By Andrew X. Pham. New York: Picador Books, 1999. 344 pp.
Andrew Pham was born in Vietnam and escaped to the U.S. with his family in the late 70s. This memoir tells the story of his return to Vietnam, to tour the country on his bicycle, intertwined with his memories of the war and his family’s life in California. The travelogue is haunted by his younger self, An, and his young parents; an American vet named Tyle, who he meets briefly on a bike tour through the Mexican desert; and especially his lost sister, Chi.
The book begins with an account of Chi’s birth fortune, “suicide at thirty-two,” and Pham hints that life in America was too much for Chi, and that, paradoxically, she “died because she became too American” (7). Her full story is revealed slowly, and becomes something of a symbol of the losses the family incurred by immigrating.
Tyle is broken by his experiences in Vietnam, and after a long night of drinking tequila, begs Pham for forgiveness. Pham gives “him the absolution that is not mine to give. And, in my fraudulence, I know I have embarked on something greater than myself” (9). Tyle travels Vietnam with Pham as a memory, a story to tell to curious Vietnamese who have stayed.
Pham’s stories of himself, Chi and his parents, as well as his younger siblings, dot the book, and they are each revealed and complicated tale by tale. His parents are Romeo and Juliet, marrying in defiance of their families’ wishes; heroes who survive the new Communist regime and prison camp; immigrants with dreams that make them targets in their desperately poor neighborhood; successful homeowners, surrounded by extended family, who cannot fully escape the past.
Most memorable are the family members and strangers Pham meets in Vietnam. Biking to his father’s birthplace and his own, visiting the beach where the family made their escape to American, drinking with his cousins and befriending people such as Cuong, or Calvin, a tour guide who, in his own estimation, represents the new Vietnam, Pham reveals the country in the details such as a cobra heart beating in a shot glass of rice wine; a stranger, Uncle Tu, who treats Pham’s fever with mentholated oil and a silver coin; and a treacherous ride on the Perfume River in a leaky tin canoe.
There is a kind of resolution to Pham’s tales, but to reveal it here would be to diminish the power of reading the book. In the end, the book shows us how human it is to want to belong, to fit in, and how complicated that longing really is.
