Background
Cao was born in Saigon, South Vietnam. Her father was Cao Văn Viên, the Chairman of the South Vietnamese Joint General Staff. She grew up in Saigon's twin city, Cholon.
- Photos
- Works
- Photos
- Works
Lan Cao
Edit Profile
Education
Yale Law School.
Career
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 has taught at Brooklyn Law School, Duke Law School, Michigan Law School and William & Mary Law School. In 1975, when Communist forces defeated South Vietnam, she was flown out of Vietnam.
Cao received her B.A. in political science from Mount Holyoke College in 1983 and her J.D. from Yale Law School. 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.
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."
It is considered to be "the first novel by a Vietnamese American about the war experience and its aftermath". 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. Cao's second novel, , was published by Viking Press in August 2014. 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 , deals with disjunction, war, trauma, loss, lives exiled, and the continuing weight of the past on the present.
Views
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.
