Monkey Bridge (review)

Monkey Bridge. By Lan Cao. New York: Penguin Books, 1997.

Since 1975, Vietnamese Americans have produced a small but significant body of literature that deals with the postwar immigrant experience. Most of these works are written from a Vietnamese American perspective and are notable for shifting the gaze to a Vietnamese American rather than at the figure of the immigrant. It is also important to note, however, that many of these works are written in the autobiographical mode. Such a trend stands as a powerful testament to the ways in which a mainstream readership (still) insists on the truth-telling and ethnographic voice of the immigrant writer, especially within the US context of a "failed war," as well as to the ways that the writer responds to the demands of the marketplace.

Lan Cao's first novel Monkey Bridge is distinct from the autobiographical writing that is generally representative of Vietnamese American literature. A fictionalized account of a young immigrant woman's discovery of her family history, it also traces the roots of her pained relationship with her mother. Spliced together then are two tales, one told in an epistolary form and the other, first person narrative; her mother's letters serve as a direct link to the past while Mai's narrative of assimilation grounds the story in the present.

Beginning in 1978 in Falls Church, Virginia, seventeen-year-old Mai Nguyen struggles to understand her mother's ailments, afflictions that are rooted in the emotional trauma of having left Viet Nam and her grandfather behind. As the narrative reveals, Mai's relationship with her mother is contentious, strained by generational and cultural differences. For reasons that are not clear to Mai in the beginning, her mother appears to suffer from bouts of paranoia and suspicion; she is most fearful, however, of devastating karmic returns. Because of her growing alienation in America, she begins to see her own daughter as "somebody volatile and unreliable, an outsider with inside information--someone whose tongue had to be perpetually checked and contained." (41) From Mai's perspective, she has been given the responsibility of taking care for her mother too prematurely. The exchange of familial roles is an experience that gives her no choice but to "forgo the luxury of adolescent experiments and temper tantrums." (35)

Feeling overburdened when her mother is in the hospital, Mai sets out to locate her maternal grandfather so that he can return with her and take care of his daughter, leaving Mai free to go to college--guiltless. Mai's quest to find Baba Quan and find out more about his mysterious whereabouts after the fall of Saigon is thwarted for a variety of different reasons. Rather, she uncovers her familial past vis-à-vis her mother's journals and thus, painful secrets of illegitimacy and betrayal are unfurled at the end in her mother's elegant writings. Indeed, at the heart of the story is the past life of Baba Quan and his secret identity during the Viet Nam war. As a result, her mother, who is like Viet Nam because she is "obsessed with karma," is filled with guilt as well as fear. (34) For she believes that the bad deeds committed by Baba Quan and her family will follow her to America; thus, she attempts to safeguard Mai with a final act that she hopes will end the cycle of karmic retribution.

Monkey Bridge is a significant book for several reasons. It attempts to look at the politics and poeses of displacement and exile from a distinctly gendered perspective. Moreover, Cao's story tries to move away from the genre of autobiography. At the same time that autobiography can be enabling for immigrant writers as a mode of expression, it is also troubling for some Asian American cultural critics and writers who see it as a commodification of culture. Interestingly enough, however, Lan Cao's book has been called "semiautobiographical" by one reviewer; the same reviewer also warns readers against using...