Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a Vietnamese-American writer, traveling and living in Asia for the past two decades. I have published a bicycle travel memoir, a Southeast Asian cookbook, a Vietnamese biography, an essay collection about escaping abroad, and a translation of the most famous Vietnamese diary. I am a professional hammock weight, wine taster, foodie, and connoisseur of Asian literature.


I wrote

Book cover of Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam

What is my book about?

Catfish and Mandala is the story of an American odyssey—a solo bicycle voyage around the Pacific Rim to Vietnam—made by…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey

Andrew X. Pham Why did I love this book?

A Paduang tribesman journeys from a distant mountain village to Mandalay to become a university student but soon finds himself caught up in protests against the military dictatorship. He becomes a revolutionary and fights in harrowing battles. Somehow through it all, he escapes and, thanks to a random friendship with a stranger, journeys to England to study at Cambridge University. Exquisitely detailed and lyrically written, his memoir stands as a fine work of literature, rare and utterly unique. Consider it a travel memoir in reverse.

By Pascal Khoo Thwe,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked From the Land of Green Ghosts as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The astonishing story of a young man's upbringing in a remote tribal village in Burma and his journey from his strife-torn country to the tranquil quads of Cambridge.

In lyrical prose, Pascal Khoo Thwe describes his childhood as a member of the Padaung hill tribe, where ancestor worship and communion with spirits blended with the tribe's recent conversion to Christianity. In the 1930s, Pascal's grandfather captured an Italian Jesuit, mistaking him for a giant or a wild beast; the Jesuit in turn converted the tribe. (The Padaung are famous for their 'giraffe women' - so-called because their necks are ritually…


Book cover of A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East

Andrew X. Pham Why did I love this book?

Terzani is one of those grizzled war correspondents from the old days, a man of vast knowledge and keen observations. He is gifted with the storyteller’s tongue and the artist’s eyes. His travels, adventures, and reflections, noted over two decades ago, are as timely today as ever. This is a must-read semi-modern classic.

By Tiziano Terzani,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked A Fortune-Teller Told Me as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Warned by a fortune-teller not to risk flying, the author - a seasoned correspondent - took to travelling by rail, road and sea. Consulting fortune-tellers and shamans wherever he went, he learnt to understand and respect older ways of life and beliefs now threatened by the crasser forms of Western modernity.

William Shawcross in the Literary Review praised Terzani for 'his beautifully written adventure story... a voyage of self-discovery... He sees fortune-tellers, soothsayers, astrologers, chiromancers, seers, shamans, magicians, palmists, frauds, men and women of god (many gods) all over Asia and in Europe too... Almost every page and every story…


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Book cover of Return to Hope Creek

Return to Hope Creek by Alyssa J. Montgomery,

Return to Hope Creek is a second-chance rural romance set in Australia.

Stella Simpson's career and engagement are over. She returns to the rural community of Hope Creek to heal, unaware her high school and college sweetheart, Mitchell Scott, has also moved back to town to do some healing of…

Book cover of The Lover

Andrew X. Pham Why did I love this book?

Travel back in time to colonial Vietnam with this exquisite memoir about a girl’s coming of age in an exotic land. Duras’ narrative voice is magic itself—at times soft as silk, and at other times, hard, brilliant as a diamond. Read it for tone. Read it for wisdom. Read it for the first love that echoes for a lifetime. Fly across the decades, down the length of a lifetime, within a hundred pages.

By Marguerite Duras, Barbara Bray (translator),

Why should I read it?

7 authors picked The Lover as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A sensational international bestseller, and winner of Frances' coveted Prix Goncourt, 'The Lover' is an unforgettable portrayal of the incandescent relationship between two lovers, and of the hate that slowly tears the girl's family apart.

Saigon, 1930s: a poor young French girl meets the elegant son of a wealthy Chinese family. Soon they are lovers, locked into a private world of passion and intensity that defies all the conventions of their society.

A sensational international bestseller, 'The Lover' is disturbing, erotic, masterly and simply unforgettable.


Book cover of Iron & Silk

Andrew X. Pham Why did I love this book?

This classic about a young American teacher’s adventures in post Cultural Revolution China set the standard for “travel memoir”. Salzman’s journey is captivating and unique because it is, at its core, a love story with the country, the culture, the people, and martial arts—the sort of adoration that could only manifest in youth. He gives himself entirely to the experience and, thus, takes the reader along with him. A wonderful book that lingers in the memory for decades.

By Mark Salzman,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Iron & Silk as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This large print edition recounts the true adventures of a young martial arts student in China. Told as a series of lightly sketched episodes, the book allows the reader a glimpse of Chinese culture largely unaccessible to foreigners.


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Book cover of Locked In Locked Out: Surviving a Brainstem Stroke

Locked In Locked Out by Shawn Jennings,

Can there be life after a brainstem stroke?

After Dr. Shawn Jennings, a busy family physician, suffered a brainstem stroke on May 13, 1999, he woke from a coma locked inside his body, aware and alert but unable to communicate or move. Once he regained limited movement in his left…

Book cover of Survival in the Killing Fields

Andrew X. Pham Why did I love this book?

There are beach reads and there are must reads. Ngor’s memoir is the latter, preferably consumed in the secure comforts of one’s own home. Known for his Oscar-winning role in the movie The Killing Fields, Ngor is a Cambodian doctor who survived the country-wide massacre committed by the Khmer Rouge (who were funded by the Chinese Communists). He narrates his personal journey through the deepest horrors in human history, full of savagery, unrelenting brutality, and often sheer madness. It is a heavy story, difficult and disturbing, but also a story of the human spirit. We do not need to look far to find the true heart of darkness.  

By Roger Warner, Haing Ngor,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Survival in the Killing Fields as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This is an autobiographical account of life in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, written by the Oscar-winning actor from "The Killing Fields", whose own experiences under the Khmer Rouge were more shocking than those of Dith Pran, the character he played. The Khmer Rouge, led by Maoist fanatics, laid waste to the social fabric of Cambodia, forcing the entire population into agricultural labour camps and murdering those they considered bourgeois or intellectual. As a doctor, Haing S. Ngor was a special target of the Khmer Rouge; his family was wiped out, his wife died from starvation in his arms, and…


Explore my book 😀

Book cover of Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam

What is my book about?

Catfish and Mandala is the story of an American odyssey—a solo bicycle voyage around the Pacific Rim to Vietnam—made by a young Vietnamese-American man in pursuit of both his adopted homeland and his forsaken fatherland. Intertwined with an often humorous travelogue spanning a year of discovery is a memoir of war, escape, and ultimately, family secrets.

Andrew X. Pham was born in Vietnam and raised in California. His father had been a POW of the Vietcong; his family came to America as "boat people." Following the suicide of his sister, Pham quit his job, sold all of his possessions, and embarked on a year-long bicycle journey that took him through the Mexican desert; on a thousand-mile loop from Narita in South Korea to Kyoto in Japan; and, after five months and 2,357 miles, to Saigon, where he finds "nothing familiar in the bombed-out darkness." In Vietnam, he's taken for Japanese or Korean by his countrymen, except, of course, by his relatives, who doubt that as a Vietnamese he has the stamina to complete his journey ("Only Westerners can do it"); and in the United States he's considered anything but American. A vibrant, picaresque memoir written with narrative flair and an eye-opening sense of adventure, Catfish and Mandala is an unforgettable search for cultural identity.

Book cover of From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey
Book cover of A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East
Book cover of The Lover

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