Monkey Bridge

#159
Title: Monkey Bridge
Author: Lan Cao
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 1998
260 pages

An uneven first novel that is by turns compelling and awkward, Monkey Bridge might best be appreciated as a compendium of the ways that post-traumatic stress disorder is experienced and enacted. The voice of the protagonist, a teen who fled Vietnam just before the fall of Saigon, is believable. Since the novel has been described as semi-autobiographical, I would expect this to be the case. The mother's voice in the novel's real time also works; her poetic, literary voice as depicted in her writings rings false, and not just for reasons that make sense within the narrative. Unfortunately, this voice keeps sliding into what reads like an imitation of the mother in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. Still, if these awkward passages can be put aside, the novel does an excellent job of depicting the immigrant/refugee experience from a young adult's perspective, the tensions that arise almost immediately between generations of immigrants, and the forces that seem to compel the romantic reconstruction of one's country of origin.