An Analysis Of Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge

Although difficult in a foreign environment, East-Asian immigrants felt compelled to retain their culture to leave a legacy of their heritage. From the beginning, Asian immigrants knew they did not belong in the white environment. Mai describes the prejudice, “we would never be welcome in this country . . . set apart from everyone else” (Cao 65). In Obasan, Canadians ridicule the Japanese by constantly calling them “Japs,” a demeaning term. Even from a young age, the white children in the novel pick on and segregate away from their “yellow peers.” To cope and keep traditions and cultures, immigrants created communities to support each other. Perhaps one of the most famous cities that still holds on to its beginning roots is Chinatown, San Fransisco

(Takaki 91). The characters in The Joy Luck Club live in Chinatown because they can freely celebrate their cultures and traditions without facing mockery and bigotry. When Vietnamese refugees moved to the United States, many settled in Vietnamese communities in a similar fashion. Mai’s mother lives a partially Vietnamese lifestyle in Little Saigon, Virginia. She can relate to local friends, shop in Vietnamese grocery stores, and celebrate traditional holidays with her family. The Japanese immigrants also followed in similar patterns. “The Issei developed a separate Japanese community and economy” (Takaki 34).
East-Asian immigrants, however, could not always find peace in their environments of ethnic solidarity because they were still surrounded by an environment that derided against different cultures.

Important, but difficult in the Western environment, many immigrants struggled when attempting to retain culturally religious practices and superstitions. In Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge, Thanh is haunted with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from her experiences during the Vietnam War, and this contributes to her fear that she did not uphold her filial duties in Vietnam. Two important ideologies in Southeast Asia, Buddhism and karma preach that a being must be a “worthy person” to enter Nirvana (Welty 291). Constantly plagued and troubled, Thanh feels she can not uphold her cultural daughter duties to her karma in America. This anxiety eventually leads to Thanh’s downfall as she believes the only way to save her own daughter from her negative karma is committing suicide. Yet before Thanh takes her own life, she finally feels tranquil because she can finally experience a closeness to her true home, “And for the first time since our arrival in Virginia, I can almost feel the geometric shape of the shimmering rice fields outside . . . the call of my heart” (Cao 253). Amy Tan’s characters in The Joy Luck Club concern and contemplate with the reverence of traditional Chinese superstitions. Although these characters live in the United States, their hearts still align with their Chinese superstitions. Ying-Ying St. Clair struggles with her life in America. She feels uneasy and believes the United State’s “qi” gives her poor fortune. Her paranoia leads to her suffering with depression “as if she had died and become a living ghost” (Tan

118).
Although it proved challenging, Asian immigrants held onto their culture in some aspects by raising their children with cultural traditions in a Western environment. Many immigrant parents wanted to raise their children with traditional cultural myth and folklore. Historicl analysts describe Japanese children as “learned at the mother’s knee, coached in the Japanese language, traditions, and values” (Wilson and Hosokawa 161). Raised in a Western environment with a Japanese touch, Naomi Nakane nurtured on milk, a Western concept, and Momotaro, a Japanese folktale (Kogawa 68). Parents also raised their children to celebrate East-Asian holidays and beware East-Asian superstitions. Thanh raises Mai to revere and attend to her karma (Cao 20). The children in both Monkey Bridge and The Joy Luck Club also celebrate the Lunar New Year Festival with their parents to continue their cultural legacy. Parents urged assimilating children to remember their heritage, one of the few links they shared with their children. Aunty Emily urges Naomi “You have to remember! You are our history!” (Kogawa 60). This repeated idea endures as a common theme in parent-child relationships in East-Asian immigrant families.