Customer Reviews

Monkey Bridge

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

In her book, Monkey Bridge, Lan Cao uses her lyrical figurative language and genuine anecdotes as a crowbar to pry open a crate full of memories of the scarred heart of Vietnam and the Vietnamese immigrant experience to realistically present Vietnam as more than a war and Vietnamese immigrants as more than refugees.

Her figurative language and anecdotes gives her writing a style of realism that shows the brutal scars left from the Vietnam War on not only the Americans, but more importantly, the Vietnamese. From the first page, Lan Cao begins painting her memories of her childhood in Vietnam with her poetic diction and alliteration. She draws from her real life experience as a volunteer at her local hospital to show the stream of consciousness of Mai Nguyen, the Vietnamese teenage narrator. Mai recalls "the smell of blood, warm, and wet, rose from the floor and settled into the solemn stillness of the hospital air" when visiting her ailing mother in the hospital (1). In one of her many flashbacks, Mai remembers how a maimed soldier was "curled like a newborn, vicious and pink and covered from head to toe in placenta" (72). This simile transports the reader to the vicious Vietnam War and displays to the reader more than a library of war videos could. After Mai is airlifted out of Saigon because of the fall of Vietnam, she must, like all immigrants, learn the difficult language of English. In another flashback, Mai remembers how she was constantly "collecting words like a beggar gathering rain with an earthen pan" (36). This simile realistically describes the desperate manner instilled in all immigrants in which they must adjust themselves as fast as possible and puts the readers in an immigrant's pair of tattered shoes.

Besides figurative language, the anecdotes of Monkey Bridge provide the story with a sense of realism. Lan Cao writes much of the book in diary form to reveal the stream of consciousness of the mom and give the reader a true taste of the distant relationship between an immigrant mom and an assimilated daughter. For instance, one night Mai and her mother are watching a moralistic episode of The Bionic Woman about how children should always listen to their parents. When her mother asks her what happened in the episode, Mai translates the story to one about the virtues of letting children do what they want. This anecdote shows how immigrant families often become fractured and how the role of parent and child become switched. The parent must learn a new culture from their more assimilated child. Legends such as the one of the sly Trung Sisters who defeated the invading Chinese Army depict the Vietnamese morals and way of life. For example, Mai goes into a college interview with the same strategy as the Trung Sisters when defending their country, focusing on their strong points while never showing their weak ones. These stories provide an insightful view on the morals and values Vietnamese people are raised on.

Through her poetic figurative language and her realistic anecdotes, Lan Cao ultimately offers the reader a gem of knowledge: Vietnam is more than a blemish on the smooth surface of American history and that the Vietnamese are more than bystanders in a war, they are human beings.

I read this book torn between wanting to go really fast to the end to find out what happened and on the other hand, wishing to slow down to enjoy every beautifully crafted sentence. The interior world of the main character and her mother is just as interesting as the exterior world they live in -- descriptions fascinating and most of all, written in a most engaging style. I was very touched by the plight of these immigrants and also learned a lot about the war in VIetnam from an angle different from what I had studied in my history book. But most of all it's a human story, and even if it deals with a historical event like the war, it doesn't do so in a blunt political manner. It's a literary book and a good story.

This novel is one of the best books I have read that combines culture, humor, and the shock that comes when one encounters the unknown. I highly suggest this book to anyone who loves to read about people discovering secrets about life and family. It is captivating in imagery and literary devices. You can almost touch the story as you venture curiously about Virginia with Mai, a young girl who escapes from Vietnam with her mother, and finds a whole new freedom she never expected.

Lan Cao has written a masterpiece. "Monkey Bridge" successfully explores a complex mother-daughter relationship and details Vietnamese culture and the South Vietnamese immigrant experience. Even without a highly engaging story, however, this book deserves attention for Cao's beautiful use of langauge. Reading "Monkey Bridge" is like reading the most exquisite poetry. Easily 5 stars.

Monkey Bridge is a wonderful example of an author putting her true emotions into a touching and well-written story. Lan Cao starts off by introducing the character Mai Nguyen who portrays all the feelings that the author is feeling throughout the narration. Mai recalls throughout the story, the many events in her life that has made an impact on her and others surrounding her, such as what her grandfather was like and the "incident" that broke him up from the family. Mai brings her feelings and emotions into the story with vivid descriptions like her observations in the hospital-using words such as "smell of blood, wet, warm, and how it rose into the soleman air. The writing techniques Lan Cao uses include a wide range of figurative language, diction, alliteration, anecdotes, and also techniques to give the reader a sense of realism. The stories told through Lan Cao's character, Mai, depicts the life of a vietnamese, how life would be during the war, and addapting to a new environment/culture. Through Mai's descriptions and stories of her grandfather you feel for her loss of a loved one and the greif of basically being forced to change their way of living. Cao uses a very unique technique of linking key words or senses together such as the color red. I noticed that she kept a constant going thourghout the story of red object, whether being of good nature or bad. The "red" blood, the color of red for war the traditions of wedding dresses and lucky red paper. Cao uses sensery descriptions such as these to, as I see it, bring the reader into the story and understand the feeling behind it a little bit more. Overall the book is a very well-written narrative that not only overpours with vivid descriptions and feelins of sensitivity but also points out very meaningful morals or lessons such as that violence does not come from only war but from other forms of society (domestic sides of our society today). Cao is definitly a talented and gifted writer, this showing through a must-read novel that you surely will not beable to put down and will want to read over and over again.

I think this is one of the best novels I have read because it talks about a time in history that I am very involved in as a reader. This a great debut for Lan Cao. I like how the this novel started out. She is describing a military hospital. She describes the blood stains and the reaking aroma of death in the hospital. She tells about her family in the beginning and her mother. She tells of her stay and the prejudism she suffered living in virginia. And to top it off it has brilliant ending.

This is the first book I've read by a Vietnamese author, and I enjoyed it. It gives you wonderful insight into the values and customs of American and Vietnamese characters. I thought it had bit too much poetic description mixed in with the story, but that's just my opinion.