Lan Cao (1) (1961–)

I'm close to my mother and though we have a few similarities we are definitely two different people.

Reading a Family in Six Tones, I find that the story is easy to connect too. Lan Cao and daughter Harlan Margaret Van Cao team up to create this book of their personal memories.

This book shows us the aftereffects and the struggles of Lan coming to America from Saigon in 1975, and how the mother and daughter cope.

I received this book through the generosity of Anna Sacca, Senior Publicity Manager with FSB Associates… (mais)

First off, I think Lan Cao’s grasp of the English language is amazing. Her word choice s perfect as she tells her story of growing up in Vietnam and moving to the US with an American “uncle and aunt” shortly before the fall of Saigon. Her explanation of the differences in Vietnamese parents and American parents in expectations and mindset makes it clear what a big jump in was in beliefs to parent in America. By contrast her daughter, Harlan, is born in America. I love how she explains her mother’s “shadow selves” that emerged after the traumas of Vietnamese life. Harlan is a teenager and I think her observations are extremely important as she is still figuring out who she is. I would love to see a follow-up to her views in 20 years, when she knows who she is. The two perspectives are interesting, and I feel that anyone willing to share their personal fears and views of their mother in a non-self-centered way has a future as an author.… (mais)

I liked the duo voices of this memoir. In this way, I was able to connect to both Lan and Harlan equally. In addition, there was that strong emotional connection to them as I got to "experience" from each of their different view points.

Although, I was adopted, I was a baby so can't really relate. However, in a way I could as I could imagine I would feel the same way if I had been older when I came over to America. Yet, I did experience some of the racism when I was a young girl. My eyes were made fun of and the kids were mean to me. I am lucky that it was not as bad in my times and that the internet was not big either.

The struggle that Lan felt where Harlan was considered was understandable. She did not want to forget her Vietnamese heritage but at the same time wanted her daughter to be American as well. This was her ying and yang. So reading these parts of Lan's voice and then Harlan's was lovely. Anyone who is a refugee can relate to Lan's story.… (mais)

It is always impressive when one can write about the effects of war without succumbing to the tendency to depict gruesome battle scenes and heroic acts of valor and sacrifice. In most of the novels I have read about the Vietnam War, soldiers are forced to commit acts of atrocity and many of the characters eventually become unhinged and alienated from society after returning home. Monkey Bridge takes a different look at the effects of war—the attempt to reinterpret the truth of what happened into a narrative that one can live with peaceably. Cao reminds us that after something as traumatic as a war, people must come to grips with what has transpired and integrate it into their postwar experience as smoothly as possible. She also details the experience of postwar dispossession, the intergenerational culture gap that occurs between parents and children in immigrant families, as well as the power of reinforced collective cultural memory among immigrant communities in the United States.

While at first I was not drawn into the narrative of the postwar Vietnamese refugee experience, I became more interested once it appeared that the main character’s mother was attempting to recreate her past and establish a new identity for herself. By the end of the novel, I felt an empathy for both the main character and her mother as the truth was finally revealed after years of family stories that glorified past actions and deeds, many of them false or misleading.

Cao carefully delivers her narrative in a manner that allows the reader to perceive the subtleties of the American immigrant experience. For Mai’s mother, America is a place wholly unfamiliar and suspect. In order to navigate this new cultural milieu, Vietnamese immigrants created a “Little Saigon,” a community of refugees to reinforce cultural connections with their homeland and help one another adapt to their new life in the United States. Mai has chosen to adopt the American Dream and integrate as fully into American society as possible, but Cao illustrates the difficulty that many immigrants have in gaining unfettered access to mainstream American society. Often times, foreign born nationals are reminded of their racial or cultural otherness by native born Americans. Issues of identity become confounded for second generation immigrants when they are pulled between the cultural values of their families and the culture they experience in their day to day life outside of the home. The main argument seems to be that the modern American immigrant must alter or customize their cultural values and historical memory in order to fully integrate into American society. While many of these issues are handled within the context of Vietnamese immigrants in the late 1970s, I think that Cao’s understanding of how many people negotiate their understanding of the past can be expanded to look at many historical movements within and outside of the United States.

The mother in Cao’s novel experiences a sense of cognitive dissonance between her nostalgia for the traditional cultural ways of her little South Vietnamese farming village and its violent and disreputable history. In her mother’s final letter to her before committing suicide, Mai reads the truth of her grandfather, his relationship with the Vietcong, and her mother’s desire to change the past. In one lengthy passage towards the end of this letter, she admits that she still carries the burden of her past in spite of attempting to leave Mai with a “different course” that might have been possible. The burn on her face is a reminder of this burden and the fact that her father’s actions cannot be undone or reconciled. She explains that “karma is exactly like this, a continuing presence that is as ongoing as Baba Quan’s obsession, as indivisible as our notion of time itself. Our reality, you see, is a simultaneous past, present, and future." The past as an indivisible ongoing obsession was quite poetic and powerful to me. Any culture scarred by a past both sordid and sublime may be able to relate to the tendency to battle history daily as it tries to move forward and backwards at the same time. Reconciliation with a tarnished past doesn’t seem possible without acknowledgement, something that both individuals and societies must do if they intend to move forward. In a karmic version of things, the past “rips through one generation and tears apart the next."… (mais)