DATE: Sunday, September 21, 1997            TAG: 9709110864

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY MICHAEL ANFT 

                                            LENGTH:   84 lines

AUTHOR LEAVES A FEW MORE BRIDGES TO BE CROSSED

MONKEY BRIDGE

LAN CAO

Viking. 260 pp. $23.95.

``I had gone to the library and flipped through the card index for books on Vietnam,'' Mai, the protagonist of Lan Cao's debut novel, Monkey Bridge, reports. ``Most had been written at the height of the American involvement in the war, when more than 500,000 American troops had been sent. It was only four years since the war ended, and there was nothing about Vietnam after April 30, 1975. . . . ''

As Mai later learns, America's literary myopia regarding Southeast Asia had ethnocentric dimensions. Even though many Americans - most notably Stanley Karnow, Tobias Wolff and Robert Olen Butler - have tried since 1979 to explain the horrifying otherworldliness of the experience that was war-torn Vietnam, the richer, possibly more hellish Vietnamese-American side of the story has been neglected. And while Hollywood was exploring What Vietnam Meant in films such as ``Apocalypse Now,'' ``The Deer Hunter'' and ``Coming Home,'' refugees, most from what was then South Vietnam, had merged quietly and surely into the American stream - with little interest expressed in their personal histories as erstwhile Southeast Asians or as U.S. immigrants.

Surely, the ``boat people'' and their descendents have stories to tell. It was their homeland, after all, that was ostensibly obliterated during nearly three decades of war. It was their families that were torn apart. It was their country that finally won an independence that it had paid dearly for. And it was those expatriates who fled so-called self-sovereignty for the safer shores of its once-occupying army.

We've just never heard from them.

Not surprisingly, then, Viking Books is touting Monkey Bridge as ``The first novel by a Vietnamese-American about the Vietnam War experience.'' Cao's story of a teen-age girl growing up in America while attempting to sort out her family's harrowing Vietnamese history has both the blessing and the curse of being the first of its subgenre. In its carefully chosen, often beautiful language, Monkey Bridge portrays a culture of manners and delicacy, then contrasts it with the animalistic brutality that is life during wartime.

On the other hand, Cao seems to be overly self-conscious that she is writing the first explication of its kind. Although much of the Vietnamese history is both instructive and entertaining, there is quite a bit of unnecessary historical rehashing without reconsideration. Also, Cao's characters tend to write or talk the way Cao writes, which doesn't exactly allow them to spring from the page to life.

Set in Falls Church, Va., at the end of the 1970s, Monkey Bridge centers upon Mai's multifaceted life. Faced with a future that appears bright and American - she's wooed by a prominent college, spends time with a loving American couple in Connecticut, and has made a good friend, Bobbie - Mai nonetheless is tortured by a past she can't fully comprehend. She is ruled by fear and anxiety, frequently telling herself when to breathe, such as during an aborted trip to Canada to try to track down her beloved grandfather, Baba Quan, who is still in Vietnam.

As the book begins, her unnamed, recently stricken mother suffers even more, feeling fearful, Mai believes, of the strange, new country that has taken her in (with nothing resembling embracing arms) and wracked by guilt for not spiriting Baba Quan away during the fall of Saigon, as she had once promised him.

Although Cao's characterization of Mai - claustrophobic, yet searching - resonates, few of the secondary ones do. There are occasional glints of insight, such as when a former GI hangs out at Mai's mother's Vietnamese food store; they're both outcasts, Cao seems to be saying. But mostly, Cao's cast is there to propel the plot and utter her thoughts, which are unconcealed because of a seeming inflexibility with language.

Furthermore, the book's transitions are a little too glib. One is certainly aware while reading Monkey Bridge that this is a story that has been constructed, not one allowed to flow freely. This glibness obscures the import of the book's pivotal point, a final diary entry by Mai's mother that explains the complexity of the family's past.

One wishes that Monkey Bridge contained a more quietly revelatory pace and style - all the better to contrast its poignant, often hair-raising tale. For now, the Vietnamese-American experience awaits a writer who is fully up to the task. MEMO: Michael Anft is a free-lance writer and critic who lives in

Baltimore. ILLUSTRATION: Photo

Lan Cao

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