Thursday, August 30, 2012

Book review: A journey through Vietnam and a refugee's psyche

A month ago, in "What they eat in Vietnam", I introduced you to Catfish and Mandala, a book I bought expecting a travelogue of a journey through that little-known country. Although Andrew X. Pham's 1999 book contains plenty of fascinating travel tidbits -- like the descriptions of the strange Vietnamese cuisine -- it should really be described as more memoir or autobiography than travel book.

Mr. Pham describes himself now as a Viet kieu -- an overseas Vietnamese. He is one of the 1000s of "boat people" who fled Vietnam in the aftermath of the war. With his family, he was "adopted" by a Baptist congregation in Shreveport LA. After a short time the refugee family moved to California, to be in poorer circumstances but at least in a community of Vietnamese and other immigrants.

A disturbing theme of the book is the effect that life in America had on the family. By the time Pham decides to leave home and return to Vietnam in search of his roots, two of his brothers have decided to be gay, and his elder sister, a transvestite turned transexual, has committed suicide. Whether these problems of sexual identity are due to culture shock or a dysfunctional family life is a matter for speculation. The author talks freely about his own identity problems and those of his siblings, but reaches no conclusions.

As for the travel part, Pham, after experiencing a bit of an epiphany while bicycling in Baja California, throws in his job as an aerospace engineer and sets off to bicycle counterclockwise around the Pacific rim to the land of his birth. He gets a decidedly cool welcome from the Vietnamese who have been left behind. Even folks in his old neighbourhood seem to be asking, "What did you come back for?"

That part of the book, then, is yet another statement of Hardy's dictum -- you can't go home again. The resentment of those who left by those who were left behind is particularly acute in Vietnam, but still the same sentiment one finds in China, Zimbabwe or just about any other third world country.

The more interesting part of the book is the painful personal history of Mr. Pham and his family. There are hints of dark doings while the family is still in Vietnam, and at the end the source of the family's (comparative) wealth is revealed. Pham writes about his family compassionately, not critically, implicitly putting at least some of their troubles down to the trauma of adjusting from a traditional Asian culture to that of modern America.

He is understanding, too, of the grasping rudeness he meets in Vietnam. What the reader sees in Andrew Pham is the emerging of the "global soul", so well described by Pico Iyer in his book of the same name. (The Global Soul, Knopf, 2000)

Catfish and Mandala is extremely well written, a pleasure to read. For his work, Pham won the 1999 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize. I expected to be entertained, and was not disappointed. I did not expect to learn as much as I did about the life and emotions of "displaced persons". Highly recommended.

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