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Summary: Great Escape to Vietnam & into the mind of a Vietnam refugee
Review: I just returned from a trip to Hanoi and I bought Pham's book to learn more about the country I had just visited. I was pleasantly surprised by Pham's descriptiveness of the scenes which enabled me to be transported back to similar experiences I had traveling in the backwaters of Latin America and SE Asia. Having never suffered through the horrors of war and the terror of being on the losing side. I cannot image the hardship of imprisonment, fleeing the country on a leaking boat and the abject poverty of a internment camp in Indonesia. Pham is incredibly descriptive in his recollections of these places and events. He made me begin to understand the loneliness of moving to America and being the only Asian faces in a town in the deep South and then the tensions of the slums of LA. All of the flashbacks and the current reality of Vietnam are woven into a book that I had difficulty in putting down. It is a great read -- a great escape.
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Summary: not all it could have been
Review: For me the most powerful and poignant sections of the book were about Phan's childhood, the escape from Vietnam and his life as an immigrant. The journey back seemed somehow under-processed. I would have loved to hear what the author was thinking about first-world/third-world issues, but mostly I got lots of information on his alcohol conumption habits. Still, fast-moving, entertaining and vivid writing make up for any flaws, and I would recommend this book.
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Summary: The word,"Vietnam" elicits a spectrum of emotions,
Review: In Catfish and Mandala, Andrew Pham's memoir offers an unprecedented view and understanding of what it is like to grow up in the U.S. as a Vietnamese American and the various social issues and challenges entailed. Like the intricacies of life, Catfish and Mandala covers a matrix of themes, oftentimes harsh, yet courageously honest. Pham's voice is poetically from the heart covering the full gamut of feelings--eliciting tears to gut-rending laughter. Catfish and Mandala is a joy to read--definitely a thought provoking, insightful and inspirational memoir from a wonderful new author. Two Thumbs Way Up!
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Summary: WOW-Moving, refreshingly insightful, yet humorous and poetic
Review: In short, Andrew Pham's memoir spans many levels: travelogue, insight into Vietnam's Communist imprisonment, the heart/mind of a Vietnam War Vet, Vietnamese people/culture, Vietnamese American returning to the homeland, honestly telling portrait of a Vietnamese American dysfunctional family, and captivating examination of one's psche and the external factors that define it. Wonderfully engaging read!
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Summary: Powerful
Review: I had a hard time putting this down. It is brilliantly told with such detailed imagery that you feel as if you are sitting right along side the author. At times I found myself doubling over in laughter, others fighting back tears. As a Vietnamese American, I found it especially poignant. His experience of Vietnam today contrasts strongly with his memories of a carefree, happy childhood. I too have fond memories of Vietnam and am disheartened to see the toll that communism has taken on a people and a country. A must-read for all Americans -- to truly appreciate that life is all along the way and to be thankful for the freedom and opportunities we enjoy in this great land.
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Summary: Andrew Pham won the 1999 Pacific Rim Award for Nonfiction.
Review: An excellent new author. A refreshingly insightful contribution to the understanding of Vietnamese Americans.
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Summary: Brilliant, insightful, captivating---MUST read!
Review: Andrew Pham's memoir shares a rare insight of a Vietnamese American family. Catfish and Mandala is beautifully written from the heart. All parents or to-be-parents should read this book for it introduces many life lessons that are better learned by reading than by living for they bring too much pain if one would have to experience them.
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Summary: Story vs. Storytelling
Review: Finished reading Catfish and Mandala by Andrew X. Pham. He has a great facility with words and descriptions, however I was annoyed on more than one occasion with the picture he often painted of himself. It was difficult to sympathize or even identify with him. He used words so smoothly that I began to distrust the ephiphany he was describing. Maybe there were too many epiphanies in the memoir and it diluted the intentioned effect. By the end however there was a certain respect I had for him, for telling his story, for describing Vietnam and the Vietnamese with honesty, even though I couldn't help feeling that a few things were more contrived than actually experienced, more exaggerated than exact. I got the feeling that he took various items from his past and arranged them conveniently into one scene for dramatic effect. And it was this dramatic effect that Mr. Pham wished to achieve that came off poorly to me. I would have wished that the chapters with his father at the end and the "family's secret" (not the secret that was his sister) would have been elaborated at the start instead of paralleling them at interspersing chapters with his travels in Vietnam. It is how things occured chronologically and it would have given his journey to Vietnam more purpose at the outset. So while I thought the story was honest, I thought the storytelling was dishonest in that it was manipulative towards the reader. In fiction it works well, but in memoirs it more readily detracts from than adds to the book.
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Summary: A Startling Book
Review: This is not the type of book I usually read. However, I will be looking for something like it from now on. The book deals with Andrew's search for himself in some of the most exotic, beautiful, sad, surreal and shocking situations imaginable. His honesty, his pain and his triumphs are visions that will remain with me for a long time. It is a book not to be missed, and Andrew Pham is to be congratulated for having the courage to not only write it, but to live it.
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Summary: Vietnam Today from a Unique Perspective
Review: This is a new book by a young Vietnamese-American who revisits the homeland he fled in 1977 with his family at the age of 10. He travels by bicycle, and the rigors of his personal discomfort as well as his memories are eye opening as he faces the realities of what it is to be Vietnamese today, both in America and in Vietnam. The book is totally involving, pulling the reader into the world of Andrew Pham, from the childhood games he played with his sister, to the horrific boat escape where he and his family were inches away from death, to Vietnamese culture in California. The writer is brutally honest, sparing neither his family, America nor the Vietnamese from candid review. His insights are at once startling, fresh and vivid and some of his images will long haunt my imagination. The people in Vietnam are poor. There is filth everywhere and mosquitoes and bugs and rats. He constantly is overcharged and everyone has their hands out, especially the police. When he looks at his cousins who he played with as a child, he realizes that his life could have been just like theirs if his family hadn't escaped. The flashbacks t his childhood in Vietnam are interspersed with his flashbacks with life in America and there is much exploration of what can be called his dysfunctional family. Among other things, as there are family secrets that rip them all apart. The one weakness of the book is that some things are not fully explained. A little gentle editing would have proded the writer to put more information in to some of the segments and leave out the boring details from others. However, I did love the book. I loved the fact that it took me to places I know little about, both in the geographical as well as the author's own internal landscape. It's a modern update of the Vietnam experience from a very unique point of view. And it focuses on Vietnam as it is today. Recommended
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