Sometimes, my prepared invention slips out before I realize it: I’m Japanese-Korean-Chinese-mixed-race Asian. I hide my distaste because it is un-American. I have always hated this question and resent him for asking. They grinned-Sí, sí, Señor-and grilled me a slab of beef. But I’m American, Vietnamese American, I shouted at them. A crew of Mexican ranchers said they liked me because I was a bueno hermano-good brother-a Vietnamito, and my little Vietnam had golpea big America back in’75.

All the extras, they confided, were because I wasn’t a gringo. Taking money from a poor and crazy man brings bad luck. You are in the desert going nowhere, so you are crazy. Señor, they explained in the patient tone reserved for those convalescing, you are riding a bicycle, so you are poor. Every place gave me nourishment men and women plucked grapefruits and tangerines from their family gardens, bagged food from their pantries, and accepted not one peso in return. When I was hungry or thirsty, I stopped at ranches and farms and begged the owners for water from their wells and tried to buy tortillas, eggs, goat cheese, and fruit. “How you got here on that bike is amazing.” I had been pedaling and pushing through the forlorn land, roaming the foreign coast on disused roads and dirt tracks. Up the way a couple hundred yards.” “Amazing! I found it!” He smiles, suddenly very charismatic, and shakes his head of long matty blond hair. In a dry, earthen voice, he asks me, “Looking for the hot spring?” “Yeah, Agua Caliente. I see the wind has carved leathery lines into his legend-hewn face of fjords and right angles. Rising from the makeshift pavilion staked against the camper top of his pickup, he moves to meet me with an idle power I envy. A month of wandering the Mexican wasteland has tumbled me into his lone camp warded by cacti. He is a giant, an anachronistic Thor in rasta drag, bare-chested, barefoot, desert-baked golden. I said no, quit my job, and bicycled into the Mexican desert.ġ Exile – Pilgrim The first thing I notice about Tyle is that he can squat on his haunches Third World-style, indefinitely. I looked at this relic from a distant world, dreading its power. She pressed into my chest a yellowed fortune-scroll, crushed and tattered, its secret bound by an umbilical cord of red twine. It was from the hand of the same monk, written twenty-seven years earlier. Grandmother closed her hands over mine and asked me quietly if I wanted to read my birth fortune. The rope was gone, but there was incense ash in the carpet, its fragrant prayers locked in. We were sitting on Grandmother’s bed in the very room where Chi had hung herself. Prologue Grandmother told me it had been written in my sister Chi’s fortune penned by a Vietnamese Buddhist monk on the day of her birth, in the year of the Tiger: suicide at thirty-two. What is the proper number of kisses For a man to leave this world? The average depth of melancholy? The approximate wetness of hope? To the memory of my sister Chi, my brother Minh, one and the same … if only I had learned to see without looking. Pham’s - Catfish and Mandala Acknowledgments Copyright Page Table of Contents Title Page Epigraph Prologue 1 - Exile – Pilgrim 2 - Catfish-Dawn 3 - Fallen – Leaves 4 - Clan-Rift 5 - Fallen – Leaves 6 - Headwind – Tailspin 7 - Japan-Dream 8 - Last – Gamble 9 - Mecca-Memory 10 - Strange-Hearth 11 - Fallen-Leaves 12 - Divergent-Rhythm 13 - Dying-Angels 14 - Alley-World 15 - Beggar-Grace 16 - Fallen-Leaves 17 - Hope-Adrift 18 - Gift-Marriage 19 - Jade-Giant 20 - Fullcircle-Halflives 21 - Baptizing-Buddha 22 - Foreign-Asians 23 - Milk-Mother 24 - Chi-Daughter 25 - Jungle-Station 26 - Night-Wind 27 - Fallen-Leaves 28 - Hanoi-Visage 29 - Patriot-Repose 30 - Silence-Years 31 - Blushing-Winter 32 - Vietnamese-Karma 2ģ3 - III-Wind 34 - War-Survivors 35 - Harlot-Heroine 36 - Fallen-Leaves 37 - Gaping-Fish 38 - Chi-Minh 39 - Fever-Ride 40 - Fallen-Leaves 41 - Coca-Cola 42 - Brother-Brother 43 - Father-Son 44 - Viet-Kieu 45 - Chi – Me 46 - Blue-Peace Epilogue Praise for Andrew X.

Floating rings steamy stacks