Vietnam - Monkey Bridge/The Lotus and the Storm

Country: Vietnam
Book: Monkey Bridge/The Lotus and the Storm
Author: Lan Cao
Publication Year: 1997/2014
Genre: Fiction

For many, if not most people in the world, Vietnam and the Vietnam War are inseparable. The plethora of films made about or set during the conflict, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Hamburger Hill, Apocalypse Now, Born on the 4^th of July, Forest Gump, Good Morning Vietnam,  The Deer Hunter, etc., show the deep psychological scar the war left on the American consciousness. As discussed when we looked at South Korea (See: South Korea), even M*A*S*H, the one cultural artifact set during the Korean War, is really about Vietnam.

How many people died in the war remains widely debated with estimates ranging from 1.4 to 3.6 million people across Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. What is known is that more tons of TNT were dropped on the countries of Indo-China than were dropped by all sides during World War Two, including both atomic bombs. The use of chemical weapons like Agent Orange cause birth defects in the Vietnamese population to this day.

What few, if any, American films and TV series do is present the Vietnam War as seen from the perspective of the Vietnamese. Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s  2017 documentary series, The Vietnam War, frames the 20 year conflict through its various stages as seen from all sides. It is probably the most objective attempt to explain the how, what and why of Vietnam. Although some of its conclusions are perhaps less objective.

Lan Cao’s two novels, Monkey Bridge and The Lotus and the Storm, concern the war and how it affected those living in South Vietnam. They are in many ways mirror images of one another and, one imagines, largely autobiographical. In both books, a daughter escapes Vietnam with one of her parents (mother in Monkey Bridge, father in The Lotus and The Storm ) and settles in the United States. The ex-pats are haunted by the fate of those left behind in the aftermath of the war.

Cao’s perspective is one which we are perhaps not used to seeingly in western media. In the black and white grayscale through which everything must seeming be portrayed, Vietnam is a war between America and the Vietminh (the Vietcong in American parlance) of the Communist north. What about the Vietnamese who fought with and for the Americans?

 
In The Lotus and the Storm, Minh is a South Vietnamese officer who narrowly escapes execution for refusing to support the attempted military coup of 1965. From there, his story and that of his daughter, Mai, who shares the narrative with her father, becomes entangled with those of two Americans, James and Cliff, a GI and a military adviser respectively.

Monkey Bridge would seem to be the more autobiographical of the two novels. The narrator, also called Mai, takes up the bulk of her story with accounts written by her mother inserted at various points. These accounts parcel out the truth to Mai and to the reader like a slow releasing poison.

In common with both versions of Mai, Cao left Vietnam for the US in 1975 as the Vietminh were on the march to Saigon following the American withdrawal. Like the Monkey Bridge version of Mai, she initially lived with an American officer and his wife, who were personal friends of the family. She went on to become a professor of international law, trade and business.

It is a story we have seen depressingly frequently in this project. The author who is forced to flee their homeland thanks to internal conflict and outside agitation. Most recently, we saw Loung Ung escape the Killing Fields of Cambodia (see: Cambodia) for the United States via Vietnam and Thailand. There she worked for the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997.

In Afghanistan (see: Afghanistan), all three of our authors became refugees thanks to one or more of the Soviet Union, Taliban and the United States (and then the Taliban again). Sulaiman Addonia (see: Eritrea) spent much of his life in refugee camps because of the Ethiopia-Eritrean War before settling in the United Kingdom. Samar Yazbek (see: Syria) had to leave Syria for the sake of her daughter’s and her own safety. There will be many others before we conclude this project. We shall certainly return to the issue when we turn to Zimbabwe.

When the subject of migration and immigration are such hot button topics, exploited by bad faith actors on the right, it is a timely reminder that if we want to quell the waves of migration, we could try interfering less in the internal affairs of other countries. Or be less surprised when people cross seas and deserts to escape economic and ecological wastelands for pastures new. It is, after all, what our ancestors did, Pilgrim and Anglo Saxon alike. Migration and immigrations are facts of life. It prevents societal stagnation. In the words of Bob Dylan: He not busy being born is busy dying

The obvious analogy is to the Monkey Bridge itself. A handmade bridge of wood or bamboo, they are built to cross the waterways of the Mekong Delta. Known as cầu khỉ in the local language, these precarious looking platforms embody the connections across a fragile divide found in Cao’s novels and in Diaspora Fiction in general. The people, often from the same families, who fought on both sides of the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese who became refugees and those who remained behind. The émigrés who reconstructed their culture and community in the United States and how they push against the America for which they will always be in conflict, like any immigrant population.

The Vietnam War can never be erased from the minds of the Vietnamese, nor from the American consciousness. Yet Monkey Bridge and The Lotus and the Storm are about more than mere war. Historical events are rarely anything but a backdrop to any work of descriptive art. Like the landscape behind Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile, they are mere details.

Circumstance does little more than to inform a narrative. Rather it is how characters respond to events. War and Peace is not a book about the Napoleonic Wars, but how its myriad characters, for better or for worse, respond to those conflicts. Family and friendships are at the heart of both of Cao’s novels. Survival and resilience. The power of individuals to lose everything and start again from scratch. Which, like a rickety bridge, is something that connects Vietnam to America and with a hundred other places besides.

Vietnam is one of those places about which the west knows more than it has any practical need or necessity to know. And yet, of course, we know very little. History is not always written by the victors. The Vietnam War is still framed as a disaster for the United States rather than the desolation of three impoverished South East Asian counties for dubious geopolitical reasons. The Vietminh won and yet few people ever really win at war. What level of victory Lan Cao or either version of her alter-ego achieved in emigrating to America is very much a matter of perspective. As with many of our featured writers, wouldn’t it have happened anyway? It is impossible to say.

Cao’s novels give a perspective of the war as seen from a side rarely seen in mainstream retrospectives. Not only as someone Vietnamese or South Vietnamese, but as a woman, a survivor and an exile. We can never hope to reveal more than a fraction of the countries we read in this project. We can at least listen to voices that reveal something illuminating. Lan Cao is one such light.

Lan Cao