Monkey Bridge

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.

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.

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.

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.