Monkey Bridge [Paperback]

Lan Cao (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1998

Hailed by critics and writers as powerful, important fiction, Monkey Bridge charts the unmapped territory of the Vietnamese American experience in the aftermath of war. Like navigating a monkey bridge--a bridge, built of spindly bamboo, used by peasants for centuries--the narrative traverses perilously between worlds past and present, East and West, in telling two interlocking stories: one, the Vietnamese version of the classic immigrant experience in America, told by a young girl; and the second, a dark tale of betrayal, political intrigue, family secrets, and revenge--her mother's tale. The haunting and beautiful terrain of Monkey Bridge is the "luminous motion," as it is called in Vietnamese myth and legend, between generations, encompassing Vietnamese lore, history, and dreams of the past as well as of the future. "With incredible lightness, balance and elegance," writes Isabel Allende, "[Lan Cao crosses] 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."
Quality Paperback Book Club Selection and New Voices Award nominee
A Philadelphia Inquirer Best of the Rest of Summer 1997 pick
A Kiriyama Pacific Rim Award Book Prize nominee

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Just months before the Communists roll into Saigon in 1975, Mai Ngyuen, the young Vietnamese narrator of Monkey Bridge, is packed off to the U.S. Her sorrowing mother escapes in the final hours, leaving Mai's grandfather behind. Now it's Mai who plays the elder, navigating a rude, incomprehensible culture that makes possible a sudden twist in life. "Not only could we become anything we wanted to be in America, we could change what we had once been in Vietnam," she realizes. Though Mai watches her mother's ebullient friend shave years off her age and a one-time bar girl lay claim to a virtuous past as a Confucian teacher, she never wonders how much of their lives her mother has reinvented. Following in the footsteps of The Woman Warrior, this compelling novel draws on folk tales and traditions. Despite false notes and occasionally clunky dialogue, it delivers a neat knockout punch in the end. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

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. Donna Seaman --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (June 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140263616
• ISBN-13: 978-0140263619
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #61,157 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A remarkable storytelling., December 27, 2002

By 

alainviet "alainviet" (Indianapolis, IN United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Monkey Bridge (Paperback)

The story is so fascinating it has caught my attention many nights in a row. It is packed with so many social and historical facts I have to digest each data before moving to another chapter (the reader, however, could skip these sections if he/she did not want to delve into these details).

Besides the usual digressions about Tet (Vietnamese New Year) and the Tet offensive, the Trung sisters (see book under the same name), the Mongol invasion, the story of the betel nut, and so on, the book could be broadly subdivided into two sections dealing with daughter and mother's recollections about the war. This is one of the rare books that approach the Vietnam War from the natives' point of view.

The year was 1975, when both daughter and mother landed in America shortly before the fall of Saigon. We were given a glimpse about their new life in a foreign land, their adjustment to new customs, ways of thinking, and schooling system. We learned about the story of a U.S. colonel who almost had been killed in Vietnam a few years earlier and who now sponsored the two refugees to the U.S.

The most interesting section, however, was the one related by the mother: she opened our eyes to colonial Vietnam, the system of provincial landlords and peasants, and the Viet Cong. Behind the façade of a plain housewife, the mother slowly unveiled the dark family secrets she had been trying to hide from her daughter all her life. This is a story with a twist that made the reading exciting and worthwhile. How the author has been able to weave together the stories of a U.S. colonel, the Viet Cong, the landlords and peasants, and the refugees together in a short book is simply remarkable.

This is the Vietnam War many Americans did not know about until now.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Vietnamese Version of the American Dream, May 2, 2001

By 

Maria Ng (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Monkey Bridge (Paperback)

Lan Cao weaves a web of fine silk through her vivid imagery and strong motifs to show off to the world her home country Vietnam as something more than a war and to portray a daughter's relationship with her mother. Cao brings back many memories from the time when she lived in Vietnam, each time, describing it vibrantly with many details to make the reader feel as if they were truly there. To fill in the gaps between these meticulous descriptions, Cao uses a family consisting of a mother and a daughter and shows their relationship. The motif of the color of blood ties these two contrasting strands of silk together to present the main idea, the web, to portray the "Vietnamese version of the American Dream; a new spin, the Vietnam spin, to the old immigrant faith in the future"(40). The color of blood clearly is the color of war. The war scenes clearly depict the terrors of violence. Yet, these terrible colors are also used to celebrate the traditional rites of marriage. The red wedding dress, the virginal rites, and the lucky red paper all seem innocuous, but they have the potential to be virulent as well; especially when things go wrong. The mother in the story tries to escape from the violence of war, where the daughter tries to escape from the terrors of the old culture she fears. Cao wanted to show that violence does not only comes from war, but also from everyday domestic living. The delicate yet massive web Cao creates circumnavigates to correlate times of peace and war together. In America, many denizens see Vietnam as nothing more than a war. Cao uses detailed descriptions of her home country Vietnam to describe the beautiful countryside, traditions, traditional food, and the celebrations for the reader. Cao wanted to show the reader that Vietnam also had a history and was not just a battlefield. She wanted to reveal to the world, the hidden side of the web that many people seem to neglect; the side that shows Vietnam's heart, its culture. As an aftermath of the war, all the immigrants struggled to make a living in an alien country, to prosper. This obviously shows the Vietnamese influenced by the American Dream, but with a slight twist. The intricate web Cao designs shows the reader the beauty of Vietnam's culture and a daughter's relationship with her mother through her usage of vivid imagery and a strong motif of the color of blood. Through Cao's descriptions, inferences, and the relationship of a mother and daughter, the American Dream can obviously be noted.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A gifted writer portrays Viet Nam like no other, January 11, 2001

By 

Janice M. Hansen (California United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Monkey Bridge (Paperback)

The novel is beautiful and deeply sensitive. Two stories of a mother and daughter Vietnamese immigrants are revealed in a somewht challenging read. It took a while to feel the cadence of her methodology, but the book on the whole was worth the moderate effort it may be to truly appreciate her work.

What I found lovely is to hear about the real lives that the Vietnamese had before, during and after the war. Lan Cao offers to the reader a real sense of being in her country and living the lives of the poor and the rich. While the plot developes, she very creatively allows the reader to really get a taste of the food, the lifestyle, their celebrations and their rituals of their faith. The daughter tells her story as a youngster sent away from Viet Nam prior to the capitol city of their residence falling to the enemy. The pain she must have felt leaving her mother and her (supposed) beloved relatives was wretching. Her mother barely gets out of the country, but, her father, the daughter's beloved grandfather is somehow lost in the chaos and left behind. For this, the granddaughter agonizes and searches ways to locate him. Her mother on the other hand, seems to be having more difficulty coping with being in the new country, and as the granddaughter presses her for more follow up on grandfather, it somehow escaltes the mother's anxiety. Her depression and questionable sanity are at risk, but while at risk, she endeavors to journal all the truths and lies of her incredible life and the lives of her family and landowners. The ending is unexpected and shocking.

This is definitely a novel with such beautiful, original and rich construction that one could reread it and be sure to find new insights. Don't lend this one out, you will want to read it again and will not want to lose it.