Andrew x pham biography of williams
Going Full Cycle -- Andrew X. Pham Pedals Along A Journey Of Discovery
------------------------------- BOOK REVIEW
"Catfish and Mandala" Andrew X. Pham will read from "Catfish and Mandala" at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Elliott Bay Book Co., 101 S. Main St. in Seattle. Information: 206-624-6600. -------------------------------
Revelatory road trips long have been a mainstay of Amencan literature: Thoreau, Theroux, Kerouac, Steinbeck, Mark Twain and William Least Heat-Moon - the roster of those who have turned to their travels for inspiration includes some of America's most noted scribes. Now add Andrew X. Pham to the list. His new book, "Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam," (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25) records a remarkable odyssey across landscape and into memory.
The eldest son of a husband and wife who found themselves working as an anti-Communist propagandist and a brothel madame during the Vietnam War, Pham and his family fled that country in 1977, and came to America to begin life anew. Two decades and a lot of water under the bridge later, Pham had achieved the American Dream - a degree from UCLA and an engineering job in California. But he shucked it all after his trans-sexual sister turned brother, Chi/Minh, committed suicide.
Wracked with guilt at being too wrapped up in his own life to notice his sibling's spiral into fatal desperation, Pham realizes it is time for some serious soul-searching. Would Chi's life have been happier had she stayed behind in Vietnam as she'd wanted to when the family made plans to flee? How would the lives of Pham and the rest of his family have turned out, had they stayed?
In a quest for answers and identity Pham decides he must go back to his roots. His conveyance of choice is a bicycle. After a trial run through the Mexican desert (during which he confesses to pushing the bike almost as much as he rides it), and a trek up the West Coast from the Bay Area to Seattl
Eaves of Heaven: A Life in Three Wars
Told in the father’s voice, it has the feel of an autobiography, and it straddles a tumultuous and fascinating period of Vietnam’s modern history, from French colonialism through Japanese occupation and then the American War; from the end of “feudalism” till the birth of Vietnam’s modern era.
Structurally, the multiple award-winning, 2009-published book switches between Thong’s early childhood during the French colonial period when he lives on his wealthy family’s country estate and then Hanoi, and his young adulthood, after he has fled to Saigon with his family as war with the north looms and he’s drafted into the army. We found this a little discombobulating, given the history of Vietnam is already thick with confusing alliances, and we felt that there was no good reason for it. We would have preferred a linear treatment as it was all so interesting, so we would have been compelled to continue reading without the interwoven teaser of the future.
That aside, Eaves of Heaven is an engrossing tale that poetically traverses multiple themes with ease: the futility of war; the intricacies of relationships between both family and friends; loyalty and trust; and the importance of place in forming identity.
Westerners often tend to view Vietnamese history purely through the prism of the American War there, but that war was simply one deadly upheaval that followed many others, including the brutal French colonial era, which saw Thong captured, chained and forced to act as a translator, and the even more brutal Japanese occupation, which led to a Great Famine that killed some one million Vietnamese. Thong lived through this all. At the end of the book he considers leaving Vietnam as a refugee by sea, and we are not privy to finding out what happens next. But an earlier book by the author, the also award-winning Catfish and Mandala (as yet we haven’t reviewed, but you can find it here), is about his own emigration to the United The story, with some of a mandala's repeated symbolic motifs, works on several levels at once. It is an exploration into the meaning of home, a descriptive travelogue, and an intimate look at the Vietnamese immigrant experience. There are beautifully illuminated flashbacks to the experience of fleeing Vietnam and to an earlier, more innocent childhood. While Pham's stern father, a survivor of Vietcong death camps, regrets that Pham has not been a respectful Vietnamese son, he also reveals that he wishes he himself had been more "American" for his kids, that he had "taken [them] camping." Catfish and Mandala is a book of double-edged truths, and it would make a fascinating study even in less able hands. In those of the adventurous, unsentimental Pham, it is an irresistible story. --Maria Dolan "Thoreau, Theroux, Kerouac, Steinbeck, Mark Twain and William Least Heat-Moon--the roster of those who have turned to their travels for inspiration includes some of America's most noted scribes. Now add Andrew X. Pham to the list . . . Catfish and How much harder it is to be a visionary close to home! Familiarity can render places not more knowable but less. Every so often, however, a gifted writer manages to produce a travel book that, while dealing with a place or culture he knows well, still has all the sharpness and strangeness of a dispatch from the dark side of the moon. Such a book is Andrew X. Pham's remarkable CATFISH AND MANDALA: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25). Most of the Americans who flock to Southeast Asia these days are outsiders drawn by its exoticism. For Pham, it was a return trip. As a child, he had fled Vietnam with his family and settled in California. As a young adult, he found himself still facing occasional hurled slurs and beer cans as well as, perhaps worse, a gnawing unease with his fellow Vietnamese-Americans, a feeling he describes with brutal honesty: ''I hate . . . the quick gestures of humor, bobbing of heads, forever congenial, eager to please. Yet I know I am as vulnerable as they before the big-boned, fair-skinned white Americans. The cream-colored giants who make them and me look tribal, diminutive, dark, wanting.'&ap
nyone who has traveled to one of the remoter parts of the world knows the feeling that comes over you when you realize, suddenly and viscerally, how far you are from home. The sensation is both terrifying and exhilarating, as if the distance across oceans and continents were opening up directly under your feet. It's like taking a hit of some mind-expanding drug: in the streets of a foreign city, the contours of things acquire a clarity that's often unrealizable in your native land. From Marco Polo to Graham Greene, writers have relied on this peculiar high to lend a kick to their powers of observation and have gone seeking the drug in ever more remote valleys and villages.