Since I was a child, I had always thought that I would become a painter, but I was a dreamer and had a penchant for sky gazing. My father was a software engineer, so I became an aerospace engineer (UCLA, 1990).
After a brief stint as an aircraft engineer, I realized that I was inherently unfit for cubicle work. I quit my job to pursue an M.B.A. and an M.S. in Engineering; however, graduate schools could not dispel my restlessness. I wrote a fantasy novel while attending business school and freelanced as a writer while studying orbital debris. It took some time for me to find the courage to admit to myself that I really wanted to be a writer. At last, I abandoned my studies, and saddled with debts, I tried my hands at writing for a living. I dabbled in technical writing and spent several wonderful years as a starving artist while working as a restaurant critic for a local newspaper.
It has been a long arduous road, filled with dark abysses, marvelous heights, gut-rotting doubts, exquisite joys, heartbreaks, piercing loneliness, lasting friendships, memorable feasts, and long stretches of hunger. The view ahead seems to promise more of the same.
But I have enjoyed the journey immensely. There is some truth in the old proverb: The rewarding path is never easy, the easy path never rewarding.
Along the way, I’ve held a dozen different jobs, lived in eight cities scattered across four states, spent the last decade living abroad, and managed to do a few interesting things:
- bought a sailboat, lived on it for 2 years, and taught myself how to sail, saving and dreaming of circumnavigation (a dream never realized)
- bought a cheap Chinese bicycle in Havana (~$60US) and pedaled around Cuba (and fell in love) for a month
- designed, built, flew, and crashed my own ultralight (twice)
- designed and built a bungalow on the Mekong with timber from our land
- lived in Kauai, Hawaii, with surfers and the counter culture crowd, running a free hitchhiker service with a $475 Ford Fiesta, & turning kama’aina
- helped many small, deserving restaurants succeed with my newspaper reviews
- helped two women fight sexual harassment in the workplace by their bosses
- chased rogue elephants from cornfields
- lived out of a backpack for a year
- lived out of my bicycle panniers for a year
- kept a month-long vow of silence
- reunited a man with his long lost sister through sharp investigation
- created an architectural design and rendered it into a prose poem that would one day be realized in the One World Trade Center
- launching a project on Kickstarter
- plant rice, harvest rice, process rice, eat rice (really proud of this one, still going at it)
In a way, I have become a painter of sort. Medium: words on paper. Subject: life as I see it.
If the above & below seem like a good CV, please feel free to hire me for a suitable position 
~*~
AWARDS & ACHIEVEMENTS
Montalvo Fellow – Lucas Residency
Quality Paperback Book Award for Non-Fiction
Guardian Book Prize Finalist
New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Seattle Post Intelligencer Best Book of the Year
Library Journal Best Book of the Year 1999
National Book Critics Circle Finalist
Honor Book of the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association 2008/2009
One of the Ten Best Books of the Year, Washington Post Book World
One of the Ten Best Books of the Year, Portland Oregonian
One of the Los Angeles Times’ Favorite Books of the Year
One of the Best Books of the Year, Bookmarks Magazine
San Francisco Chronicle Best Seller List
Barnes & Noble Discovery Writer
Border’s Original Voice
Dear Mr. Pham,
Our class is currently reading about Catfish and Mandala. We are all fascinated by your adventures and hope to meet you in person.
Hi Quynh,
Thanks for writing. Glad to know you all want to meet me
But the person is usually less interesting than the author and certainly far less heroic than the narrator–who is, in effect, a creation of both the author as well as the reader.
Good luck with your papers on my book. Feel free to tell your teacher that I urge him/her to give you all “A+” !
Cheers,
Andrew