E-Book Overview
Catfish and Mandalais 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 Mandalais an unforgettable search for cultural identity.
E-Book Content
1 Table of Contents Title Page Epigraph Prologue 1 - Exile – Pilgrim 2 - Catfish-Dawn 3 - Fallen – Leaves 4 - Clan-Rift 5 - Fallen – Leaves 6 - Headwind – Tailspin 7 - Japan-Dream 8 - Last – Gamble 9 - Mecca-Memory 10 - Strange-Hearth 11 - Fallen-Leaves 12 - Divergent-Rhythm 13 - Dying-Angels 14 - Alley-World 15 - Beggar-Grace 16 - Fallen-Leaves 17 - Hope-Adrift 18 - Gift-Marriage 19 - Jade-Giant 20 - Fullcircle-Halflives 21 - Baptizing-Buddha 22 - Foreign-Asians 23 - Milk-Mother 24 - Chi-Daughter 25 - Jungle-Station 26 - Night-Wind 27 - Fallen-Leaves 28 - Hanoi-Visage 29 - Patriot-Repose 30 - Silence-Years 31 - Blushing-Winter 32 - Vietnamese-Karma 2 33 - III-Wind 34 - War-Survivors 35 - Harlot-Heroine 36 - Fallen-Leaves 37 - Gaping-Fish 38 - Chi-Minh 39 - Fever-Ride 40 - Fallen-Leaves 41 - Coca-Cola 42 - Brother-Brother 43 - Father-Son 44 - Viet-Kieu 45 - Chi – Me 46 - Blue-Peace Epilogue Praise for Andrew X. Pham’s - Catfish and Mandala Acknowledgments Copyright Page 3 To the memory of my sister Chi, my brother Minh, one and the same … if only I had learned to see without looking. 4 What is the proper number of kisses For a man to leave this world? The average depth of melancholy? The approximate wetness of hope? —Max Garland 5 Prologue Grandmother told me it had been written in my sister Chi’s fortune penned by a Vietnamese Buddhist monk on the day of her birth, in the year of the Tiger: suicide at thirty-two. We were sitting on Grandmother’s bed in the very room where Chi had hung herself. The rope was gone, but there was incense ash in the carpet, its fragrant prayers locked in. Grandmother closed her hands over mine and asked me quietly if I wanted to read my birth fortune. It was from the hand of the same monk, written twenty-seven years earlier. She pressed into my chest a yellowed fortune-scroll, crushed and tattered, its secret bound by an umbilical cord of red twine. I looked at this relic from a distant world, dreading its power. I said no, quit my job, and bicycled into the Mexican desert. 6 1 Exile – Pilgrim The first thing I notice about Tyle is that he can squat on his haunches Third World—style, indefinitely. He is a giant, an anachronistic Thor in rasta drag, bare-chested, barefoot, desert-baked golden. A month of wandering the Mexican wasteland has tumbled me into his lone camp warded by cacti. Rising from the makeshift pavilion staked against the camper top of his pickup, he moves to meet me with an idle power I envy. I see the wind has carved leathery lines into his legend-hewn face of fjords and right angles. In a dry, earthen voice, he asks me, “Loo