Between “Roots and Routes”: The Diasporic Traveler and the Politics of Belonging in Catfish and Mandala

Abstract

Andrew X. Pham’s Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam (1999) evokes oriental mysticism and the trauma and conflict of the Vietnam War by its title alone. Thwarting the reader’s expectations, Pham’s memoir and travelogue seemingly aims to disassociate itself from and does not relay much about the images his title elicits. Instead, Pham’s readers are met with a poignant tale about a Vietnamese American man’s quest to define himself and recover his ethnic roots as he grapples with ideas of home, America, Asia, family, sexuality, and identity. The son of Vietnamese “model minority” immigrant parents, Pham decides to leave his “adopted homeland” America and return to Vietnam almost two decades later, after his transsexual sibling Chi/Minh tragically commits suicide at the age of 32. Following in the tradition of travel narratives, Pham’s endeavor to reacquaint himself with his “homeland” coincides with his pursuit for self-discovery. As his travels continue, however, Pham cannot decide if his trip is indeed a “pilgrimage or a farce” as the frenetic search for his cultural roots exacerbates his state of confusion about his ethnic identity and where his “home” lies. This essay delves into the slippages that occur in Pham’s narrative as a result of his internal struggles to collapse together the two divergent “homelands”; Pham’s attempt ends in futility as the two are ultimately polarized by the end of his narrative. In the end, Pham embraces another kind of “model minority” mentality despite his rejections of becoming yet another “good Oriental.” Consequently, even as Pham initially distances himself from things “so American,” his journey to Vietnam ironically proves to be a process of his “Americanization.”