It must have been love that propelled Andrew X. Pham through the
sometimes hellish odyssey he chronicles in his travelogue Catfish and
Mandala (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 344 pp., $25.00). Pham rode his
bicycle around the Pacific Rim to the country of his birth, Vietnam. His
story unfolds masterfully, with some of a mandala's repeated symbolic
motifs. He weaves a hair-raising tale of travelling the length of
Vietnam with beautifully illuminated memories of an earlier, sometimes
innocent childhood, refugee camps, his strict father, a former
official in the defeated American-backed South Vietnamese regime, and
growing up in California. Throughout the book he is haunted by memories
of
his sister Chi, a female-to-male transsexual who committed suicide after
her operation. Pham encounters his birthplace in a variety of different
guises: as long-lost brother, exiled traitor, backpacking foreign
interloper, and confused lover. His journey is an expertly rendered
voyage
into the past, present, and future, a trip through landscape as well as
memory. In his first book, Pham has captured a Vietnam that is
foul-mouthed and alive, a nation whose heart beats uneasily in sync with
his own.
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