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| Author: Andrew X. Pham |
This is the story of an American
odyssey-a solo bicycle voyage around the Pacific Rim
to Vietnam-made by a young Vietnamese-American man in
pursuit of both his adopted homeland and his forsaken
fatherland. Pham was born in Vietnam and raised in California.
His father had been a POW of the Vietcong; his family
came to America as "boat people." Following
the suicide of his sister, Pham quit his job, sold all
of 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." In
Vietnam, he's taken for Japanese or Korean by his countrymen,
except, of course, by his relatives, who doubt that as
a Vietnamese he has the stamina to complete his journey
("Only Westerners can do it"); and in the United
States he's considered anything but American. A vibrant,
picaresque memoir written with narrative flair and an
eye-opening sense of adventure, this is an unforgettable
search for cultural identity.
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From Publishers Weekly
In narrating his search for his roots, Vietnamese-American and first-time
author Pham alternates between two story lines. The first, which begins
in war-torn Vietnam, chronicles the author's hair-raising escape to the
U.S. as an adolescent in 1977 and his family's subsequent and somewhat
troubled life in California. The second recounts his return to Vietnam
almost two decades later as an Americanized but culturally confused young
man. Uncertain if his trip is a "pilgrimage or a farce," Pham
pedals his bike the length of his native country, all the while confronting
the guilt he feels as a successful Viet-kieu (Vietnamese expatriate) and
as a survivor of his older sister Chai, whose isolation in America and
eventual suicide he did little to prevent. Flipping between the two story
lines, Pham elucidates his main dilemma: he's an outsider in both America
and VietnamAin the former for being Vietnamese, and the latter for being
Viet-kieu. Aside from a weakness for hyphenated compounds like "people-thick" and "passion-rich," Pham's
prose is fluid and fast, navigating deftly through time and space. Wonderful
passages describe the magical qualities of catfish stew, the gruesome
preparation of "gaping fish" (a fish is seared briefly in oil
with its head sticking out, but is supposedly still alive when served),
the furious flow of traffic in Ho Chi Minh City and his exasperating confrontations
with gangsters, drunken soldiers and corrupt bureaucrats. In writing a
sensitive, revealing book about cultural identity, Pham also succeeds
in creating an exciting adventure story.
© 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. |
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$15.00 (softcover)
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