Saigon

Saigon, a city of the former South Vietnam that is now known in unified Vietnam as Ho Chi Minh City, was where Andrew Pham lived as a boy before his family escaped Vietnam by boat. They left just as Saigon was falling to the Viet Cong in 1975, and the book has several descriptions of the chaos and danger in the streets of that time. The other face of Saigon in the book is as the contemporary Ho Chi Minh City, where Andrew stayed with extended family during his bicycle tour of the country. He described the poverty, the exoticism, and the decadence of the city today, often comingling these impressions with his memories from childhood of the city that he persisted throughout the book in calling Saigon.

San Jose

San Jose was the California city where the Pham family eventually lived after their immigration to America. They...