Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam

The author and his grandmother sit together in the room where his sibling, Chi, committed suicide. The reader will later learn that Chi had transitioned genders and changed his name to Minh. Pham’s grandmother tells him that a Buddhist monk predicted the suicide in a fortune told on the day Chi was born. She grandmother asks him if he wants to read his own fortune, written by the same monk, and hands him a scroll. Pham writes, “I said no, quit my job, and bicycled into the Mexican desert” (3). 

After cycling to Mexico, Pham meets an American man named Tyle while visiting a hot spring. Tyle asks where he is from, and Pham tells him the Bay Area in California. Tyle then asks where he’s “really” from. The author notes this is a question he has always hated, so he beats around the bush before telling Tyle he was born in Vietnam.

The two meet again that evening when Tyle visits Pham at his campsite. They share a bottle of tequila, and Tyle asks him if he’s been back to Vietnam. Pham replies that he hasn’t but will visit someday. He writes that many Vietnamese-Americans have returned, some to taunt their former enemies with their newfound wealth, but he thinks most “return because we are lost” (8).