- guardian.co.uk, Friday October 13 2000 15.38 BST
Every now and then a book comes along that defies categorisation. Catfish and Mandala is one of them, and - in UK newspapers at least - Pham was punished by being consigned to the travel round-up.
In fact, as every round-upper pointed out, this is far more than a bike-across-the Pacific-Rim-and-find-yourself book (though, in the course of it, Pham does just that). Peter Hughes in the Times described it as Jack Kerouac meets Wild Swans . Pham shares with Kerouac a belief that the road may hold answers - in Pham's case, his journey takes him back to the Vietnam his family escaped as boat people when he was 10 years old. "America fished us out of the ocean like downing cockroaches and fed us and clothed us," he writes. But if America saved the Phams in body, it left them flailing in soul, and here is where the Wild Swans comparison comes in. Only by going back, by staring in the face what happened to his family and their country, can Andrew Pham begin to understand what he now is, and what his transsexual sister, Chi, used to be, before she was driven to suicide.
The exquisite sense of mission, the pressure to understand through reliving, creates a writing style that, according to Lucy Gillmore of the Independent on Sunday, makes you "want to stick your tongue out and lick every last morsel of the page". Some of the prose proved a little too purple for Anthony Sattin in the Sunday Times, who nonetheless conceded that Pham had the outsider's gift of clear sight and had caught the mood and exposed the dilemmas of an emerging country.
The Times's Hughes saw it not as a book about Vietnam, but a fine addition to the growing American literature of the Vietnam war. The New Yorker, though, saw no need to classify it at all. "In his passionate telling, his travelogue acquires the universality of a bildungsroman."
But the most touching tributes are on amazon.com - many from other Vietnamese Americans, and one from a Vietnam vet. He'd often wondered, he said, how the "exfiltrated" Vietnamese had fared and what had happened to the ones who got left behind. Now, finally, he knew.
