Trauma and potential healing in Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge and The Lotus and the Storm

Nearly half a century since its end, the Vietnam War still continues to hold a strong place in the memories of the nations involved and of people who were subjected to the atrocities. However, debates on the effects of the War have always revolved around a U.S.-centered perspective excluding the Vietnamese experience. Mainstream American cultural productions have an influential role in foregrounding the American veterans' experience and thus erasing the Vietnamese voice related to the War. As such, Vietnamese American literature appears as a response to the dominant American discourse on the Vietnam War and concentrates on the experiences of the Vietnamese who have been marginalized in the U.S. after immigration. Being a 1.5 generation Vietnamese, a term used to describe the people who were born in Vietnam and moved to the U.S. at an early age due to the War, Lan Cao places emphasis on the impact of the War on the Vietnamese war survivors in her novels, Monkey Bridge (1997) and The Lotus and the Storm (2014). Both novels demonstrate the consequences of traumatic past events in the present lives of the individuals through multiple symptoms depending on their distinct experiences, character traits, beliefs and present condition. Besides individual traumas, Cao's novels attach importance to the impact of the War as a collectively experienced phenomenon leading to collective trauma. Despite the violence causing individual and collective traumas, Cao does not portray the Vietnamese as helpless victims constantly in a pathological state, rather, they are depicted as trauma survivors who struggle to recover. Hence, this study aims to explore the representations of trauma at individual and collective levels and the efforts carried out at both levels for potential healing in the two novels. To better understand the trauma of the Vietnamese war survivors and their healing efforts, this study utilizes both traditional models of trauma theory that focus on the effects of trauma on the individual psyche and pluralistic approaches to trauma that highlight the importance of distinct experiences and contexts in which these experiences are situated and diverse paths taken by individuals for potential healing. Keywords: Lan Cao, Trauma, Healing, Vietnam War, Vietnamese American