The Nature of Trauma in American Novels

Two: The Role of Place in Remembering: Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge

41 Chapter two The Role of Place in Remembering Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge In Lan Cao’s novel Monkey Bridge (1997), trauma is a constellation of individual and social forces that convene at a local landscape to generate both the meaning of the experience and the texture of its remembrance. Traumatic experience is situated within the contexts of immigration and social assimilation, creating alternative meanings and states of subjectivity for the protagonists. The novel describes the relationships between a mother, Thanh, and a daughter, Mai, who arrive in the United States in 1975 as Vietnamese refugees, evoking the historical exodus of individuals from Vietnam in this period.1 The daughter’s accounts of Saigon and Virginia are paired with the mother’s nostalgic recollections of her homeland written in her diary. Mai’s search for the “truth” of her mother’s past becomes a search not only for an articulation of her own identity, but also an exploration of the contours of her relationship to her mother. Their relationship is largely influenced by the presence of traumatic experiences in both women’s lives, with each responding differently. In addition to wartime experiences that both characters experience, Thanh is physically wounded by a napalm bomb and experiences a family betrayal that she attempts to erase through her nolstagic journal entries . These entries act as a wished-for narrative of the past, but hide the actual events of Thanh’s life. The mother’s self-defining narrative is based within her relations to family and native lands, especially establishing the importance of the rice fields of the rural Mekong Delta in defining her identity. It is the landscape of the past, the land of the 42 chApter two traumatic experience, that finally explains the mystery of her past and her father’s disappearance. The mother’s diary is the contested site that formulates the past for both mother and daughter. The diary records her childhood in Ba Xuyen, a rural village in the Mekong Delta, and her father Baba Quan, who was a farmer and later secretly becomes a soldier for the communist forces of the north (5). His contradictory representations by Thanh in her diary as both a moral and a corrupt person hide a larger truth of Thanh’s wartime experience. As the U.S. intervention in Vietnam’s civil war escalates, Thanh returns to her village to take care of her parents. They are forced to live in a military compound, or “strategic hamlet,” built by the United States. When Thanh returns to her village, she travels across the “free-fire zone” to bury her mother in a traditional burial ground. Before she can bury the body, she witnesses her father murder a man and discovers his Viet Cong affiliation that contradicts his professed alliance to the South Vietnamese and Americans. The murder disrupts the burial ritual and she is forced to flee from the site of the crime across the fields near the river to the compound. While running to safety, Thanh is hit with a bomb next to the river by military jets in the “free-fire zone.” She flees to America soon after this incident, but her wartime experience along with her father’s betrayal produces an unsustainable tension . The protagonist cannot maintain loyalty to her ancestors or land as dictated by the national mythology encapsulated in the betel nut story due to her traumatic experience and forced departure, thus foreclosing any possible redemptive return to her homeland. The disjunction between the past and present is caused by the inability to reconcile on the one hand, mythic notions of a cultural identity defined by inhabitation of native homelands and loyalty to ancestors’ spirits, and, on the other hand, a traumatic departure and modern diasporic life in which return to the native land is impossible. Thanh’s ambivalent relationship to her family and nation is mirrored in a national story of duty and loyalty contained in the betel nut myth. The betel nut myth asserts that a person’s soul cannot live outside its homeland because one must protect the spirits of ancestors. The human spirit, according to the myth, “can only live in the village land” 43 the role of place in remembering (84). The Vietnamese must inhabit the land of their ancestors so that the ancestors’ souls achieve eternal life and regeneration (84). The myth describes two brothers and a woman who...