Monkey Bridge - Plot Summary

Plot Summary

Lan Cao’s debut novel Monkey Bridge traverses several opposing worlds. The novel consists of two narrators: Mai, a teenage Vietnamese immigrant, who flees to America on the day Saigon falls in 1975, and her mother, Thanh, who manages to join Mai a few months after Mai is settled in United States Of America.

Three years after their arrival in the United States, Thanh is in the hospital with a blood clot in her brain, suffering paralysis of half side. She has been calling out for Baba Quan, her father, in her sleep. Thanh and Baba Quan are supposed to meet in Saigon and leave for America together back in 1975, but this plan fails because Baba Quan, due to some unknown reason, does not show up. Since then, Thanh has “never truly recovered from the mishap that left him without the means to leave Saigon” (4).

Mai, who worries about her mother’s health condition and understands how desperately her mother wants to see Baba Quan, decides to make a dangerous trip to Canada with her best friend Bobbie, where they plan to make a phone call to Baba Quan once they cross the border and hopefully take a wild chance to bring her grandfather to the United States. The plan, however, does not succeed. Mai retreats at the last minute because she not only fears for being deported by the U.S government but also recalls what her father says all the time: “One wrong move…the entire course of a country changed” (25), in which he refers to America’s decision to make the crucial commitment in the Vietnam War.

Thanh gets discharged by the hospital and decides to temporarily leave her Vietnam past behind so she can move on. She becomes socially active again in the Vietnamese American community, Little Saigon. Meanwhile, Mai, idling around at home in the summer before attending college, gets very curious about her mysterious grandfather and starts to pry into things about Baba Quan from her mother and different acquaintances, such as Mrs. Bay, Thanh’s best friend, and Uncle Michael, a Vietnam veteran who befriends with her father and brings her to the United States when Saigon falls. After several attempts, Mai still fails to learn anything specific about Baba Quan, all they would tell her are some basic facts and superficial comments. She also fails to convince Uncle Michael to help her grandfather relocate in the United States.

Wanting to know more about her mother’s and Baba Quan’s Vietnam past—“the vivid details that accompanied every fault and fracture, every movement and shift that had forced her apart and at the same time kept her stitched together" (168), Mai sneaks in her mother’s room and steals the letters that her mother has kept writing her, but has not let her read them yet. From her mother’s secret letters, Mai finally learns the unspoken family history that Thanh has been avoiding telling her and the reason why Baba Quan did not show up at their escapade:

Unable to maintain his rental payments, Baba Quan, who Thanh once believed to be her father, prostitutes his wife to his rich landlord, Uncle Khan, whose wife is sterile. Tuyet, Baba Quan’s wife, later on has Khan’s child, Thanh. From this act, Baba Quan secures his land and gets endless benefits from the rich landlord. The Khan’s soon adopt Thanh and send her to a catholic boarding school. Living with shame and rage, Baba Quan has been planning to get revenge on his landlord by committing a murderous act but never succeeds. Later on when the war begins, Baba Quan becomes a Vietcong. His village is declared a free-fire zone, and his family is moved away from their ancestral land to a nearby strategic hamlet, while he stays there to keep working with the Vietcong. Thanh’s mother dies during the transition. In accordance with Vietnamese ritual, Thanh has to escort her mother’s body back to their home village for burial. By a riverbank on her way back home, Thanh witnesses Baba Quan murder his landlord. Struck with panic, Thanh runs away and incautiously leaves her mother’s body behind. Because Thanh loses her mother's body and fails to perform the proper burial rituals, she is left with a permanent scar and never adjusts her to new life in America.