Andrew X. Pham’s Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam tells the story of Andrew Pham, a young Vietnamese-American man who travels to his hometown in search of “finding himself” due to a conflict between his adoptive land and his native land. The ...
From the award-winning author of Catfish and Mandala comes a son's searing memoir of his Vietnamese father's experiences over the course of three wars.
THE FAMINE SOUP There were roughly a dozen mouthfuls of rice in a bowl of famine soup, give or take a spoon. The broth was watery and faintly seasoned with salt. At the best of times, it contained a few beans or peanuts. Before things became truly scarce, the estate cooks added yam to the soup, m...
Despite his poverty, he had thickened into a burly man, a diesel-powered tank, with M-16 fingers and a grenade of a nose from which he was squeezing out the blackheads. Stringy yellow stubble grassed from his pores as he hunched over a hand mirror on the kitchen table. Sedentary suburbia had fat-...