Andrew X. Pham's Catfish and Mandala and the Dialogics of Identity

Abstract

In his 1999 memoir Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam Andrew X. Pham meditates about the confusing complexities of identity, home, and family as the former ‘boat person’ returns to his country of origin. In a descriptive-meditative narrative that simultaneously traces the landscape of Vietnam and the ‘inscape’ of his consciousness, Pham experiences multiple consciousnesses that defy synthesis. Instead of the mandala-like geometric construction of self and identity that he seeks, he finds ‘a puzzle beset with contradictions.’ While Pham cannot confidently solve ‘the mysteries of identity,’ he achieves in his use of literary forms the cultural hybridity he cannot realise in his construction of self. The multiple consciousnesses are a dilemma, but they are also acts of imagination that Pham embeds in literary forms and tropes that blend Eastern and Western concepts. By creating a mandala-like literary design that adapts the structures and conventions of the quintessential American theme of self-invention as well as the literary forms best suited to it—autobiography, memoir, the coming-of-age narrative, the bildungsroman—and related motifs such as ‘the lost boy’ and ‘boy, interrupted,’ he creates an embryonic ‘portrait of the artist as a young man.’ His quest for a wholeness of being remains more willed than achieved at the end of the memoir, but the act of writing has become ‘something to fasten all these gems [his memories]…something to hold them in a continuity that [he] can comprehend.’