Catfish and Mandala is certainly an interesting novel. I’ve been brainstorming ideas for what to write about and what experiences I can include to relate to Pham’s experiences. I have had my own refugee experience fleeing from the war in Fmr. Yugoslavia but my only worry in creating an essay on that topic is that it is too obvious. On the other hand, what more an appropriate life altering experience to choose. What I worry about though is that if I do choose that, the essay becomes emphasized more on my own personal experience than on the comparison of my experience to Pham’s. What will jump out to the reader is not Pham’s experience made more abstract by its presence in a mainstream novel, but my retelling of my own experience. Fortunately there is still a bit of time to decide. I really want to visit Vietnam after reading the novel. I’ve never been to southeast Asia and it seems like it would be really interesting to see since its so different from anything in my experience.

Also I find that I really relate to Pham’s cultural isolation. If I am in America and I see something strange that I don’t understand, or don’t agree with, or even every time I hear someone try to pronounce my last name, I feel like a foreigner. Yet, when I go back home to Liznjan every calls me American or ‘the American’ even though I speak the same regional dialect as them, grew up with the kids over there and have gone back every year usually multiple times, me even being in America for a year dubbed me the title, ‘American.’ I usually don’t let it bother me but it’s discouraging not being able to relate to anyone wherever you go. From this lens I can understand why Pham went on such a journey especially after a tragedy like the suicide of his sister. In his description of Chi and how she was tied into Phan Thiet it seems clear that Chi was more ‘Vietnamese’ than Pham and in the tragedy of her suicide Pham was seduced to understand more about what psychological conditions Chi may have felt to lead her to such a point—feelings which Pham gets to experience firsthand. Certainly feeling isolated in a new country is a very tough thing to deal with and Chi felt that she could not even rely on her family which no doubt took a massive toll on her. I haven’t finished the book yet so I don’t want to speculate too far as to what each characters or persons motivation were, but the feelings and things that they deal with strike very close to home. I don’t have to deal with prejudice at all since I’m white, usually people just think I’m Russian or a jew from someplace in eastern Europe, and when I say I’m Croatian most people don’t know where the hell it is so they haven’t yet to form any opinion about it. In fact that, and not having any diasporas to run to in a foreign land and only a few family members in the states can really be a downer.