Monkey Bridge, a novel written by Lan Cao, is a portrait of the Vietnamese American experience. It shows the lives of a mother, Thanh, and a daughter, Mai, who travel to the United States as refugees after the Vietnam War. Mai embraces all that is American by learning flawless English and befriending a white girl. She immerses herself in the way of life claiming not to understand how immigrants can come to the United States and balance on the cusp of two cultures.
She asks, “How did those numerous Chinatowns and Little Italy’s sustain the will to maintain a distance, the desire to inhabit the edge and margin of American Life?” She reveals that after she had spent only eight weeks in this country, “The American dream was exerting a sly but seductive pull.” She remains encapsulated in her new culture while she lives with friends of the family, an American Vietnam Veteran and his wife. She eats their food and consumes their television programs, completely isolated from all that is Vietnamese until she is joined by her mother in this new land where they will fight to forge a common ground, reinventing the past in order to pursue their futures. If Mai plunges headlong into the American Dream then Thanh treads threateningly close to the waters, retreating when the cool sting laps against her ankles. At the time that Thanh sends her daughter to America she views it as, “only for a short trip,”until the situation in Saigon gets better.” (19) She cannot fathom the fall of Saigon into the hands of the Vietcong and by the time she reaches America she is disillusioned in and suspicious of people in general.
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Mai speaks of this when she says, “My mother could be a fugitive even in her own home. She had an instinctive distrust for everyone.” Thanh cautions Mai against sharing personal information she tells her, “keep what you see behind your eyes. And save what you think under your tongue. Let your thoughts glow from within. Hide your true self.” Mai sees this warning as a sign that her mother views her as, “somebody volatile and unreliable, an outsider with inside information – someone whose tongue had to be perpetually checked and contained.” (41) Mai couldn’t have shared these secrets if she desired to do so. Mai was not free to express herself openly to Americans because she felt she was only a guest in her new country.
She said that, “Once not long ago, Vietnam was just a country. But in America, Vietnam meant war, antipathies. I didn’t want to parade an unpleasant American experience in America.” (42) Mai understood her mother’s resistance to sprouting new roots in foreign soil. She said, “I couldn’t begrudge my mother her wish to return to a more familiar home.” (206) But Mai believed she was capable of adaptation. She said, “It all had to do with being able to adopt a different posture, to reach deep enough into the folds of the Earth to relocate one’s roots and bend one’s body in a new direction, pretending at the same time that the world was the same now as it had been the day before.” (39) The only problem with this is that pretense is not a solid foundation out of which life can flourish. When Mai tries to compartmentalize herself so neatly, a section gets lost and she is stuck hovering, between two worlds detached and rootless failing to gain nourishment from the land.
This is why no Vietnamese immigrant can ever truly belong to America or Vietnam. To claim to do so would be to deny a quintessential part of their being. Thanh understands this about her daughter she says of Mai that, “She has disengaged an unremembered so swiftly something as big as a life. Disassembling it from her mind as if it had never been.” Thanh says it is her, “Vietnamese way”, “That’s made me feel sorry for this child of mine.
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A country in shock as it watches the first living room war. The media is spreading it everywhere. For the first time in history the United States of America witnesses the Vietnam War. The colleges are ripped especially Kent State after the terrible shooting which occurred there.Media is good for some things but not all. They can be informational and tell things that are the truth or they can tell ...
So lost between two worlds that she can’t find her way back into the veins and arteries of her mother’s love.” And as much as Mai may reminisce about her childhood in her native land, she cannot even share her experiences with her friends in America. She believes that, “The Vietnam delivered to America had truly passed beyond reclamation. It was no longer mine to explain.” (128) So Mai relinquished Vietnam and set out to conquer the American school system. Her mother had told her, “You can lose a country, but no one, no war can take away your education.” Mai applies herself and earns top grades in high school.
When she goes to her university interview she does so as an American student pursuing her dreams of a higher education. She is met instead with a candid curiosity about the Vietnamese American experience. Mai realizes how tightly entwined her future is with her past if not in her own mind than in the eyes of others. When the interviewer tells Mai, “Well, I have to say I’m impressed. You speak English very well. You sound just like an American.” (130) Thanh never embraces life in America her daughter speaks of a painting in their living room saying that it, “hung on the wall like an antiquated map.
Its black lacquer finish refracting everything the world had to give but absorbing none of it. After all, absence itself would spare us from the roots of new history.” Thanh knew better than to believe the United States had welcomed them with open arms. She said, “They’d jump at the chance to send us all back. Nomads, that’s what we ” ve all become.” Nomadic people are wanderers of the earth. Never settling too long in any one place. I’m not certain that this is an accurate description of Vietnamese Americans.
Instead, I see a resilient people unafraid of carving out a new life with whatever materials they can gather, but unable to look to a future in either America or Vietnam without glancing back to see the other in the rear view mirror. My parents work at a university and have allowed many economically disadvantaged students live in their home while completing their education. A few years back they traveled with one of theses students, Nhuy (New E) and her mother Huong (Hun) to Vietnam. Huong spoke often of her life in Vietnam. How wonderful things had been there as a life of a congressman and how she was working so hard to put all of her children through college so she could retire in Vietnam.
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She feared she had lost Nhuy to America. Huong knew that education was the most important thing to her and that her children couldn’t get an education in Vietnam because their father had been on the wrong side. They left him in prison to travel to America and start over. Huong was not surprised to see Nhuy stick out in her own country. Her vocabulary in Vietnamese had become weak and it was easily discovered that she was an American. Even from a distance her gestures and mannerisms no longer fit in.
She was fourteen when she left Vietnam. But she, not unlike Mai, had left that entire life behind her. Huong, on the other hand, had spent much of her time in the United States dreaming of Vietnam. It was a very emotional experience to see her numerous friends and huge family again. She had kept in close contact but had no idea of how much things had changed. The government still spouted anti-American sentiments and they visited the American Atrocities Museum.
But much of this talk was hypocritical. There were more cars and motorcycles than ever before and many American products. The government had not been successful in changing the minds of the people who were not in any way anti-American. Huong stared in quiet wonder as they visited the Mekong Delta, so lush and vibrant, completely grown back as if deforestation had never taken place.
She remained sort of silent until half way back to the United States when she started talking to my dad. She had two jobs, one as a stylist at Super cuts, the other as a waitress in a restaurant. All of her children were becoming college educated. She owned two houses in Stockton and a car while her family in Vietnam moved from their homes into apartments. Their life would be even harder there. Her life would be harder in Vietnam.
Her daughter had a nice visit to Vietnam. She had forgotten much of her previous life. She told her friends about it upon her return, but they weren’t certain if they would ever go back. They were not the daughters of a congressman when they left Vietnam. One night I returned late to my parent’s home to find Thuy (Twee) standing in the kitchen shaking.
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She was a twenty three year old, Chinese – Vietnamese American student. She asked me if I ever had that dream, the one where I was back in the camp and I woke up to find rats chewing on my fingertips, gnawing their way through my flesh. I didn’t know what to say. There was Huong Pham another student who got angry if you called her by her name and said call me Amanda Pham! There was Truc (Took), who went through her entire world being called Truck and never correcting anyone. An (On) asked me to help him with his personal statement for graduate school and when I read it I asked him if he should talk about what it was like to be one of the boat people. He told me that it had nothing to do with who he was now.
He was simply American. I went to visit him while he worked in the Peace Corps in Gambia and we traveled throughout West Africa. Wherever we went, people asked where he came from. He would tell them America and they would laugh and ask, “Where do you really come from, Chinaman?” Through her novel, Lan Cao, is able to roll all of these experiences into a mysterious story. It keeps the audience captivated while inviting them to observe the complex relationship between mother and daughter, the undeniable connection between where we live and who we become.
Mai and Tranh represent Vietnamese Americans constantly effortlessly, making their way across a Monkey Bridge. traveling between two cultures. Precariously balanced yet seemingly Cao, Lan. Monkey Bridge.
