Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge: Problematic Representations of Vietnam War History

This article employs postcolonialism and historicism to critique how the Vietnam War is misrepresented in the Vietnamese American novel Monkey Bridge, by Lan Cao. The Vietnam War was one of the most controversial wars in the twentieth century, and it is simplistic to reduce the war to a black-and-white historical narrative, portraying the Vietnamese communists (the Vietcong) as barbaric, inhumane, and uneducated jungle fighters, while presenting the American soldiers as generous, benevolent, and kind saviors of the world. Thus, the article examines the political dichotomies often expressed by anticommunist Vietnamese refugees in the United States in order to understand the novel's conciliatory on the war.