Catfish and Mandala [Idioma Inglés] - Tapa blanda

A limpid voyage through Vietnam’s ghost-ridden landscape, at once a moving memoir, travelogue and compelling search for identity.

‘The bartender, a shriveled man with the pinched face of someone bitten a hundred times, lugs a basket of live two-foot long cobras to the table. He reaches into the basket casually – a magician going for a rabbit in a hat – and pulls one out. He whacks its head sharply with a mallet. The snake goes limp in his hand. With a deft glide of his short knife, he opens a slit in the snake scales, a perfect surgical incision. Blood drips onto his hand. Puffing on a cigarette held at the corner of his mouth, he plucks open the skin and shows the beating heart, the size of a chocolate chip to everyone at the table. Working with the boredom of a shrimper, he severs the arteries and transplants the heart into a shot glass half-filled with rice wine. The heart pulses red streamers of blood into the clear liquor. Viet seizes the glass and shoots it down his throat. The idea is swallow the concoction before the heart stops beating. Viet smacks his lips, grunts and grins blissfully. Now it is my turn.’

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.

'The bartender, a shrivelled man with the pinched face of someone bitten a hundred times, lugs a basket of live two-foot long cobras to the table. He reaches into the basket casually – a magician going for a rabbit in a hat – and pulls one out. He whacks its head sharply with a mallet. The snake goes limp in his hand. With a deft glide of his short knife, he opens a slit in the snake scales, a perfect surgical incision. Blood drips onto his hand. Puffing on a cigarette held at the corner of his mouth, he plucks open the skin and shows the beating heart, the size of a chocolate chip to everyone at the table. Working with the boredom of a shrimper, he severs the arteries and transplants the heart into a shot glass half-filled with rice wine. The heart pulses red streamers of blood into the clear liquor. Viet seizes the glass and shoots it down his throat. The idea is swallow the concoction before the heart stops beating. Viet smacks his lips, grunts and grins blissfully. Now it is my turn.'

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 parents’ 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.