After Vietnam's "American War" ended, the victorious Viet Cong captured and imprisoned Andrew X. Pham and his family as, along with scores of others, they tried to escape south to Thailand. The soldiers released women and children a month later, but Pham's father remained imprisoned in a fetid South Vietnam death camp, where every night a list of those condemned to die was read out.
In the mornings, his father told his eldest son years later, he'd scramble out to the latrine, just wooden planks built over a shallow pond. He could hear the catfish below fighting for what became breakfast. At the end of the day, the hard-worked prisoners were allowed a single bowl of rice and fish soup. "They fed the catfish at dawn and ate them at dusk," Pham writes. "Then the indigo light fell and silence crept in" as the internees awaited their fates.
So concludes just one of Pham's evocative passages recounting his family's long journey -- both physical and psychological -- from South Vietnam to Northern California. The subtitle of this memoir is deceptive; one expects a glorified travelogue. But "Catfish and Mandala" is, thankfully, much more. Just as Pham cycles not only Vietnam but also, en route, the U.S. West Coast and Japan (nearly 3,800 km before he even sets foot in the country of his birth), he has also produced a rich memoir that transcends the scope of personal history.