Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Chris' thoughts on Monkey Bridge

The message I got from the novel was not very enlightening. I felt that Thanh was conveying a neglect of her true heritage. She does perform a traditional suicide which preserves and follows her culture, but I still saw some holes in her actions. She could only accept her Vietnamese heritage through lies and highly fabricated stories that only made her feel even more guilty. She claims this was to conceal the tragic and horriffic truth from her daughter. All she is diong is giving her daughter a false sense of hope that will never be gained. She will be in search of a person that she will never find and a truth she, perhaps, would never realize. Mai gained nothing from these lies and ints very selfish of her mother to do this to her. Unfortunately, Mai, who loves her mother dearly, must realize that her mother was a weak person and let her fears overcome her.

5 comments:

  1. I really don't agree with you here Chris. The suicide that Thanh performed was going alongside tradition, yes, but in ways that you did not mention. She commits suicide to regain a sort of honor for her daughter. Also, in romanticizing the past to such an extent Thanh was attempting to give her daughter a clean slate without lying the burden of prostitution, murder, etc. on her. Her form of protection involved a long chain of previous events that could not be erased and therefore came out after creating a beautiful background allowing Mai to come to realize the truth slowly rather than abrubtly.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I think that Thanh did everything with the best of intentions. What is debatable is whether things really worked out for the best. Surely, Thanh wanted to give Mai a clean slate. However, it is unfair to tell the truth to Mai without giving her the opportunity to ask questions as Mai will undoubtably have many. This could have truly been an opportunity for Mai and Thanh to connect. However, Thanh had a different viewpoint.
    -Teresa

    ReplyDelete
  3. I don’t really understand what you mean by “traditional suicide which preserves and follows her culture” because as far as I know there is nothing traditional about sleeping pills and vodka. Also I am aware of suicide being a traditional aspect of Japanese culture as a response to failure, but I don’t know that Vietnam has anything similar. Still, I agree with the rest of what you are saying. At the end of everything Mai no longer knows which way is up thanks to all of Thanh’s misleading lies. Actually it becomes difficult later on to tell which is a lie and which is the truth. Thanh’s final letter has been interpreted by some writers as being a lie itself. Perhaps her final letter was a designed to make sure that she does not seek out the truth about Baba Quan, who might not actually be a bad guy as Thanh suggests. It could also be that Thanh just doesn’t want Mai to find out some deeper more horrible truth about herself, like maybe she was a prostitute or something. The point is that suicide only makes Thanh more of a suspect for worse things than she has up to now admitted to.

    ReplyDelete
  4. While I have strong feelings opposing suicide, I can see the rationale behind what Thanh did. In the end, I think while what she did was somewhat selfish, her intentions were to protect her daughter and to allow her to be able to lead her own life. I feel that somehow, her mother living would have hindered her from continuing forward. All that baggage that Thanh carried might have been placed upon Mai, but now that she's gone, she has been released from that burden.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I am a pretty big advocate of the truth and while I understand Thanh's rationale of saving Mai and setting her free, I don't necessarily agree with it. In fact I agree with you on the point that she is instilling a false sense of hope in Mai and is perpetuating the lies in the journals by not giving an explanation to Mai and leaving her to make her own cultural identity. That is all Thanh wanted and in the end left Mai with a confused sense of Vietnamese culture and animosity towards her family.

    -Aimee

    ReplyDelete