Catfish,Memory, Poetry, Race, and Pain

“I am soaked in self-pity. Then it rains and I begin to shiver. Cornered, I do what I always do  in absolute desperation: I bite my lip and plunge into the street. Pham 43

Andrew Pham is clearly a poet his stunning imagery and powerful content along with amazing verbs punch a hole into the readers gut. We are pulled into this story of a writer so much like ourselves lost in immigration, war, family ties and so much more. I found solace that he like so many earlier writers before him chose to write a traveling memoir but the difference here is in the way Pham travels through the space of the page and through his own personal journey on merely a bike. I don’t even know how he was able to remanipulate these accounts of conversations so clearly and with such emotion, I think that must be the hardest part of memoir is figuring out how to write down the pain and all these things we’ve experienced with a clear set of rules and ideals about who we’re protecting what we’re putting out there and how we do it. I loved that at the end of this book Pham is asking for forgiveness for writing the book. It is the hardest thing to do as people of color to air our dirty laundry and expect our families to still love us. I am still nervous about releasing my first book I am lucky I do not have a literary family I hope my words will slide underneath their radar.

I was tied to his mother’s story of being a sex worker and the being the force holding the whole family together. t was this secret that protected the family and it was also what made the family’s overall tone especially between his mother and father such a different tone.

 I appreciated Pham’s ability to always be searching for that lost sister. For me Pham is a poet creating beautiful statements from an experience that is hard to cradle into comment and perfect story line but he does it. Clearly my favorite part of this book is the consistent wondering about his sister who he always calls his sister who was actually born a boy.

Unlike other traveling memoirs or 30 minutes shows often seen today about how fun it is to travel and how we can boost the economy this memoir is based in heart and heritage. I also really appreciate that he brings up the problem of people of color traveling we are always having to defend our race we are only as far as our stereotyped american image take us when we leave this country; “I like you,” Paul said, walking round behind me and putting a hand on my shoulder, which I didn’t like.  “I like you people. Orientals are good workers. Good students, too. Great in math, the engineering stuff.” He smiled at me, reassuring, beaming. “Oh, I think you’ll do just fine here. We won’t have any trouble at all.” Pham 25

This is someone who is constantly talking about money, about our own personal familial feelings of insecurity about race,  “Pinch it, like this,” Mom told me, grabbing the ridge of my nose between her thumb and index finger, “and pull. It’ll make your nose longer, thinner, and better looking.” Sometimes I think we could publish a whole anthology just about our racial and indigenous insecurities about our noses, this statement made me feel like I was sitting at his dinner table. And what amazing toll this journey takes on his emotional body, physical psyche, and mind. To tell the story of what its like to see your home country with the weight of personal turmoil about what happened on this land how your own family was supposed to die and how they lived on this very soil and these patches of ground and to tell the story your father could never tell, about being able to say as a writer I spent my time writing anything for anyone; birth certificates, eulogies, clearly I’m in love with his writing. This is the writer’s life to waste all our energy creating money so we can one day  have just enough money to sit down for weeks, months, years on end if need be and write our own goddamn words one day.

I love the way he travels through time I always feel safe with Pham, even when he is in and out of sequence with his memories they feel rooted in the right place because we’re pulled to a very purposeful memory and then it helps it makes sense. He usually utilizes one line to make the reader understand the time frame then he goes with the story and then comes back to now. Like he does on pg 235 with the opening of his high school days and the race wars at school. And his linking this story to when Saigon fell and what it all meant for his father, his family, himself.