Catfish and Mandala

<p><b>Winner of the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize</b><br><b>A <i>New York Times</i> Notable Book of the Year</b><br><b>Winner of the Whiting Writers' Award</b><br><b>A <i>Seattle Post-Intelligencer</i> Best Book of the Year</b><br><br><i>Catfish and Mandala</i> 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. Intertwined with an often humorous travelogue spanning a year of discovery is a memoir of war, escape, and ultimately, family secrets. <br><br>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; on a thousand-mile loop from Narita in South Korea 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. <br><br>A vibrant, picaresque memoir written with narrative flair and an eye-opening sense of adventure, <i>Catfish and Mandala</i> is an unforgettable search for cultural identity.</p>