Monkey Bridge - Part 2 (links not working!)

So what is Monkey Bridge really about? I guess I am supposed to be telling you, but I am not sure I really know. It has kind of turned into a diary of events proceeding in a continuous flow, without a separation in journal entries. The continuous flow of ideas connects the past and future. Mai, the narrator in the beginning of the book essentially sets out to learn about her family history and its deep connections to the conflict of Vietnam. Now living in America, she struggles to connect to her Vietnamese roots and understand where she came from. “In America, Borders tended to seem easier to cross, the future itself raucous with possibilities (Cao 27).” Although Mai thinks borders are easier to cross, it is also easier to get lost and forget who you are and where you came from.

I am a little more then halfway through the book. At some points, the narrator changes from Mai, the young Vietnamese American girl to Mai’s Mother, Thanh. After Thanh gets released form the hospital she starts to adapt to the life of a Vietnamese American in “Little Saigon.” At the same time Mai, who is growing up rather quickly, discovers that see can learned about her family history and her mysterious elatives. In my opinion, the most important realization for Mai comes when she says:

"Inside my new tongue, my real tongue, was an astonishing new power. For my mother and her Vietnamese neighbors, I became the keeper of the word, the only one with access to the light-world. Like Adam, I had the God-given right to name all the fowls of the air and all the beasts of the field. The right to name, I quickly discover, also meant the right to stand guard over language and the right to claim unadulterated authority." (Cao 37).

Mai realizes the power of language at this point and uses it to peer into her family past and the Vietnam conflict. In chapter four, Mai uses her newfound skill to read a secret letter she finds that her mother wrote to relatives in Vietnam. Just before she begins her journey into her mother’s past she proclaims, “I took a deep gulp of air and watched myself contemplate the possibility of touching, actually touching, this untouchable part of my mother’s nighttime life.” (Cao 46)

The first letter stretches for 13 pages and is written in italics. There is a change of narrators to the perspective of Mai’s mother, who wrote these letters years ago. Lan Cao employs these letters as a means of flashing back to the past in order to examine events that had gone on in Vietnam before Mai was even born (Basically a time machine).

Overall, I think Monkey Bridge is an interesting story, but lacks the punch of an action-adventure book to keep me reading, and is not sad and gruesome enough to make me feel sorry for the characters involved. I do not feel connected to the events happening in the book. In fact, I feel as if I am excluded from their lives and am just peering as an outsider. It provides me with a new insight into the plight of Vietnamese Americans during this time period, but I don’t know that it is really as extraordinary as the critics proclaim. I will keep reading and do a lively video Blog over my break…after I finish the book!