Catfish And Mandala: A 2 Wheeled Voyage Through The Landscape And Memory Of Vietnam
Author: Andrew X. Pham
Stock information
General Fields
: $26.00 AUD
: 9780312267179
: picador
: picador
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: 0.318
: 01 September 2000
: 216mm X 152mm X 19mm
: United States
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: books
Special Fields
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: Andrew X. Pham
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: Paperback
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: English
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: 344
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9780312267179
Description
"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. 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.