Summer Reading Selection 2010

May 17, 2010 |

This summer, new students at Goucher College will explore ideas surrounding home, family, and cultural identity with Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam by Andrew X. Pham. The book is Goucher’s 2010 summer reading assignment for incoming first-year and transfer students.

Selected based on suggestions from faculty and staff, Catfish and Mandala will spark discussion among new students, staff, and professors during Goucher’s fall orientation session. This summer, incoming students will receive a copy of the book and study guide questions to foster group conversation during a daylong discussion of the book and its themes that will be held on Monday, August 30.

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.

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 narrating his search for his roots, first-time author Pham alternates between two story lines. The first, which begins in war-torn Vietnam, chronicles the author’s hair-raising escape to the United States as an adolescent in 1977 and his family's subsequent and somewhat troubled life in California.

The second recounts his return to Vietnam almost two decades later as an Americanized but culturally confused young man. Uncertain if his trip is a “pilgrimage or a farce,” Pham pedals his bike the length of his native country, all the while confronting the guilt he feels as a successful Viet-kieu (Vietnamese expatriate) and as a survivor of his older sister Chai, whose isolation in America and eventual suicide he did little to prevent.

Flipping between the two story lines, Pham elucidates his main dilemma: He’s an outsider in both America and Vietnam. 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.

Catfish and Mandala is a vibrant memoir written with narrative flair and an eye-opening sense of adventure.

Pham was born in Vietnam in 1967 and moved to California with his family after the war. Catfish and Mandala was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a Seattle Post-Intelligencer Best Book of the Year, and the winner of the 1999 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize.