Book review: The Lotus and the Storm, by Lan Cao

Love and suffering are so inextricably tied in the psyche of Vietnam that the nation's epic poem The Tale of Kieu revolves around a hero who is separated for years from his lover, but never stops dreaming of their reunion.

The same dynamic defines the lives of the father and daughter who narrate The Lotus and the Storm, a poignant novel by Vietnamese-American writer Lan Cao. The lotus is a metaphor for the two immigrants swept up by the storm of American intervention in Vietnam.

A professor of law in California, Cao grew up amid the Vietnam war, whose horrors are deeply embedded in the souls of Vietnamese and Americans alike. Split between Vietnam and the US, the novel weaves a tapestry of misery and pain, love and joy, as Cao tries to show what four decades of war and woe have done to her people.

The novel is a discourse of sorts between the narrators, who fled Vietnam after the war and live in a tightly knit Vietnamese community in suburban Virginia. The father, identified as Mr Minh, is a former paratrooper in the South Vietnamese army. He reflects on his life back home and the war that climaxed in the humiliating 1975 American retreat from Saigon.

His daughter, Mai, in alternating chapters, reminisces about her childhood in Vietnam and her later infatuation with a charitable American soldier. Mai's character seems undeniably modelled on the author herself, not least because both struggled against but eventually embraced a piece of the American dream.

Cao is at her best when she describes in riveting detail what Mai feels like when the character returns to Vietnam in 2006.

"If one measures the depth of love by the persistence of sorrow following love's separation or loss, then I can say I truly love this place," Cao writes in a chapter titled Knowing towards the end of the book. "And for the Vietnamese, indeed that is how love is weighed and judged, by a lifetime of grief."

The author described that feeling of intense unhappiness in an article last month on Biographile, a website devoted to biography and memoir.

"What happens when you wake up and you no longer smell familiar scents? When you are no longer surrounded by the foliage and flowers of your childhood? This loss of geographical anchor alters your entire sense of being and perspective," Cao writes.