She lived in Avon, Connecticut, with a close family friend, an American colonel, later promoted to Major General, and his wife.
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 in 1962.
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."
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.
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.