If there were some kind of screening process for memoirs-and I guess you might say there is, with contemporary publishing houses-this one would get through every time. Meanwhile, Pham decides to return to Vietnam with a hand-me-down bicycle and ride from Ho Chih Minh City to Saigon, trying to understand where he comes from and who his people are. He wants to be a writer, he tells his father-who doesn’t understand. Now, he writes from a place of confusion he has graduated with a degree in engineering but has realized that is not what he wants. (Though he ends up taking his life soon after.) Pham, the oldest son, is the beneficiary of the family’s many sacrifices, a status for which he is grateful and resentful. Along with that story is that of Pham’s sister, who, as Pham leaves home, grows estranged, moves out, goes missing, and resurfaces following a sex change. The story goes like this: Pham emigrated from Vietnam to the Bay Area along with his family-in an improbable escape late one night in a fishing boat-when he was a boy. As much as this is Pham’s memoir, it’s also a panorama of late twenieth-century Vietnam, a country still divided, still recovering from the war and languishing now in poverty, reliant on tourism and agriculture for survival. Catfish and Mandala is a picaresque, a family history, an immigrant’s confession, a travelogue, an enthnographic study.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |