For the Viet Book Fest 2024 Author Spotlight, Lan Cao—author of the groundbreaking novel Monkey Bridge—shared reflections on her literary journey, including meaningful exchanges with Vietnam veterans and young writers, her efforts to move beyond war-centric narratives, and the complex generational dynamics explored in her memoir Family in Six Tones. Currently working on a short story collection set in Cuba, Cao continues to explore themes of displacement, memory, and identity, drawing parallels between Vietnamese and Cuban diasporic experiences.
Your debut novel Monkey Bridge is the first novel about the Vietnam War written by a Vietnamese American to be published by a major press. Since 1997, as you shared your novel with the world, attending speaker panels, interviews, and more, were there any memorable or meaningful interactions you had with your readers, perhaps future writers?
Some of the most meaningful interactions I’ve had have been with American vets who returned from Vietnam, who shared with me their own feelings of isolation, rejection, and loneliness, feelings that were much more pronounced when they arrived in the US than anything they experienced while in Vietnam. In fact, they told me this before I wrote the novel and I incorporated some of that in Monkey Bridge. When I did readings, many in the audience, especially in the early years post-publication, were Americans — mostly those who came of age in the 1960s, many antiwar and many American vets.
I did meet one young person who came to me in 2000 when I was at UCLA and she was a student (maybe English major) at UCLA, I believe. She interviewed me for a Vietnamese publication which I recall might be titled 20 Vietnamese Americans in 20 years (or maybe it was 25). She herself has become a writer.
One of the encounters that became a friendship was one I had with the writer Isabel Allende and her husband Willie. Both attended my reading in Corte Madera at Book Passage. The owner of the bookstore had invited me to do a reading there and gave the book to Isabel to read. Isabel wanted to introduce me and she did. She wrote a wonderful introduction. We went out for dinner after and have remained friends. She took me to one of her awards ceremonies, the 1998 Sara Lee Award in her capacity as my mentor.
In multiple interviews you’ve expressed that you don’t want to play into the western image of Vietnam as only a war and you don’t want to perpetuate the idea of Vietnam as an American experience, especially when the country has a rich, more than a thousand-year-old history. But you admit that despite this intellectual stance, it’s not easy for you to extricate the War from how you remember and consider Vietnam. In the present publishing landscape, there are more Vietnamese American writers telling stories that are beyond the war. I’m wondering, then, if witnessing more stories from the Vietnamese American community being uplifted has changed anything for you and how you see Vietnamese American identity formation and storytelling?
I’ve always believed that it is important to see Vietnam as a country, not a war because the war is significant mostly because it affected the US. As in most scenarios in the world, where tragedy and catastrophe have occurred, those events remain invisible unless they affect Americans or Western powers somehow. To extricate Vietnam from war is in many ways to extricate Vietnam from being seen as an American war and an American event. Having said that, if one was born in the midst of war and grew up in it, and fled it, it is very hard to extricate war from one’s psyche, regardless of intellectual position. The war is in effect a totalitarian country that one is trapped within. I write about things that I’m caught in and entangled with.
As you’ve pointed out, many other writers since then don’t write about the war. It’s great they’ve escaped it. Maybe they weren’t born in it and maybe they’re more American or born in America. I think it’s wonderful to have a kaleidoscopic experience with Vietnam.
Family in Six Tones, published in 2020, is a memoir you co-wrote with your daughter when she was fifteen. What did you learn about generational rifts, of what it means to be a Vietnamese parent and to be an American daughter, after this co-writing experience?
Generational rifts probably exist in all parent child relationships but are pronounced when the parent is embroiled in unruly stuff that act as tentacles reaching down, up, around the younger generation. These tentacles are not physical and thus because they are psychological and often even subconscious, they are invisible and difficult to address. So the process of relating is certainly not linear and will be messy. You don’t even see the obstacles until you feel them and then you have to address, or maybe not even address them. The experience of doing the book together was turbulent but has brought us even closer.
Your love for writing stems from a love for reading. Are you currently reading and writing about any particular topics, or working on a creative project? Are there writing forms or genres you’re drawn to or have yet to experiment with?
I am drawn to short stories as a form and I am writing a collection of short stories. The main reason is the stories I want to tell are best told in a smaller scale with little room to maneuver and explore, requiring me to get to the gut punch sooner. So it’s not because I’m enamored of the form that leads me to writing short stories. I’m also writing stories that took place in Cuba and the main characters are Cubans and Cuban Americans. The experience is similar to Vietnam and Vietnamese Americans.
Interview conducted by Cathy Duong
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The Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Association (VAALA) proudly presented Viet Book Fest 2025, an all-day literary event that celebrated Vietnamese diasporic voices in literature, culture, and storytelling. This year’s festival took place on Sunday, April 6, 2025, at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana. Admission was free and open to the public.