HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Lan Cao (born 1961) is the author of the novels '' Monkey Bridge'' (1997) and '' The Lotus and the Storm'' (2014). She is also a professor of law at the Chapman University School of Law, specializing in international business and trade, international law, and development. She received her Juris Doctor from Yale Law School. She has taught at
Brooklyn Law School Brooklyn Law School (BLS) is a private law school in New York City. Founded in 1901, it has approximately 1,100 students. Brooklyn Law School's faculty includes 60 full-time faculty, 15 emeriti faculty, and a number of adjunct faculty. Brookl ...
,
Duke Law School Duke University School of Law (Duke Law School or Duke Law) is the law school of Duke University, a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. One of Duke's 10 schools and colleges, the School of Law is a constituent academic unit t ...
, Michigan Law School and
William & Mary Law School The William & Mary Law School, known historically as the Marshall-Wythe School of Law, is the professional graduate law school of the College of William & Mary. Located in Williamsburg, Virginia, the school is the oldest extant law school in th ...
.


Early life

She was born in
Saigon , population_density_km2 = 4,292 , population_density_metro_km2 = 697.2 , population_demonym = Saigonese , blank_name = GRP (Nominal) , blank_info = 2019 , blank1_name = – Total , blank1_ ...
, South Vietnam and grew up in Saigon's twin city, Cholon. In 1975, when communist forces defeated South Vietnam, she was flown out of Vietnam. She lived in Avon, Connecticut, with a close family friend, an American colonel, later promoted to Major General, and his wife. Cao received her B.A. in political science from
Mount Holyoke College Mount Holyoke College is a private liberal arts women's college in South Hadley, Massachusetts. It is the oldest member of the historic Seven Sisters colleges, a group of elite historically women's colleges in the Northeastern United States. ...
in 1983 and her J.D. from
Yale Law School Yale Law School (Yale Law or YLS) is the law school of Yale University, a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. It was established in 1824 and has been ranked as the best law school in the United States by '' U.S. News & Wor ...
. After law school graduation, she worked as a litigation and corporate attorney at the NYC law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. She also clerked for a federal judge, Constance Baker Motley of the Southern District of New York, who was the first African-American woman to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court in ''Meredith v. Fair'', where she won James Meredith's effort to be the first black student to attend the
University of Mississippi The University of Mississippi (byname Ole Miss) is a public research university that is located adjacent to Oxford, Mississippi, and has a medical center in Jackson. It is Mississippi's oldest public university and its largest by enrollment. ...
in 1962.


''Monkey Bridge''

''Monkey Bridge'' is the semi-autobiographical story of a mother and daughter who leave Vietnam to come to the United States. Michiko Kakutani of ''The New York Times'' wrote of the novel, "Cao has not only made an impressive debut, but joined authors such as Salman Rushdie and Bharati Mukherjee in mapping the state of exile and its elusive geographies of loss and hope." ''Monkey Bridge'' is part coming-of-age story, part immigration story, part war story and part mother-daughter story set both in Vietnam (Mekong Delta) and the US (Virginia). It is considered to be "the first novel by a
Vietnamese American Vietnamese Americans ( vi, Người Mỹ gốc Việt, lit=Viet-origin American people) are Americans of Vietnamese ancestry. They make up about half of all overseas Vietnamese and are the fourth-largest Asian American ethnic group after Chinese ...
about the war experience and its aftermath".''Lan Cao to Speak of Bridging Two Cultures in Lyon Lecture''
''Monkey Bridge'' has been widely adopted in high schools and colleges, in courses such as AP English, comparative literature, women's studies, Vietnam War studies, and cultural studies.


''The Lotus and the Storm''

Cao's second novel, ''The Lotus and the Storm'', was published by
Viking Press Viking Press (formally Viking Penguin, also listed as Viking Books) is an American publishing company owned by Penguin Random House. It was founded in New York City on March 1, 1925, by Harold K. Guinzburg and George S. Oppenheim and then acquire ...
in August 2014. Viking describes the novel as "the first in-depth portrait of the Vietnam War from a Vietnamese-American point of view; it is an intimate, universally human story, epic in scope, about the entwined paths of Americans and Vietnamese. It explores the ways in which love and connection heal trauma; and how the deeper story of war is always one of relationships." As in ''Monkey Bridge'', ''The Lotus and the Storm'' deals with disjunction, war, trauma, loss, lives exiled, and the continuing weight of the past on the present.


References


External links

*
Chapman University Faculty webpage

Bridging the Gaps: Inescapable History in Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge

Monkey bridge companion website

Interview with Lan Cao, at the ''Los Angeles Review of Books''
Twitter @lancaowrites {{DEFAULTSORT:Cao, Lan 20th-century American novelists 20th-century American women writers American women novelists American novelists of Asian descent American writers of Vietnamese descent American women lawyers College of William & Mary faculty Yale Law School alumni Mount Holyoke College alumni Vietnamese emigrants to the United States 1961 births Living people Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison people Novelists from Virginia Brooklyn Law School faculty English-language literature of Vietnam