Catfish and Mandala by Andrew X. Pham

I really enjoyed reading Catfish and Mandala. The book was the author's memoir - Mr. Pham escaped to the US from Vietnam with his family when he was around nine, and then about ten years ago he made this pretty epic bike journey up the west coast, then through Japan, then around Vietnam. I'm not sure how often I've read memoirs before, probably not very, but I don't think I've ever felt such a personal connection to an author before. I mean, I've identified with characters, but that's not the same thing - you know they aren't real.

The book cuts between the story of the Pham family's life in Vietnam, their escape from it, and their life adjusting to being immigrants in America and trying to find their identity here, and the story of Andrew's, or just An's, bike trip. It's sad to read because you see the family struggle to find and identity in America and come up against the racism and exclusivity that Americans love and hold dear, never being allowed to be accepted as part of America, and then when An goes back to Vietnam, where he was born, he is seen as a traitor for having left them, and is seen as an outsider now. The Vietnamese just want to use him to profit off of his prosperity now that he lives in America, even though he has very little money. It seems as though the Vietnamese, and probably many other countries, have a very different kind of national identity than the US does. Our national identity is very fluid - we're a nation of immigrants, after all (which isn't to say that immigrants are always accepted as Americans, because, as clearly shown by this book, they aren't,) and we're used to feeling powerful because we're a very rich country and powerful in the world, for better or for worse. That must be very different from being an underdog country, in the third world, who's been stepped on over and over again by different greater powers throughout their history. A strong national bond would have to form through pride at having endured suffering as a nation and survived to keep trying to move forward.

I wonder if immigrants, or children of immigrants, in the US feel like they can share our national history. I mean, my great grandparents were immigrants from Ireland - I have no claim that my roots go back to the revolution or anything, but I still feel like I can identify with our history as my own. But what about people who just arrived? How many generations removed must you be to feel that your national identity is American, or most primarily American, and take on our national mythology so that the founding fathers are your heroes too? I wonder what it's like to be black in America - would you identify more with being African American than just American? Would the historical struggle you take national pride in that to end slavery and attain civil rights, instead of the struggle to overthrow British rule? Would you feel a disconnect from the founding fathers who were holding Africans as slaves as they were fighting for freedom?

I think that a nation's sort of historical mythology is so interesting - actual history will tell you about the actions of a nation's people, but the way they perceive their own history, the people they make heroes, will tell you about who those people are.