Review of Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge

Abstract

Lan Cao depicts the actuality of Vietnam’s social life during the Second Indochina war (1955-1975) and the complexities of migration in her debut novel, Monkey Bridge (1997). The novel is critically acclaimed for its war literature imageries, and it is received as a powerful work of fiction, elucidating the uncharted territory of the Vietnamese-American experience on the subjects of the aftermath of war, the migratory process, and the migrant life. Cao wrote this fiction with a blend of personal input because Cao herself is a Vietnamese-American citizen who fled Vietnam during the fall of Saigon in 1975. She grew up in Saigon’s twin city Cholon(South Vietnam) and was later migrated out to Avon, Connecticut. Thus, Cao built her plot from different perspectives, such as being a novelist of the Vietnam War, a postcolonial exile, and a migrant writer. The plot narrated by Mai and her mother, Thanh, reflects the different perspectives of the traumas that Cao projects for her readers. The critical detail that this novel explained was the aftermaths of war and migration from a Vietnamese perspective.