:: Reviews :: Rants ::

A review of Andrew X. Pham's Catfish and Mandala written for my composition class.

Andrew X. Pham’s first-time novel, Catfish and Mandala, unearths themes of family views in America and Vietnam, while searching search for cultural identity. Being the son of Vietnamese parents, his family suffered abhorrent consequences due to the populous conflicts of the Vietnam War. With an assiduous and well thought-out plan, his family escaped to America when he was 10. Twenty years later, Pham disregards his parent’s aspirations for him to be an engineer by setting off on a hazardous excursion to travel the world on his bicycle. During his travels, he pedals through Mexico, Japan, Hanoi, and finally to his homeland, Vietnam, in hopes to discover what it means to be a Viet-kieu – a Vietnamese American.

A pivotal idea to Pham’s book is that he expresses the incongruousness of conventional family ties in America and Vietnam. Pham graphically shows the reader the violence of Vietnamese parental treatment from his own afflicted memories. The recurrent images of violence in the novel successfully and conclusively explain the importance of the American families “cherishing their children (320)”. Another prospective theme is the conquest for cultural identity. The debates Pham depicts in the novel provide examples of life as a Viet-kieu, whom many like himself travel to Vietnam to restore their lost heritage. Upon examination of Vietnamese and American life, he abandons the concept of cultural identity and is brought to a revelation. He settles his internal conflict of cul-tural identity and realizes that personality and spirit is what truly characterizes an individual, not cultural roots (342). Although Pham successfully articulates the central themes of the novel, he oftentimes presents himself in a biased manner towards the Vietnamese people and neglects to understand their economic wellbeing that defines their cultural trends. Had he successfully depicted and acknowledged both sides of the spectrum, he would have had a more notable interpretation of his intentions concerning theme.

The writer has strengths and weaknesses. Pham’s strength was his creativity in incorporating titles into the novel. The chapter entitled “Jade – Giant (136)” is obscure in its name and empowers the reader with a broad catalogue of ideas for foreshowing the upcoming chapter. Pham wrote select chapters in the form of short po-etic memoirs. After careful examination, it may be difficult to see any relation to the storyline, which in overall detracted the author’s intent of the novel and was frustrating to comprehend.

Pham exhibits is a spectacle of demiurgic and stimulating use of metaphors. Pham writes eloquent metaphors of catfish to depict the life of the Vietnamese in reeducation camps in the Vietnam War. An example of such a metaphor is, “Dinner was rice and catfish soup. They fed the catfish at dawn and ate them at dusk. Then the indigo light fell and silence crept in (20)”. These sentences are interwoven into the context of the reading and provide insightful perspectives relating to theme. A drawback to the novel is the over usage of hyphenation. Pham continually uses hyphenated words which outlast its use and agitates and throws off the reader.

Catfish and Mandala, is a pleasing first-time novel for Andrew X. Pham. The book conquers the essence of emotions and experiences with such diversity, through culture and as a literary work. The novel has a few drawbacks, such as the biased view towards the Vietnamese people, as well as poetic memoirs and hyphenation usage. However, these are only slight inconveniences’, and it is still possible to sit back and relish this cap-tivating read.