catfish

Author Andrew Pham, has lived in the United States since escaping from Vietnam as a child in the 1970s. In the US he experiences the isolation of being a refugee from a country with which the US has such a complicated and painful relationship. Returning to Vietnam he is isolated once more, labelled a Viet-Kieu, a foreign Vietnamese. This is a very honest exploration of what it means to return to a country of your roots but where you no longer fit in. Pham struggles to reconcile his own perceptions of present day Vietnam, his guilt at what he has and doesn't have, and where his own family fits both in Vietnam and in the US. While the book covers the beginning to end of his cycling journey, there are no simple solutions presented. This is an excellent read.

In narrating his search for his roots, Vietnamese-American and 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 U.S. 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 VietnamAin the former for being Vietnamese, and the latter for being Viet-kieu. Aside from a weakness for hyphenated compounds like "people-thick" and "passion-rich," Pham's prose is fluid and fast, navigating deftly through time and space. Wonderful passages describe the magical qualities of catfish stew, the gruesome preparation of "gaping fish" (a fish is seared briefly in oil with its head sticking out, but is supposedly still alive when served), the furious flow of traffic in Ho Chi Minh City and his exasperating confrontations with gangsters, drunken soldiers and corrupt bureaucrats. In writing a sensitive, revealing book about cultural identity, Pham also succeeds in creating an exciting adventure story. (Oct.)