Lan Cao

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A dual first-person memoir by the acclaimed Vietnamese-American novelist and her thoroughly American teenage daughter--exploring their complicated relationship and touching on war and past tragedy, culture clash and bullying, and growing up both as individuals and as a family.

After more than forty years in the United States, Lan Cao still feels tentative about her place in her adoptive country, one which she came to as a thirteen-year old refugee. And after sixteen years of being a mother, she still ventures through motherhood as if it is a foreign landscape. In this lyrical memoir, Lan explores these two defining experiences of her life with the help of her fierce, independently-minded daughter, Harlan Margaret Van Cao.

The Lotus and the Storm is a novel about war and its casualties. On one level, it chronicles the downfall of a country marred by political intrigue and ravaged by a war fought on its land but controlled and managed elsewhere. On a more personal level, it is a deeply intimate story about love and longing, deception and betrayal, and trauma and madness. But most of all, it is about loss of country and the deep imprints this loss has on its children’s lives, in ways that ripple across time and space.

A monkey bridge is a slender bamboo bridge used by the Vietnamese in rural Vietnam to cross rivers and canals. Monkey Bridge is a story of crossings – the crossings that refugees and immigrants, often living marginal lives, make as they navigate into the dead center of the American Dream; crossings that the traumatized, still living in a waste land of loss and war, must make to find home and peace; and crossings that mothers and daughters, parents and children make across cultural and emotional dislocations to reconnect to each other.