Going Full Cycle -- Andrew X. Pham Pedals Along A Journey Of Discovery

------------------------------- BOOK REVIEW

"Catfish and Mandala" Andrew X. Pham will read from "Catfish and Mandala" at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Elliott Bay Book Co., 101 S. Main St. in Seattle. Information: 206-624-6600. -------------------------------

Revelatory road trips long have been a mainstay of Amencan literature: Thoreau, Theroux, Kerouac, Steinbeck, Mark Twain and William Least Heat-Moon - the roster of those who have turned to their travels for inspiration includes some of America's most noted scribes. Now add Andrew X. Pham to the list. His new book, "Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam," (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25) records a remarkable odyssey across landscape and into memory.

The eldest son of a husband and wife who found themselves working as an anti-Communist propagandist and a brothel madame during the Vietnam War, Pham and his family fled that country in 1977, and came to America to begin life anew. Two decades and a lot of water under the bridge later, Pham had achieved the American Dream - a degree from UCLA and an engineering job in California. But he shucked it all after his trans-sexual sister turned brother, Chi/Minh, committed suicide.

Wracked with guilt at being too wrapped up in his own life to notice his sibling's spiral into fatal desperation, Pham realizes it is time for some serious soul-searching. Would Chi's life have been happier had she stayed behind in Vietnam as she'd wanted to when the family made plans to flee? How would the lives of Pham and the rest of his family have turned out, had they stayed?

In a quest for answers and identity Pham decides he must go back to his roots. His conveyance of choice is a bicycle. After a trial run through the Mexican desert (during which he confesses to pushing the bike almost as much as he rides it), and a trek up the West Coast from the Bay Area to Seattle, Pham flies across the Pacific and stops first for a bike tour through Japan. In the opening chapters of the book, these scattered expeditions are interesting but unsettling - surely a reflection of his mindset at the time.

Finally, Pham makes the final hop across an ocean for his ultimate goal: setting foot (and wheel) on his native soil for the first time in some twenty years.

He is embraced by the relatives who stayed behind, but Vietnamese society overall is much more ambivalent toward those of his ilk. Pham finds he is a hyphenate no matter where he goes. In the United States he is a Vietnamese American. In Vietnam he is a Vietkieu (foreign Vietnamese). He is variously an object of fascination and resentment for having cast his lot with America. Despite the warnings of his relatives about the dangers of cycling across Vietnam, Pham gets on his bike and pedals away to immerse himself in his fatherland.

Woven through this travelogue are strands of pungent memories: of Pham's childhood, of his father's precarious existence in a brutal postwar "reeducation" camp, of the family's harrowing escape from Vietnam, their resettlement in America and gradual adjustment to that way of life.

But the reminiscences - both good and bad - of Pham's childhood are quickly overlaid with present-day reality. The sites and landmarks he remembers from his youth are nearly unrecognizable to him now, but other impressions flood in - he records in acutely evocative detail the sights, sounds and smells that assault his senses.

Pham rubs elbows with shopkeepers, street vendors, fellow travelers and beggar children on his trek. Often he finds it difficult to distinguish between police officers and thugs - they all seem to be on the take, and Vietnam's nascent entrepreneurial enterprises must contend with omnipresent graft.

Lacking the customary deference of a foreign visitor, Pham probes the widespread poverty and corruption, ever mindful that the relatively marginal lifestyle endured by his Vietnamese contemporaries might have been his own, had his parents made other decisions.

"I am sick with the incongruity of our lives," he confesses midway through his journey. Later, when an Australian tourist counters with the beauty and historicity of the Vietnamese culture, he retorts, "Perhaps that's because your images are not wearing their rags."

Near the end of his trip, plagued with dysentery and saddle sores, and hounded by his failure to reconcile neatly the past with the present, Pham recalls the benediction he received early on in his journey from a certifiably crazy woman. She told him that the perfection of intention was ultimately what mattered.

Somewhere along the way, his pilgrimage in tribute to his dead sister-brother has transformed into Chi/Minh's posthumous gift to him of this journey of discovery. "Our truths change with time," he realizes.

And with that, he is able to come home to America.