Award-Winning Memoirist Andrew X. Pham to Speak at Goucher

August 30, 2010 |

Andrew X. Pham, an award-winning memoirist, will present a public lecture and book signing on Monday, August 30, at 7:30 p.m. in the Hyman Forum of Goucher College's Athenaeum.

His Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam was assigned as Goucher's 2010 summer reading for incoming first-year and transfer students.

For more information about the event, please call 410-337-6333.

Pham was born in Vietnam in 1967. Before the Vietnam War, his father worked double shifts as a school teacher, and his mother did neighbors' laundry to earn extra money to support their struggling household. During the war, Pham's father earned money by working for the Nationalist army in the propaganda department until he was captured by the Vietcong and forced to stay in a prison re-ducation camp for several months. When he was released, Pham's father began to plan the family's escape to America. They eventually moved to California in 1977 as Vietnamese "boat people."

Pham received a bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1990 and worked as an aircraft engineer before becoming a freelance technical writer and journalist. From 1994 to 2000, he was a book reviewer, food writer, and restaurant critic for Metro Newspapers in Silicon Valley, California. He eventually gave up traditional employment to bicycle through the western United States, part of Japan, and most of Vietnam in a whirlwind bike adventure tour.

Pham's first book was Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam (1999), the story of his solo bicycle voyage around the Pacific Rim to Vietnam to discover both his adopted homeland and his forsaken fatherland. An immigrant memoir, as well as an adventure travelogue, the book won the Kiriyama Prize, the Whiting Writers' Award, Quality Paperback Book Prize, and the Oregon Literature Prize. It was also named a Guardian Prize Shortlist finalist, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a Barnes & Noble Discovery Book, and a Border's Original Voices Selection. 

In his second book, The Eaves of Heaven: A Life in Three Wars (2008), Pham takes on his father's voice to write the elder Pham's memoir. Thong Van Pham lived through the most tumultuous period of Vietnam's history, from 1935 to 1975, witnessing and surviving World War II, the Indochina War, and the Vietnam War. Narrated with his father's perspective and sentiments, the memoir reveals the country and historical events and portrays the trials and tribulations of an ordinary Vietnamese person. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the book was also selected as one of the Los Angeles Times Favorite Books of 2008, the Washington Post Top Ten Books of the Year, the Oregonian Top Ten National Books of the Year, and Bookmarks Magazine Best Books of 2008.

Last Night I Dreamed of Peace (2008) is Pham's translation of Dr. Thuy Tram's diary written during the Vietnam War. A bestseller in Vietnam, the book is the diary of an idealistic battlefield surgeon for the North Vietnamese Army who worked in primitive and dangerous conditions at the frontline.

Pham is now working on Twilight Territory, the third book in his trilogy on Vietnam.