Praise for Monkey Bridge

The American Dream With a Vietnamese Twist, Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, August 19, 1997

”My dilemma,” says Mai, the narrator of Lan Cao’s affecting first novel, ”was that, seeing both sides to everything, I belonged to neither.” Mai lives at once in the past and the present, haunted by the memories of her Vietnamese youth and determined at the same time to create a new life for herself in America. On one hand, she shares the immigrant fears of her mother; on the other, she shares the shiny teen-age dreams of her friends — college, a career, hanging out at the mall. 

In ”Monkey Bridge,” Ms. Cao, who left Vietnam in 1975 and now teaches international law at the Brooklyn Law School, tells the story of a family fractured by the Vietnam War (or, as the Vietnamese call it, the American war). It is a story about immigrants grappling with the mind-boggling possibilities and confusions of American life, reinventing themselves as they go along. But is also a story about the collision of public events and private lives, and the devastating consequences of cultural and emotional dislocation on the members of a single family.

Moving back and forth between Mai’s first-person reminiscences and journals written by her mother, Thanh, Ms. Cao does a sensitive job of delineating the complicated relationship between a mother and a daughter, a relationship that has been turned upside down by their move to the United States. Back home in Saigon, Mai not only found comfort in ”the solid geometry” of her mother’s life, but also deferred to her politely like a model Confucian daughter. Here in the Virginia suburbs, Mai is the one who quickly masters the language; she is also the one who tells her mother what is ”acceptable or unacceptable behavior.”

In Saigon, Thanh would buy dozens of hummingbirds and canaries and release them in the garden to generate positive karma for the family. Here in America, such charming gestures, along with her belief in curses and countercurses, are rejected by her teen-age daughter as ”bad fortune-cookie advice.” Mai’s impatience will turn to concern, however, when a stroke sends Thanh to the hospital, and Mai is forced to become her caretaker, overseeing her convalescence and guarding her fragile emotional health.

Their relationship is hardly the only thing to undergo a sea change. As Mai observes, many Vietnamese immigrants arrived in the United States without identification papers, and the lack of proper documentation has conferred on them the ability to invent themselves anew. Sometimes the changes are cosmetic ones, made for simple vanity’s sake: a woman who doesn’t like having been born in the Year of the Rat gives herself a new birthday in the Year of the Tiger when she applies for a Social Security card. Sometimes the changes are more fundamental: a bar girl who once worked in a nightclub frequented by American soldiers gives herself a new past as a virtuous Confucian teacher from a small village in a distant province.

”Here, in the vehemently anti-Vietcong refugee community,” Ms. Cao writes, ”draft dodgers and ordinary foot soldiers could become decorated veterans of battlefields as famous as Kontum and Pleiku and Xuan Loc. It was the Vietnamese version of the American Dream; a new spin, the Vietnam spin, to the old immigrant faith in the future.”

Intent on shielding her daughter from the brute reality of her family’s history, Thanh, too, has put a spin on her past. The story she tells Mai, the story she has presented to the world, is a fairy tale with a tragic ending: poor peasant girl is adopted by a rich landlord, sent to convent school and married off to a handsome intellectual. She leaves behind the green rice fields of the delta for a custard yellow house on a Saigon boulevard and gives birth to a beautiful baby girl.

It is only as the war escalates that Thanh’s world begins to fall apart: after her husband suddenly dies in his sleep, Thanh decides to move the family to the United States. With the help of one of her husband’s friends who is an American military officer, she sends Mai to the United States; she and her aged father, Baba Quan, will follow in a few months. The day they are to leave, however, something terrible happens: Baba Quan does not arrive at the appointed meeting place, and Thanh is forced to leave without him.

As Mai begins to look into her mother’s past, she slowly discovers that this official version of their family’s history conceals an even sadder, darker story — a story involving marital betrayal, political intrigue and coldblooded revenge. Although Ms. Cao’s orchestration of these melodramatic revelations is far from fluent — incongruous developments and clumsy foreshadowings making us suspect that something is afoot long before we’re supposed to — she more than makes up for this weakness with her authoritative and subtly nuanced delineation of character and place.

Mai, Thanh and their family and friends are rendered with fierce, unsentimental detail, and the disparate worlds they have called home — from the tiny villages of the Mekong Delta to the bustling streets of Saigon to the air-conditioned malls of Virginia — are made equally palpable to the reader. With ”Monkey Bridge,” Ms. Cao has not only made an impressive debut, but also joined writers like Salman Rushdie and Bharati Mukherjee in mapping the state of exile and its elusive geography of loss and hope.

Isabel Allende, Introduction of Lan Cao, Book Passage, Corte Madera, July 28, 1997

Having Book Passage as my second home – I sleep here sometimes in a sleeping bag on that corner, and Elaine Petrocelli as a friend has many advantages for which I am very grateful. There are some inconveniences, however. One of them is that Elaine gives me stacks of manuscripts, uncorrected proofs and unreadable books and expects me to give her a report on each one of them. Books pile up in my home like the bricks of a Babel Tower and the task of reading them has seriously affected my nerves and my sex life.

Once in a while, however, she surprises me with a rare jewel. It may come in the form of an unassuming book with a nondescript cover from a new author I know nothing about. After reading a couple of paragraphs I realize, in gratitude and awe, that this book is an invitation to explore, hand in hand with the author a realm from which it won’t be easy to escape. I fall under the spell of a story that will not abandon me for weeks, months, maybe, forever, a memorable story that echoes inside me and speaks of my own fears and hopes. This was the case of Monkey Bridge by Lan Cao. And this is why I am here: to tell you that you can’t leave Book Passage tonight without a copy of this book.

A monkey bridge is a slim bridge made of long bamboo sticks. You walk on one piece of bamboo and there are two ropes or bamboos on the sides that you can hold on to. It moves up and down and from side to side with each step. It is like walking on a tight rope over an abyss. It can be a nightmare, unless you are a Vietnamese peasant and have used it all your life. This is how Lan Cao describes it:

“From afar, or even up close, the bridge is nothing more than a thin, unsteady shimmer of bamboo. It could take outsiders, or the uninitiated, by complete surprise, when they realize that this, this uncommanding structure, lacking completely in width and strength, was what they were expected to place their entire body weight on. And more than that, propel themselves forward and across. The secret of such crossings lies in the ability to set aside the process itself in favor of seeing the act whole and complete. It would be dangerous, of course. But we had no other bridge and rivers had to be crossed, so why not pretend that we could do it with instinct and ease?”

Lan Cao’s book is truly a monkey bridge between two cultures, two countries, two races: Vietnam and the United States. To cross a bridge like that you need to move swiftly, never looking down, or hesitating, you have to feel confident that the rhythm of your steps and the natural balance of your body will take you to the other side. This is exactly what Lan Cao does in her book. With incredible lightness, balance and elegance she goes back and forth on the bridge, crossing over an abyss of pain, loss, separation and exile, connecting on one level the opposite realities of Vietnam and North America, and on a deeper level the realities of the material world and the world of the spirits. It is a story of survivors and refugees, but it is not only about death and the horrors of war; it is really about the unbearable love of a mother for her daughter and how she liberates her from the bad karma and the hosts of the past. It is a moving story with a surprise ending.

In this extraordinary book Lan Cao gives us a new perspective on Vietnam. Now we can see the war from the rat holes, the tunnels, the boats, the villages burnt to ashes and the rice fields turned to deserts by a killer with an innocent name: Orange Agent. Like the young protagonist of her novel, Lan Cao was born in Vietnam and immigrated to the United States in 1975 just before the defeat and withdrawal of American troops from Saigon. Like her protagonist, she was born in a country marked by the scars of a thousand years of violence, a beautiful land that has been invaded for centuries, yet never conquered. And like her, she became a modern educated American woman. But the memories will always be there. Like her country she has indelible scars

Once I heard a poet describe scars as “proud flesh.” And proud flesh they are indeed because they remind us of our story, our strength, our capacity to heal.

Thank you, Lan Cao, for this extraordinary book, for giving us the opportunity to see the other side of the Vietnam War and for sharing your story and your proud flesh with us. Thank you for carrying us so gracefully through a fragile and precious monkey bridge.

Publishers Weekly, May 26, 1997: p64, Book Review (Starred Review)

Weaving modern Vietnamese history, cultural traditions and folktales into a semi-autobiographical story of immigrant experience, this deeply felt novel marks a strong new voice in Asian-American fiction. In 1975, 13-year-old Mai Nguyen and her mother are airlifted from Saigon just before the fall of the city, leaving behind Mai’s grandfather, who missed his rendezvous with them. His true identity, and his eventual fate, is the novel’s central secret. 

As Mai tries to adapt to her new life in northern Virginia’s “Little Saigon,” she must also care for her ailing mother, whose superstitions and distrust of the new culture heighten Mai’s growing identity crisis. Years after their rescue, she feels that she is still just a visitor in a foreign land. When she discovers her mother’s journal, however, she gradually comes to understand the love and sorrow her taciturn mother can’t express. Cao (Everything You Need to Know About Asian Americans) evokes mother and daughter beautifully, yet obliquely, illuminating their guilt over having survived the war. Vietnam comes alive with a beauty and mystery rarely seen in novels published here. There are minor flaws: some florid descriptions, some unnecessary obscurity in Mai’s flashbacks to Vietnam and a melodramatic conclusion to Mrs. Nguyen’s torment. Overall, however, Cao’s wry humor and compassionate insight enrich her haunting story.

Donna Seaman, June 1, 1997, Booklist, Pg. 1658(1) Vol. V93 No. N19-20

Not only is this Lan’s first novel, it is one of the finest dramatizations of the experiences of Vietnamese refugees in the U.S. Lan herself was airlifted out of Saigon in 1975, and she has transformed her prismatic memories into a stunning and powerful drama. The title refers to the tenuous bamboo bridges that sway above the rivers of the verdant Vietnamese countryside, a resonant symbol of the fragility of links between people and nations, the past and the future. 

As Lan’s young heroine, Mai Nguyen, learns over the course of her war-torn childhood and abrupt relocation to Farmington, Connecticut, even the strongest connections to home and loved ones can break under the weight of events greater than ourselves. Mai and her widowed mother escape the terrible aftermath of the war, but while Mai takes readily to American life, her mother, haunted by her losses, recoils from the place she calls “the great brand-new.” Much of Lan’s tale evokes classic immigrant quandaries, but her vivid characters have the added burden of being perceived as the enemy in a shameful war, a twist Lan explores with exquisite sensitivity.

Jeanne Schinto, The Women’s Review of Books, pages 10-11, July 1997

Over twenty years ago, in the communal fitting room of a discount clothing store on the outskirts of Washington, DC, where I used to live, I happened to glimpse the scarred body of a Vietnamese woman as she tried on a dress. I had seen the war on TV, just like everyone else; I had also seen our own maimed vets. But the woman in the fitting room brought me up short. I can’t even begin to imagine this kind of suffering, I thought to myself.

Lan Cao’s deeply moving first novel, Monkey Bridge, has had something of the same effect on me as that glimpse of scarred flesh. Only this time, thanks to Cao’s gifts for story-telling and making metaphors, I finally can begin to imagine the lives of the people who settled in the “Little Saigons” that sprang up in Arlington and Falls Church, Virginia, and who found themselves, like our vets, “an awkward reminder of a war the whole country was trying to forget.”

Monkey Bridge’s publisher claims that this is the first fictional exploration of the Vietnamese experience in America. (Another book which many readers may be familiar with, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman’s Journey From War to Peace, by Le Ly Hayslip with Jay Wurtz, is a non-fiction memoir.) Cao herself left Vietnam as a teenager in 1975, so she might well have written a factual account instead of a novel. I’m glad she didn’t. What makes her book special is not its documentary or essayistic aspects, but its memorable characterizations, its pattern of images and the insights that those images invite.

When Monkey Bridge opens, in 1978, seventeen-year-old Mai Nyugen and her widowed mother, Thanh, have been living in an apartment in Falls Church for three and a half years. With the help of a US Army colonel who became their family friend in Vietnam, Mai was airlifted out of Saigon before it collapsed; Thanh’s escape followed, on the day of the capital siege. Since then, Mai has learned English, and much more. Having yielded almost instantly to the “sly but seductive pull” of the American dream, she wonders: “How did those numerous Chinatowns and Little Italies sustain the will to maintain a distance, the desire to inhabit the edge and margin of American life?”

Thanh, in contrast, has not adjusted well to the strange country of her exile, where black, not white, is the color of mourning, and where schools use genetics, not karma, to explain things. In the open-air markets of Saigon they knew her “slick bargaining skills, and she, in turn, knew how to navigate with grace through the extravagant prices and rehearsed huffiness.” No haggling is permitted at the Seven-Eleven, and “the precision of previously packaged food” in the A & P makes her feel useless, unmoored.

As a result, Mai, the “outsider with inside information,” is forced into the premature adulthood of the classic immigrant child:

The dreadful truth was simply this: we were going through life in reverse, and I was the one who would help my mother through the hard scrutiny of ordinary suburban life. I would have to forego the luxury of adolescent experiments and temper tantrums, so that I could scoop my mother out of harm’s way and give her sanctuary. Now, when we stepped into the exterior world, I was the one who told my mother what was acceptable or unacceptable behavior. (p.35)

It’s familiar literary terrain – only the ethnic group has changed; but Cao has created fresh archetypes through the use of exquisite detail and nuanced language, and because she understands so well the particular historical moment that Mai and Thanh are forced to occupy. “In one way or another,” Mai notes, “my mother and her friends were not much unlike the physically wounded. They had continued to hang on to their Vietnam lives, caressing the shape of a country that was no longer there, in a way not much different from amputees who continued to feel the silhouette of their absent limbs.”

When Thanh suffers a stroke, it’s bad luck for Mai, too, who hopes to go away to college. If only she could locate her grandfather, Baba Quan, who, for mysterious reasons, was left behind when Saigon fell; if only he could come to the United States, then, Mai thinks, her problems would be solved. “He could step in and care for [Thanh], and…she would not be – would not feel – abandoned.”

The parallel story of Baba Quan is told by Thanh in her private journal, a treasure-trove of Vietnamese folklore and myth that intersects Mai’s narrative. Through it we learn Baba Quan’s true identity; the secret history of Thanh’s birth; and the sorrows of her marriage to Mai’s father, who died not in the war but in his sleep at the age of fifty. A philosophy professor and a member of the opposition movement that presented itself as the alternative to both the Vietcong and the government, he first saw Thanh as a young woman in white pantaloons crossing a monkey bridge. A monkey bridge is essentially a tightrope with handrails for crossing over water, comprised of a narrow bamboo pole that is roped together by vines and mangrove roots. It’s a mode of transportation only for “the least fainthearted” and “the most agile.” It’s also what Thanh and Mai – and every immigrant – must attempt to cross on their way from one culture to the next.

Thanh’s best friend in Little Saigon, Mrs. Bay, has made a much more successful crossing than Thanh, even though neither one of them can make sense of “The Bionic Woman.” Mrs. Bay has literally devoured America: a doughnut baker at the Mekong Grocery in Falls Church, she has grown fat since her arrival. She has also changed her birth date and, in consequence, her astrological sign, making herself the superior of her dead husband – this in preparation for their reunification in the afterlife. In a refugee community, customarily short on birth certificates and other documentation, personal histories are often altered. “Out of the rain [of war] came a clatter of new personalities,” Mai observes.

But Mrs. Bay doesn’t merely provide comic relief. For one thing, she knows the truth about Baba Quan (though it is up to Thanh to tell Mai about it). For another, she is the link to the GIs whose intercontinental migration has not suited them any better than the refugees’ has. It is her presence at the Mekong Grocery that has made it a popular gathering place for them.

She was a keeper of the Old World, and to them she represented the hidden pan of their lives, which they could not show to others, most of all to other Americans. In some ways, like us, they were custodians of a loss everyone knew about but refused to acknowledge. These American men who frequented the store had been too altered by Vietnam, its hidden mine-fields and burial grounds…. Those who had been in Vietnam, the vets and us, were forever set apart from everyone else, who hadn’t. (pp.64-65)

In Northern Virginia, amid ghosts and monuments dedicated to our own Civil War, Thanh and Mai do find peace of a sort, each in her own way, though Mai’s may be temporary. In the end, she is headed for Mount Holyoke (Cao’s own alma mater) in her red-pleated skirt and Dorothy Hamill haircut – a certifiable American success. But the acceptance letter can’t diminish her deep sense of loneliness, nor change the fact that the new personality she has forged to make such acceptances possible is partly a mask. She has crossed the monkey bridge, and rightly fears she is about to discover what she has left behind.

Andrea Louie, A Tale of Immigrants, and a World We Still Don’t Know, Chicago Tribune, July 27, 1997

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the architecture of words can serve as an illustration for an entire world. Everyone remembers the little Vietnamese girl whose photograph was captured for history as she ran, naked, down a street, screaming from the napalm burning her skin. This picture’s power is that it distills to a single image the overwhelming horror of war. But it never was the entire story.

In matters of faith, it is considered vital to bear witness. One senses that new novelist Lan Cao feels this burden deeply: After all, she is reportedly the first Vietnamese-American fiction writer to be published by a major press.

Even before reading Page 1 of her lovely and sorrowful work, “Monkey Bridge,” one can tell that Cao is urgent to cover a lot of ground. The book is dedicated to her mother (1925-1992), and the few lines from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” that serve as an epigraph promise, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

So while the photograph of the little Vietnamese girl helps us confront our inhumanity to ourselves, Cao seeks to say that there is much more. There is vivid landscape and subtlety of culture; there are delicate yet fiery tastes to tease the palate; and there is a vast world that we still do not know.

A tiny language lesson on Vietnamese near the end of the novel serves as a wise summation:



“The verbs in our language are not conjugated, because our sense of time is tenseless, indivisible, and knows no end. And that is what I fear. I fear our family history . . . and the imprint it creates in our children’s lives as it rips through one generation and tears apart the next.”

These words are written in a journal by Nguyen Van Binh, a woman who escaped from Saigon during the final, chaotic days when American troops withdrew from Vietnam in 1975. In advance, she had sent her 13-year-old daughter, Mai, to live with friends in America. Their transition to life in the U.S. is the story–at once funny and painful–that has been told by countless immigrants. Nguyen is addicted to watching “The Bionic Woman,” yet cannot navigate the enormous, air-conditioned American supermarket. Mai is mortified by her mother’s loud voice in public places but feels overwhelmingly protective of her even as Mai tries to escape by attending a faraway college.

The ghost who haunts and guides them is Nguyen’s father, Baba Quan, who remains lost in Vietnam. Nguyen and her father had missed each other at their rendezvous on April 30, 1975, when a car was supposed to take them to an American plane, and Nguyen had to leave without him. Guilt and love move her, again and again, to revisit memories of childhood, her beloved French convent boarding school, her marriage at age 15 to a dashing Vietnamese intellectual-activist, and the war that ultimately destroyed her world.

The book’s title refers to the thin bamboo bridges used by rural Vietnamese for centuries to cross rivers, especially during flood seasons. The allusion serves as a graceful and evocative metaphor for Nguyen and her daughter as they attempt to navigate from their past to reach what they hope will be the safer mooring of life in America.

While the novel is essentially constructed as the often-told two stories of mother and daughter, Mai’s slim presence and relatively meager challenges do little to move the plot forward. The bulk of the novel is narrated in her first-person voice, and this does a disservice to the mother’s more powerful story.

Readers may be touched that years later, Mai returns to her childhood family room and finds a still-shiny penny where she had hidden it, in the crevice between the carpet and the wall, but such passages pale emotionally compared to Nguyen’s narrative. The mother, for example, remembers the young men of her village whose index fingers were cut off by families desperate to save their sons from the draft: “It was 1968, and Vietnam was becoming a land of fingerless eighteen-year-old boys.”

The secret journal in which Nguyen records her furtive fears is discovered and read by Mai, and this is how the younger woman learns her family secrets. The use of a diary to relay information seems like an awkward literary device in this novel, especially because Nguyen is supposed to be partially incapacitated after suffering a stroke. But these are also the most beautifully rendered passages, and often the most interesting.

For example, in an especially telling passage, Nguyen recalls that in Vietnam, well-intentioned American servicemen gave villagers shiny new cooking stoves that did not emit smoke. In less than a month, however, the villagers came to realize that the metal stoves were worthless: Whenever they had cooked with their old stoves, the smoke would exterminate the termites and other pests that lived in their thatched roofs. Now, the pests “suddenly thrived, causing damage not just to the roofs but even the foundations of houses.



“And so, when the men came back for another visit, they were surprised to see their stoves blackened and abandoned like carcasses along the roadside.”

Western readers are fortunate to have Cao contribute to the modest body of work that goes beyond wartime and reaches for Vietnam’s lush heart. She joins Robert Olen Butler (who won a Pulitzer Prize for “A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain”) and Duong Thu Huong, whose works are available to us in beautiful translation from the original Vietnamese (“Paradise of the Blind”).

It is the splendid poetry of such works that provides an emotional and visual illustration of what it means to be human.

John Marshall, An Immigrant’s Tale: Novel First to Tell The Experiences of Vietnamese in U.S., Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 26, 1997

Bookshelves groan under the weight of books written about the Vietnam War. Combat accounts. Histories of diplomacy and decision-making. Memoirs. The war glimpsed through the prism of its crucial personalities. Investigative reports. Examinations of the social upheaval caused by the war. All aspects of the Vietnam War have already been written about and put between the covers of the book, it sometimes seems.

Until now. It suddenly becomes clear that all this coverage of the Vietnam War and its impact has been one-sided, if not myopic. Lan Cao’s “Monkey Bridge” (Viking, 260 pages, $23.95) points out that painful truth, with its fascinating inside look at the experiences of the two million Vietnamese who fled their homeland because of the war, resettled in the United States and built new lives. This powerful and insightful book is a bona fide first both for its author and for American publishing, the initial novel about the war and its aftermath written by a Vietnamese American.

This sort of cultural and historical milestone might weigh heavily on some writers, especially one in an adopted country. But Cao, a 35-year-old associate professor of international law at Brooklyn Law School, faces her first with polish and aplomb.



“My main concern was portraying sensitively an experience that was so raw for many Vietnamese Americans,” Cao said this week in Seattle. “I never expected this would be the book on the topic. There will certainly be other books by other writers.”

Cao, though, is accustomed to setting the example with her accomplishments, from her arrival in the United States in 1975 at age 14, only months before the fall of Saigon (where she lived), through her high school days in suburban Virginia to her studies at the prestigious Mount Holyoke College and Yale Law School.

Mai Nguyen, the young heroine of “Monkey Bridge,” follows a path remarkably similar to her creator’s: not only from the same area of Vietnam to the same area of the States, but also to the same college, and even having the same hairstyle (“the Dorothy Hamill wedge”). This may be the age of memoir in American publishing, but Cao insists that her own experience was only a starting point for the character in what is definitely a novel, not a work of non-fiction.



“I wanted to really push the parameters with what I wrote,” she says. “I wanted to go deep into that area of ambiguity and extremes that immigrants experience – to push to the limit, look at every facet, without being bound by my own life.”

In Cao’s description, the Vietnamese American experience is like that of other immigrants to this country in many ways: the sense of dislocation; the loss of identity; the longing for what’s past; the strangeness of new ways; the inevitable gulf between those of younger generations, who adapt easily to momentous change, and those of older generations, who find that difficult, if not impossible. As Mai’s mother laments, “What should it matter now, this old, century-old way of life, here in the great brand-new?”

But one part of the experience for Vietnamese Americans still remains singular, separating them from other immigrants, the way that they found themselves forever linked with a lost war that Americans would rather forget. Erasing that past, or at least hiding it, became the only way to survive the ambivalence and even hostility from many Americans. Vietnamese immigrants shared this daunting predicament, ironically, with the Americans who had fought in their country and come back to the States, where they also often felt like strangers in a strange land.

As Cao writes, “They too had been trained to decipher in strangers’ eyes the silent fact that they had failed to produce a victory. Vietnam had been their life, and now it must become nothing.”

Cao’s own way of overcoming that past was, as it has been for so many immigrants, education. She submerged herself in her studies and succeeded brilliantly, although she looks back at that period with a battle-weariness born by what she endured from within herself and from others. “It was very tough for me,” Cao emphasizes. “I became convinced that the way out for me was through education – I inherited that from my culture – so I felt under immense pressure. And I had many, many bad experiences with teachers in high school who were racist, sometimes latent racists, sometimes overt.



“There was one teacher I finally confronted, which was very difficult for me to do, and I told him that he was deliberately lowering my grade in math because I was Vietnamese. And he told me that that was because ‘you people take all the easy courses to get good grades above the American students.’ ‘But I’m taking advanced placement English,’ I told him, and he just shrugged his shoulders. I was so shocked – I had expected him to say, ‘Oh my God, I’m sorry, I made a mistake computing your grade – that I brought it up to my counselor right afterward, then the school principal. And they did nothing.”

Cao has gone on to carve a dual career for herself, a mix that satisfies different sides of her personality. Writing is her “passion,” solitary work she begins every day before dawn breaks, so that turning on her computer becomes an act that she likens to “approaching an altar.” Teaching provides the satisfactions of group endeavor, of sharing knowledge and helping others learn.

Teaching and its required research has also given the New York City resident the chance to return to Vietnam on two occasions since she left, trips in 1991 and 1996 that gave her the opportunity to visit parts of the country she had never visited and see things she had never seen. That included the “monkey bridges” in the Delta area south of Saigon that had given her the title for her first novel.

She looked up with wonder at these beautiful, but fragile structures that span rivers in Vietnam with a single pole of bamboo for the traveler’s feet and a single pole providing a hand railing, these traditional bridges held together by nothing more than vines and mangrove roots, making them definitely not for the faint of heart. And the writer immediately knew she had the perfect metaphor for the difficult crossing that Vietnamese Americans had to navigate from their old country and their old way of life to the new one ahead.

Novel moves between Vietnam and America, Santa Fe, New Mexican (New Mexico) July 20, 1997, Brent Kliewer

No other event in the past 30 years has played a bigger hand in the shaping of this country’s psyche than the Vietnam War.

After World War II, had we denounced the French colonial hold on Vietnam in favor of the country’s independence — after all, at the time Ho Chi Minh cited the Declaration of Independence as a major inspiration — maybe, just maybe, this would have turned out differently. Instead, we pursued an aggressive policy of the only good commie is a dead commie, but came up against a style of guerrilla warfare unbeknownst to our most seasoned military experts, and quite frankly got our butts kicked. Our soldiers returned home to be treated like pariahs, disgraced and held in contempt. Our way of dealing with this humiliating defeat was to ignore the people who fought.

Though our megalomania more than diminished our share of the responsibility for the complete obliteration of a culture, stories from the Vietnamese diaspora — from the Vietnamese perspective and not to be confused with the hammering apologists like Oliver Stone, whose film Heaven and Earth was insufferable — has begun to find expression in the arts.

The most recent and certainly one of the most satisfying novels in this vein is Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge, an intense exploration of cultural difference and identity, of the universal process of growing-up.

Lan is a professor of international law at Brooklyn University. She left Vietnam, in 1975, just before the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Monkey Bridge is her first novel, and while it technically is a work of fiction, it reads like a memoir.

Moving between past and present, between Vietnam and America, Monkey Bridge is narrated in two parallel, interlocking stories. One is that of Mai Nguyen, a young Vietnamese immigrant who at the tender age of 13 comes to American just before the fall of Saigon in 1975. Mais’s road from Vietnam to America is pitted with the strange juxtapositions of a life in transformation. She sorts out cultural difference, struggling to fit in with the American dream while maintaining her own identity, trying to get over her horrific experiences of the war in the face of Americas amnesia over an experience to wrenching to confront.

“We each had our own way. My mother had hers, I had mine. My philosophy was simply this: if I didn’t see it at night, in nightmares or otherwise, it never happened. I had my routines: constant vigilance, my antidote to the sin of sleeping and the undomesticated world of dreams. I reached for the pills, my kind of comfort — verifiable peace in every hundred-milligram pellet of reliable, synthetic caffeine.”

In the midst of all of this, she must wrestle with her own adolescence – with establishing relationships, learning to love, preparing for college, caring for her widowed mother, Tranh, who has recently suffered a stroke, and attempting to establish contact with her grandfather on her mother’s side, Baba Quan, who mysteriously disappeared on the day he was to be airlifted out of Vietnam and hasn’t been heard from since.

As Mai tries to come to grips with her past through the discovery of her mother’s journals, which she one day finds buried in a drawer. These journals, which Lan Cao italicizes throughout her novel, open a window to another place and time. They tell of her private thoughts, as well as her family’s history in Vietnam — most particularly of her mother, her grandmother and her grandfather — and the secrets told therein.

“Karma is the antithesis of Manifest Destiny, the kind of Manifest Destiny they teach my daughter in her history book about the great American West. Ours is not a nation of pioneers. I truly don’t understand the American preoccupation with cowboys who win and Indians who lose. It must be the American sense of invincibility, like a child’s sense that nothing she does can possibly have real consequences. Our southward expansion we study with sorrow and shame, not with a sense of conquest and pride. Karma is based less on rights and entitlements than on moral duty and obligation, less on celebration of victories than on repentance and atonement.

But my Vietnamese born daughter would never accept this way of thinking. The world to her is a new frontier, clean, pristine, ready to be molded and shaped by any pair of skillful and pioneering hands.”

Through these diaries, Mai is pulled back into Vietnam and into her family toward the revelation of the true identity, and eventual fate, of her grandfather, the novels central secret.

The title refers to the “row of pedestrian overpasses that hovered thirty meters or so above a web of canals. The villagers called them monkey bridges, because the bridge was a thin pole of bamboo no wider than a grown man’s foot, roped together by vines and mangrove roots. A railing was tied to one side, so you could at least hold on to it as you made your way across like a monkey. Only the least fainthearted, the most agile would think about using this unsturdy suspension they call a bridge.”

Lan’s monkey bridge serves as a significant metaphor, one whose distance is measured, not in feet or miles, but in terms of tradition. Lan beautifully evokes a meaning of “exile” far beyond the obvious Little Saigon in Falls Church, Virginia to the rites of marriage, “a special kind of exile, the kind that makes you an exile in your own country.” Exile is leaving everything you know and love at the age of fifteen in order to live, eat, sleep, breathe with strangers you suddenly have to adopt twenty-four hours a day as your family members”

.

Monkey Bridge is a rich, fascinating, atmospheric novel, one which offers a new perspective on the assimilation experience, as well as an intense evocation of a mother-daughter relationship. It’s also remarkable in its encapsulation of the attendant national strife that gripped this country during and after the war.

Merle Rubin, Riveting Tales of Romance and War, Christian Science Monitor, July 14, 1997

A Vietnamese girl hoping to be accepted at Mt. Holyoke College is the heroine of Lan Cao’s poignant first novel, Monkey Bridge, which offers an eye-opening look at the experience of Vietnamese immigrants in America.

Mai Nguyen and her widowed, ailing mother fled their native land in 1975 on one of the last helicopters to leave Saigon. Mai’s father, a progressive intellectual opposed both to the Vietcong and the South Vietnamese leadership, died some years before. Mai’s maternal grandfather, a peasant farmer, has been left behind. Worried about her mother’s loneliness in a new country, Nguyen tries to enlist the support of Uncle Michael, an American veteran of the Vietnam conflict and a close friend of her family, in finding a way to bring the old man to join them.

With impressive intelligence, deep emotional power, and a delicacy born of strength, Cao unfolds a story of a mother and a daughter that is also a story about the changes that unravel and rebuild the lives of nations and individuals.

We first watch as Nguyen undergoes the unsettling experience, common to children of immigrants, of becoming a kind of parent to her parent, correcting her mother’s inappropriate behavior. Knowledge and skills that once served the older woman well when haggling with vendors at an open-air Saigon market are embarrassingly out-of-place at an American supermarket.

Next, we are given a very different insight into the mother’s character from a notebook that she keeps. “Everything that smells of life before, my daughter thinks she can scour clean… How can I teach her that the worthwhile enterprise is the enterprise of learning to live with our scars? … Her own mother, the one she sees as obsolete and defective, is a woman who’s gone through more wars than she’ll ever know, who’s maneuvered through more cultures than I hope she’ll ever have to negotiate, who’s memorized book after book of Baudelaire and Moliere and Verlaine.”



There are many more surprising turns and revelations taking us deeper into the complex heart of Mai’s heritage, as a daughter of urban intellectuals, a granddaughter of tenant rice-farmers, and a survivor of a devastating war. Cao, herself a Vietnamese refugee who graduated from Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass., and who is now a law professor at Brooklyn College, is a gifted, versatile writer, equally adept at discussing the complexities of the war, evoking the many layers of Vietnam’s long history, or portraying the emotional half-tones of a mother-daughter relationship.

Judith Coburn, Starting Over, LA Times, September 14, 1997

A monkey bridge–three bamboo stalks lashed with vines–figures in two of this novel’s turning points. Apparitions: A man first sees his wife-to-be in white silk fluttering above him on such a bridge; a trapped American Marine glimpses through the mist the figure of a Vietnamese friend floating above a minefield and signaling the way out of the lethal maze.

In “Monkey Bridge,” the first novel by Vietnamese American writer Lan Cao, Vietnamese refugees, the relatives they left behind and the Americans they meet reach for each other across just such a simple and magical connection.

It’s the late 1970s, and teenager Mai Nguyen has been settled in northern Virginia with her mother since fleeing Vietnam in 1975 during the fall of Saigon. They live in what the refugees call “Little Saigon” where they can talk, eat and shop Vietnamese under the watchful eyes of their own fortunetellers. Just like the old country.

But it wasn’t a clean getaway; it never is. Family, friends and the native land still haunt them. Somehow, in the rush to escape from Vietnam, Mai’s grandfather Baba Quan didn’t make the rendezvous point, and there’s been no word of his whereabouts. The American post-war fever of revenge prevents any telephone calls, mail or visits between the Americans and Vietnamese. A curtain of stars and stripes has fallen, and Baba Quan is all but dead to his daughter and granddaughter. And like other ghostly visitations recalled in the story, he hovers over Mai’s and her mother’s dream-life as if on a monkey bridge.

In America, the generation gap that inevitably opens up in immigrant families divides Mai and her mother. While her mother and her friends build Little Saigon into a sanctuary, Mai wants to be American, chattering in English, mastering the supermarket check-out line and hanging out in fast-food restaurants with new, non-Vietnamese friends. Cao movingly evokes the cultural gap between teenager Mai’s bedazzlement at Safeway’s air-conditioned efficiency and its produce embalmed in plastic and her mother’s longing for the hustle, bustle and bargaining of Saigon’s open-air markets. Mai, like most immigrant children, becomes the go-between, translating Vietnamese and American languages, customs and laws. The child becomes the parent and the parent the child, as everything new must be interpreted and explained.

As do all teenagers, Mai tries to put over what she can on the grown-ups, telling her mother that American custom requires students to go to college far from their families, “the equivalent of a martial artist leaving her village to study Kung Fu at the Shaolin Temple or even Siddharta Gautama going away to seek enlightenment under the bo tree.” She’s too guilty to tell her mother that Little Saigon is a prison to her, not an oasis. In one of the book’s most moving chapters, Mai brings her American friend Bobbie to watch a Vietnamese fortuneteller minister to a reverent crowd of her mother’s friends. To the older refugees, the fortuneteller’s prognostications are gold. But to Mai, who already has crossed over into the new world, it’s just a fun scene.

In Cao’s hands, there is sometimes a hilarious cast to these cross-cultural matings. When her mother is hospitalized with a stroke, Mai discovers that the older woman’s favorite TV show is “The Bionic Woman.” It seems the character’s bionic ears remind Mai’s mother of her own long ears, or the Buddha’s, which droop halfway down the side of his face. Such ears are to the Vietnamese a sign of longevity and luck. But as for the program’s actual plot, the teenager must translate:

“The Bionic Woman had just finished rescuing a young girl, from drowning in a lake where she’d gone swimming against her mother’s wishes. Once out of harm’s way, Jaime made the girl promise she’d be more careful next time and listen to her mother.

“Translation: the Bionic Woman rescued the girl from drowning in the lake, but commended her for her magnificent deeds, since the girl had heroically jumped into the water to rescue a prized police dog.

” ‘Where’s the dog?’ my mother would ask. ‘I don’t see him.’

” ‘He’s not there anymore, they took him to the vet.’ “

Traditionalists, both Vietnamese and American, may bristle at such cultural mish-mashing. But Cao, one of the first Vietnamese American novelists to publish in English, shows, as do other immigrant writers before her, how the new Americans believe far more fervently in the American dream than do longtime citizens. Mai’s mother and her friends may cling to their old language and their fortuneteller, but they’re just as avid about the “possibility for rebirth, reinvention and other euphemisms for half-truths and outright lies” that starting over in America promises.

The novel’s weaknesses oddly recapitulate the cost of the immigrants’ protean approach to life in America. The novelist overreaches wildly, especially at the end of the novel, where she attempts to condense Vietnamese history and the war with the Americans into a few hyperactive pages. After early chapters of lyrical and subtle writing, the novel rockets to a close with so many plot developments that it’s more like a bodice-ripper than like literary fiction. The voice of the narrator, supposedly Mai’s, is too knowing and literary to be a teenager’s. And her mother’s journal is too close to the narrator’s densely metaphoric style to ring anything but false. There are patches of psychobabble and metaphors repeated so many times that the storyteller’s spell is broken. Has becoming an American converted Cao to a culture in which big dams wash out fragile monkey bridges?

But then, even in the unconvincing mother’s journal, there are insights: “Why do children resemble their parents? . . . In my daughter’s reasoning, it is a fact, intangible but scientific, that the child can inherit the face of the parent, but not the parent’s karmic history. . . . Yet karma, my child, is nothing more than an ethical, spiritual chromosome, an amalgam of parent and child, which is as much a part of our history as DNA strands. There is no escaping it, the fact of mother and child, as synchronous and inseparable as left and right, up and down, back and front, sun and moon.”

Such writing makes the reader look forward to Cao’s next novel.

Two Stories of Loss, Love, Assimilation, Hartford Courant (Connecticut) August 17, 1997; Arts, pG3, Mary K. Feeney

Publicity material for this semi-autobiographical story suggests that this is the first novel by a “Vietnamese-American about the war experience and its aftermath.” That’s a tough fact to verify, but one thing is certain: “Monkey Bridge” is a fine, evocative novel about the assimilation of a young Vietnamese woman and the pain her family endures in the United States and in Vietnam during the war.

The title derives from the spindly footbridges over rivers in Vietnamese villages, made of bamboo, vines and mangrove roots. They’re called monkey bridges because of the awkward method of negotiating them, and they figure as meeting points in the story. But they also refer to the difficulty that Mai Nguyen and her mother, Thanh, have in adjusting to their new home in the United States.

Author Lan Cao tells two stories and skillfully intertwines them. The principal one is of Mai, 13, who leaves Vietnam just before the fall of Saigon in 1975 to live in Farmington with an American friend, whom she calls Uncle Michael, and his wife, Mary. She is later joined in the States by her mother, Thanh.

The other story, of Thanh’s life, is told through a diary, which Mai finds one day buried in a dresser drawer.

At the opening of the novel, Thanh is in an Arlington, Va., hospital, recovering from a stroke. She cries out for her father, Baba Quan, who was to have escaped with her to the United States but never appeared at the agreed-upon meeting spot in the final, dizzying days of the American
withdrawal.

Besides coping with a new life, struggling to get into college and nursing her mother back to health, Mai is haunted by the fate of her grandfather, who received citations from the American military for guiding U.S. troops through a Viet Cong minefield. Michael, her adopted uncle, tells Mai of her grandfather’s courage, reinforcing her resolve to find him and bring him to America.

It is through the reminiscences in Thanh’s diary that Mai finally discovers why her grandfather would not emigrate to America. The diary reveals much sadness — about Thanh’s mother and father, her childhood in the rice fields of Ba Xuyen and her marriage as a teenager to a Vietnamese intellectual. The textured, rich writing in the diary — from the details of wedding-night rituals to Thanh’s feeling that her daughter has betrayed her heritage — depicts the cultural past Thanh dearly wants to protect, one that Mai is slowly leaving behind.

Mai’s descriptions of life as a Vietnamese immigrant — and the reversal of roles with her mother as Mai guides her into a new culture — are telling. In Little Saigon, the preoccupation is with reinventing oneself to suit current realities.

“It was the Vietnamese version of the American Dream: a new spin, the Vietnam spin, to the old immigrant faith in the future. Not only could we become anything we wanted to be in America, we could change what we had once been in Vietnam.”

In “Monkey Bridge,” Cao skillfully spans two cultures to illuminate the depth of a family’s losses, long after the end of the Vietnam War.

Fran Bauer, A Journey Away From War To New Ground, Haunting Bridge’ Travels Beyond Saigon, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (Wisconsin) August 31, 1997. Pg. 9

For most Americans, memories of the war in Vietnam have a nightmarish quality that is better forgotten. To lose a war shakes this country’s deepest beliefs in its own invincibility.

Yet until that scar is healed, author Lan Cao theorizes that Americans will never be able to accept the Asian immigrants in their midst, or the painful reminder they bring. The novel “Monkey Bridge” steps into this difficult terrain and is among the first books to be written from the vantage of a person who was airlifted from Saigon.

For Lan Cao, the memories of war are very personal. She recalls the South Vietnamese soldiers who fought beside U.S. troops but were forced to flee their homeland when America pulled its people out of Saigon in 1975, leaving the country to fall into enemy hands.

Yet this is not a book about military conquests.

Like the span in its title, the book threads its way across the abyss of leaving one culture and taking on another. It is a balancing act, “across the thin pole of bamboo no wider than a grown man’s foot, roped together by vines and roots” that Vietnamese peasants use to cross their raging rivers. “But only the least fainthearted, the most agile would think about using this unsturdy suspension.”

It was on such a bridge that the father of Mai, the main character, first saw her mother, whom he describes as more like an apparition floating with remarkable lightness across the bridge. Mai becomes the only offspring of this unlikely alliance between a young intellectual and the daughter of a tenant farmer who carves artful lions and dragons to adorn his rice fields in the Mekong Delta.

The story unfolds as Mai comes to the United States from Saigon as a 13-year-old. Her mother follows months later but never adapts to the new culture in which she is forced to live.

For Mai, life seems to be going in reverse, as she must become the protector while her mother slips into child-like helplessness following a stroke.

Yet her mother bears the legacy of long ears, much like the Buddha’s, that let her hear beyond time and circumstance. She sees her daughter moving in new directions, relocating her roots. She knows she is losing her child to new and inescapable currents.

So she writes a diary, exposing land mines, explosive unions and the gnarled family secrets at the heart of her anguish. Past mistakes must be repaired before they become her daughter’s karma.

There are haunting moments in this novel that speak the universal language of women who fantasize their future, only to find they’ve married a stranger. Of mothers who cling to daughters as if still in the womb, only to see them grow worlds apart. Of old traditions lost.

Put another way, Mai would wipe away her mother’s scars with creams. But her mother longs to teacher her daughter the worth of learning to live with scars.

In part, “Monkey Bridge” is a mystery leading clue by clue to a startling end. But the tale also is told as a tapestry, weaving strands of Asian lore against the harsh background of a war that defiled the very land which ancestors held sacred.

And as a teenager scrambles to find new ground beneath her now-American feet, there also is the struggle of every immigrant, measuring when to cling to the old and when to grab for the new.

Francis E. Kazemek, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, November 1, 1998

Refugees. Two books, one a novel and the other a collection of short stories, that explore the lives of Vietnamese women who fled to the United States are Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge (1997) and Robert Olen Butler’s A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain (1992). 

The protagonist of Monkey Bridge is a 17-year-old high school senior who lives in the “Little Saigon” section of Falls Church, Virginia. She and her mother settled there after the fall of Saigon in 1975. Several of the stories in Butler’s collection explore the way young Vietnamese women try to adjust to their new, and often difficult, surroundings.

Two themes emerge from these works: (a) the new possibilities in the United States coupled to all that was lost in Vietnam, and (b) the altered family relationships in the strange new context. Cao’s superb first novel deals with the losses and gains through the eyes of the young narrator, Mai. She finds herself struggling with her mother and herself as she attempts to hold on to her Vietnamese heritage while at the same time becoming an educated, Western woman. She wonders “What good could 4.0 and the English novel do for an exile parent who in all likelihood would much prefer a solid, reliable child with no ambition greater than the parent’s own horizon?” (Cao, 1997, p. 206).

Mai realizes that “immigration represents unlimited possibilities for rebirth, reinvention, and other fancy euphemisms for half-truths and outright lies” (p. 124). Draft dodgers transform themselves into war heroes; Saigon bargirls become virtuous teachers from small villages. For some, however, especially the older refugees, such adaptation and transformation are impossible.

In one way or another, my mother and her friends were not much unlike the physically wounded. They had continued to hang on to their Vietnam lives, caressing the shape of a country that was no longer there, in a way not much different from amputees who continued to feel the silhouette of their absent limbs. (p. 255)

These transformations in some people and lack thereof in others often result in dramatic alterations of relationships. Mai says that she and her mother are going through life “in reverse”; she is now the one who tells her mother what is “acceptable or unacceptable behavior” (p. 35).

Anne Morris, ‘The necessity for building bridges’; Lan Cao reveals Vietnam, Austin American-Statesman (Texas), July 5, 1998 p. D8

Lan Cao’s clear, crisp, poetic prose tells the story of a mother and daughter who left Vietnam to make a new life in America. Immediately, you want to know how much is true; how much is fiction.

Lan Cao was watching World Cup soccer on TV when we stopped by her room at the downtown Austin Omni Hotel. Her publisher, Penguin Books, sent her to Texas on tour with the paperback version of “The Monkey Bridge,” in part because Texas has a significant Vietnamese population.

The author in many ways resembles Mai, the girl who tells the story. “The broad strokes are true,” Lan Cao said. “Like the narrator, I also came from Saigon in 1975, a few months before the end of the war, and I also stayed with an American family in Connecticut; I then also moved to Virginia, and I also went to Mount Holyoke. The rest is pretty much fictional, except for the sensibility and the mood — which are mine.”

She tells a compelling story, strengthened by realistic detail. Much of the book — which she dedicates to her late mother — has to do with the role reversal that often takes place in immigrant families in which the child learns the new language readily in school and is able to adapt more quickly than the parents.

“It’s sad, particularly for a culture like Vietnam that is so founded on parental authority,” Lan Cao said. “It erodes the traditional way of parent and child relating to each other.

“Yet, it’s also a bit freeing, and it opens the door to making fun,” she said, referring to a chapter in the book in which Mai and her best friend talk about the mother without her realizing it. They nicknamed her B-o-b for Bag of Bones. “Bob can be difficult to be around sometimes,” Mai says to her friend, and the mother never catches on.

The Monkey Bridge that supplies the title to the novel is real, though Lan Cao never saw one until she visited the delta two years ago. “I was born in Saigon at the height of the war. For me, the Mekong Delta is like the frontier. It’s a repository for everything I can imagine the countryside to be. I never saw it when I lived there. It was extremely dangerous to leave the capital. . . . I know that there were these monkey bridges that were gorgeous. It’s almost like it came out of the landscape, just bamboo and rope. . . . I use it as a metaphor for the necessity for building bridges and making connections. For me in the book, the crossing is the crossing from war to peace and from one physical border to another.”

Such crossings have become more common as the last few years have produced an outpouring of books about Vietnam, a place that for a long time everybody seemed to want to forget.

“It’s like something that’s been suppressed, and then there’s an explosion,” said Lan Cao. “It (the avalanche of books) started with the vets telling their stories. Then the women serving in Vietnam began to tell theirs. It’s like an onion layer. For a long time, no one got to