. I view the Vietnamese and American people with an understanding that has escaped me for so many years. To call "Catfish and Mandala" a travelogue is to call Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" and Kerouac's "On the Road" travel books. "Catfish and Mandala" is truly great literature. I only wish it had been written sooner.

This is a new book by a young Vietnamese-American who revisits the homeland he fled in 1977 with his family at the age of 10. He travels by bicycle, and the rigors of his personal discomfort as well as his memories are eye opening as he faces the realities of what it is to be Vietnamese today, both in America and in Vietnam.

The book is totally involving, pulling the reader into the world of Andrew Pham, from the childhood games he played with his sister, to the horrific boat escape where he and his family were inches away from death, to Vietnamese culture in California. The writer is brutally honest, sparing neither his family, America nor the Vietnamese from candid review. His insights are at once startling, fresh and vivid and some of his images will long haunt my imagination.

The people in Vietnam are poor. There is filth everywhere and mosquitoes and bugs and rats. He constantly is overcharged and everyone has their hands out, especially the police. When he looks at his cousins who he played with as a child, he realizes that his life could have been just like theirs if his family hadn't escaped.

The flashbacks t his childhood in Vietnam are interspersed with his flashbacks with life in America and there is much exploration of what can be called his dysfunctional family. Among other things, as there are family secrets that rip them all apart.

The one weakness of the book is that some things are not fully explained. A little gentle editing would have proded the writer to put more information in to some of the segments and leave out the boring details from others.

However, I did love the book. I loved the fact that it took me to places I know little about, both in the geographical as well as the author's own internal landscape. It's a modern update of the Vietnam experience from a very unique point of view. And it focuses on Vietnam as it is today.

Recommended

Between the harrowing postward existence and eventual escape from Vietnam (when he was ten) and the traumas of his family's acculturation to America, Andrew Pham did not NEED to go on dangerous bicycle expeditions to get material! But he did and hung on a unique travelogue he has given readers a rich, multilayered, very moving, and very accomplished a book combining a haunting family history with tales of very rough travel, and reflections on being regarded as a crazy alien in Vietnam and America (and Japan). Pham is obviously very resilient, both physically and emotionally and makes something of great value from painful personal history and difficult travel.

Although the book is unlikely to encourage visitors (especially Vietnamese American ones) to Vietnam, Pham's journey into the multiple traumas of his family's experience yields insights of universal significance. This beautifully written and painfully self-revealing book deservedly won the 1999 Kiriyama Prize. It is hard to imagine a reader who would not learn from the book and I would not want to meet anyone who is not moved by its emotional force!