Growth With Trauma: A Research Of Trauma Narrative On Monkey Bridge

Vietnamese American Writer Lan Cao’s debut novel Monkey Bridge is known as "the first novel concerned about Vietnam War and its impact on Vietnamese Americans." Lan Cao narrates perilously between worlds past and present, East and West, made two interlocking stories portrayed. One of these stories is the Vietnamese version of the classic immigrant experience in America, told by a young girl, and another story from her mother told us about the dark history of betrayal, political intrigue, family secrets, and revenge. Throughout overseas and domestic research status, although Vietnamese Americans’ literary works gradually come into sight of readers and critics in recent years, attention and fame are still far from that of Chinese American literature. Therefore, select a representative Vietnamese American literature work stress certain significance. Written from the perspective of women experience who attended in the Vietnam War, Monkey Bridge describes Vietnamese’s life both in Vietnam and America and tries to restore part of the history of the Vietnam War so that readers can get closer to that period of war. Not only detailed descriptions of Vietnam customs, traditions, living style and legend are showed in the novel, it also compares the life of Vietnamese immigrants living in the United States and Vietnam in all distinctive aspects, which is filled with national and ethnic trauma, family trauma and trauma in cultural differences. Under all multiple traumas, this novel can be classified as a novel that writing traumatic memories. By means of the traumatic memories and explorations of culture, historical background, the writer use the words, a non-confrontational way to eliminate the conflict between "the other" and "self, expressing her yearn for multicultural integration, the fusion of real national communication and cultural exchange, and then represent an ethnic literary theme on post-colonialism, orientalism, cultural conflict, etc.Through correlation analysis of the author’s life and the comments the novel received, and by the detail analysis of the main contents of the work and the theme it reflected, the thesis sets forth overseas and domestic research status of Monkey Bridge and related material and the novelty of it; then it analyzes the work from three aspects both in trauma and trauma narrative theory and the text:firstly, it introduces the meaning and classification of trauma theory, development history of literary trauma narrative and the characteristics of ethnic literature with traumatic theme; secondly, combined with trauma theory, it reverses the multiple traumatic experiences in the aspects of war, family and cultural as the central figures in the novel had undergone--the heroine Mai, her mother Thanh and the Vietnamese American group. On this basis, it describes the understandings of daughter and mother, which let the daughter gradually grows up with her trauma. Moreover, it also gives examples to illustrate the great efforts made by Vietnamese Americans to go through from the cultural conflict dilemma to cultural integration, and how the writer Lan Cao realizes her own progress also has its related analysis. In the conclusion part, with close reading and deconstruction, it highlights the feasibility research on Monkey Bridge and insights the profound meaning of the theme-Vietnamese American woman writer Lan Cao is definitely used trauma narrative writing to reestablish her Vietnamese identity. Besides, under the influence of globalization and America’s mainstream culture, she inspires trauma-stricken Vietnamese Americans to keep firm with Vietnam’s history and cultural traditions, and also keep pace with the time to identify their own bicultural identities, hoping that Vietnamese Americans can face life optimistically and be self-confidence to speak out unique Vietnamese Americans’ voice.