Open AccessRereading Empire, Rethinking History: Rehabilitation of the Vietcong in Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge
Author(s) -
Yuan Shu
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
southeast asian review of english
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.101
0ISSN - 0127-046X
DOI - 10.22452/sare.vol58no2.6
Subject(s) - empire , vietnamese , nationalism , context (archaeology) , vietnam war , genocide , democracy , sociology , history , law , gender studies , political science , aesthetics , art , philosophy , politics , linguistics , archaeology
Throughits reading of Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge, credited as the first Vietnamese American novel, this article seeksto investigate the discourse of reconciliation or refugee settlement in the context of the changing US master narratives from Empire to Cold War 2.0. Itarguesthat Cao’s novel in its effort to register a South Vietnamese perspective reorients modern Vietnamese experiences in relation to the US sense of democracy and freedom and in the process challenges what Donald Pease calls the state fantasy of American exceptionalism in the US military intervention in Vietnam. What Cao’s novel achieves is to blur the boundary between nationalism and communism in its representation of the Vietnamese struggle for independence in its early stage and to humanize and rehabilitate the Vietcong soldier as a possibly assimilable “us” rather than as simply “them” in the realm of the other.