Catfish and Mandala - A Vietnamese Odyssey

Informationen zum Autor Andrew X Pham was born in Vietnam in 1967 and moved to California with his family after the war. Klappentext 'Jack Kerouac meets "Wild Swans".' The Times. A voyage through Vietnam's ghost-ridden landscape, at once a moving memoir, travelogue and compelling search for identity. Vietnamese-born Andrew Pham finally returns to Saigon, not as a success showering money and gifts onto his family, but as an emotional shipwreck, desperate to find out who he really is. When his sister, a post-operative transsexual, committed suicide, Pham sold all 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'. At first meant to facilitate forgetfulness, Pham's travels turn into an unforgettable, eye-opening search for cultural identity which flashes back to his parent's courtship in Vietnam, his father's imprisonment by the Vietcong, and his family's nail-bitingly narrow escape as 'boat people'. Lucid, witty and beautifully written, 'Catfish and Mandala' evokes a Vietnam you can almost smell and taste, laying bare the psyche of a troubled hero whose search for home and identity becomes our own.

Product details

• Authors: Andrew Pham, Andrew X. Pham, Pham Andrew
• Publisher: Flamingo
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 19.02.2001
• EAN: 9780006552239
• ISBN: 978-0-00-655223-9
• No. of pages: 344
• Dimensions: 129 mm x 196 mm x 20 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Biographies, autobiographies; Vietnam, BODY, MIND & SPIRIT / General, Cultural Studies, TRAVEL / Essays & Travelogues, Biography: general, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social, TRAVEL / Asia / Southeast, Travel writing, Mind, Body, Spirit: thought & practice, Later 20th century c 1950 to c 1999, Mind, body, spirit: thought and practice, Biography: philosophy and social sciences, c 1945 to c 2000 (Post-war period)