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, "ALan 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
  

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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.

6 of 6 found the following review helpful:

The Vietnamese Version of the American DreamMay 03, 2001
By Maria Ng
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 found the following review helpful:

A gifted writer portrays Viet Nam like no otherJan 11, 2001
By Janice M. Hansen
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.

6 of 7 found the following review helpful:

The Real VietnamMay 04, 2001
By Eric Chang
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.

3 of 3 found the following review helpful:

Literary storyJan 29, 2000

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.

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