The Gangster We Are All Looking For
This acclaimed novel reveals the life of a Vietnamese family in America through the knowing eyes of a child finding her place and voice in a new country.
In 1978 six refugees, a girl, her father, and four uncles are pulled from the sea to begin a new life in San Diego. In the child's imagination, the world is transmuted into an unearthly realm: she sees everything intensely, hears the distress calls of inanimate objects, and waits for her mother to join her. But life loses none of its strangeness when the family is reunited. As the girl grows, her matter-of-fact innocence eddies increasingly around opaque and ghostly traumas: the cataclysm that engulfed her homeland, the memory of a brother who drowned and, most inescapable, her fathers hopeless rage.
Excerpted from Wikipedia.org:
The Gangster We Are All Looking For is the first-novel by Vietnamese-American author lê thi diem thúy, published in 2003. It was first published as a short piece in The Best American Essays of 1997 and was also awarded a Pushcart Prize Special Mention.
The novel is a fragmented sequence of events recollected by a nameless narrator. In a first-person narrative, the narrator tells the stories of her past experiences as a Vietnamese immigrant. Time and place shift continuously throughout the novel; the story takes place both in Vietnam and America. The novel is concerned with themes of identity, family dynamics, war, and liberation. Images of water are prominent symbolically and literally throughout the novel.
Narrative Style
The novel is told through the voice of the immigrant girl when she is six and keeps building until she is 26.
The flow of the prose is anachronistic, often jumping from life in America to life in Vietnam and even to a time in Vietnam before the narrator's birth. The tenses also switch from present tense to past and back. The novel is also told episodically, fractured, because as the author stated, "memory, by its nature, is very fragmented"
Synopsis
The narrator comes to California from a refugee camp in Singapore with four other immigrants whom she refers to as uncles, although they are not blood related. They are sponsored by a retired Navy officer named Mr. Russel. Mr. Russel passes away, and under the pressure of Mr. Russel's dying wish, his son Melvin houses the immigrants. The grandmother of Mel oftentimes takes the narrator and her father on drives to the mountainside. To compensate for housing, the uncles, as well as the narrator's father, Ba, paint homes.
Suh-top!
Mr. Russel's collection of miniature glass animals are transported into Mel's home, and Mel commands the immigrants to not touch the glass objects. Secretly, the narrator often plays with the forbidden objects. She imagines that the butterfly inside the glass is alive and dreams that it wants to escape. One day she attempts to free the butterfly by throwing it, breaking the butterfly as well as the collection of glass animals. The four uncles and Ba rush into the room. The uncles tell the narrator to run and "shuh-shuh/shuh-shuh," unable to properly pronounce Stop. Ba is a little closer in that he says "Suh-top!/suh-top!"
palm
The mother of the narrator and wife of the father makes her way to America and is reunited with her daughter and husband. They live in an apartment complex with palm trees and a pool. The mother works as a seamstress. The mother accidentally crashes her Cadillac into the apartment gates. The boys of the apartment complex, on hot days, would jump from the second story into the pool. In response to this, the landlord has the pool emptied and filled with rocks and cement. A baby palm tree is planted on its surface. Following the change, Ba and Ma argue.
At the abandoned home next door, the neighborhood children play and set up a large cardboard box they find. One summer, the narrator enters the box with a boy, who begins to touch her chest. The narrator continues to enter the box with the boy.
One day, the narrator is sent to run an errand, and as she is returning home, she feels the terrifying presence of her brother who seems to have been left in Vietnam.
the gangster we are all looking for
This section begins with a description of a black-and-white photograph of the narrator's parents in Vietnam. Before the narrator's birth, when Ma, a Catholic schoolgirl, decided to marry Ba, a Buddhist gangster, Ma's parents were outraged and disowned their daughter. The narrator was born in Vietnam in an alley behind her grandparents' home.
The narrator recalls her father's face at a military camp in South Vietnam. The family moves from the Red Apartment with the palm tree to the Green Apartment. Because the manager murdered a woman, family moves again to Linda Vista. Ma shaves her head because she is
angry at Ba for gambling and drinking. After the arrival of the aforementioned photograph, Ma and Ba get into fights. Kids outside the apartment wonder what is happening, and the narrator goes outside, wildly dancing in front of the crowd.
The family is ultimately evicted from their home. The Linda Vista home is ultimately demolished. When they leave, Ma remembers that she forgot the photograph of her parents in the apartment and frantically cries to return to her parents.
the bones of birds
The narrator runs away from home to the East Coast. The father finds a new occupation as someone who mows lawns and one day digs a trench in someone's lawn without being told to. When the narrator returns one night, Ba tells her that he is in trouble.
nuoc
In the final section of the novel, two narratives seem to run alongside one another, alternating every few paragraphs.
The first narration takes place in America, where the father, in order to ignore the ringing phone, does various things to preoccupy himself. The mother works at a Vietnamese restaurant which overcharges their customers for foreign cuisine. There are rumors that their daughter has moved to the East Coast to become a writer.
The other narration takes place twenty years ago, in Vietnam. The narrator's brother's body was pulled from the South China Sea. He is said to have been jumping from one boat to another when he suddenly slipped and fell. Ma's father brings the narrator's dead brother back home, where people say he has cursed the home with bad water. Ba is currently fighting in the war.
Themes
water
Throughout the novel, water is the most prominent motif. From the beginning, lê thi diem thúy inserts that In Vietnamese, the word for water and the word for a nation, a country, and a homeland are one and the same: nuc. In a similar sense, water plays a symbolic role in diverse ways in the text-often, with dual/opposite meanings. Most of the themes within the text are somehow related to and entwined with the flow of water.
the mobility of memory through the photograph
Through the photograph, The Gangster We Are All Looking For explores the nature of memory and its ability, or inability, to travel from generation to generation. In les narrative, the photograph can be understood not only in terms of reference and time, but also perspective of mobility.
the textual representation of a visual representation
Through le's language, to the narrator and to the American reader, the photographs meaning slides from being the grandparents to being Vietnam. This is due to le's language in introducing the photograph as Vietnam is a black-and-white photograph which invokes other images of black-and-white photographs regarding Vietnam that the collective American memory may recall such as the photograph of a girl running from a napalm strike or the close range shooting of a Viet Cong suspect.
Vietnamese American Literary Context
Since 1963, over 100 volumes of literature (generally focused on tales of witness, education, and life in America) have been published in English by Vietnamese American authors. For the most part, they have gone unnoticed by the public eye because they were not useful to America in the years following the Vietnam War.
Michele Janette, specialist in Vietnamese American literature and film, proposes that the reasoning for obscurity lies in the claim to victimhood. The Vietnam War is the only war America lost. It is a war understood as having no winner, only victims. America tends to see this war as one in which Americans fought themselves, not the Vietnamese. Thus, Vietnamese American literature challenges the legitimacy of the claim shared by American citizens: Victimhood.
Published Vietnamese American literature (here defined as literature written by people with shared ethnic Vietnamese heritage) before 1995 was almost exclusively authorial biography. From 1995 and onwards, there has been a blossoming of Vietnamese American literature from writers who identify themselves first as writers, concerned with the craft of writing as well as the content of what they are writing about.
As Americans are distanced from the war temporally, as Vietnamese American literature moves away from victimhood and the war America lost, Vietnamese American literature has been more easily accepted and recognized in America.
About lê thi diem thúy
lê thi diem thúy was born in Phan Thiet, southern Vietnam. She and her father left Vietnam in 1978, by boat, eventually settling in Southern California. lê is currently a Radcliffe Fellow and resides in western Massachusetts.
Reviews
Kirkus, March 1st, 2003
A detailed and moving saga of a Vietnamese family in America, subtly assembled from this limpid debut's kaleidoscopic array of gorgeous and troubling word pictures.
The unnamed narrator's musings move forward and backward in time, from East to West, between her confused childhood and the "escape" she makes from her parents in California to relocate in the eastern US. The early pages describe her flight, with her father (Ba) and four uncles, from Vietnam by boat, their arrival in San Diego, and troubled relationships with a well-meaning American host family. After she and Ba have been reunited with her mother (Ma), the narrator then describes their constant moves from one apartment and job to another. We then learn about her parents' youth, and Ma's estrangement from her family for having married "a Buddhist gangster" who's also her social inferior. As these details emerge, thuy builds a heart-wrenching picture of her narrator's abstracted, conflicted psyche, repeatedly reemphasizing the girl's preternatural sensitivity to new sights, sounds, smells, and textures while revealing the death of her older brother by drowning in childhood, and how this loss haunted her family for many years after. The consequent impressions of disorientation, resentment, and loneliness are powerfully conveyed by numerous abrupt, startling images (a girl killed by a napalm bombing that "made her body glow, like a lantern"; a dead butterfly preserved in a glass disk and employed as a paperweight; and a climactic vision of the bodies of small "silver fish" washed out of the open sea onto a moonlit beach). The narrative thus resembles a song with a pronounced central refrain, around which an infinite number of verse variations are clustered. Beautiful stuff - and a brilliant debut.
Library Journal, March 1, 2003
In the opening pages of this affecting debut, a Vietnamese girl who has survived the open seas with her father and four "uncles" winds up in America at the home of a somewhat reluctant sponsor. There she finds a paperweight containing a butterfly and smashes it to release the beautiful creature--an act that gets the refugees thrown out. The butterfly is rather too patently a symbol for the young protagonist herself, who eventually flutters away from her prison, though not in so obvious a fashion. The story, however, is as much about her parents' marriage, strained to breaking not only by the effort to adapt to America but by memories of Vietnam. The mother had defied her south Catholic family to marry a northerner reputed to be a gangster, and violence and passion still run through their relationship. In addition, they have lost a son, who drowned in the South China Seas and sometimes comes to haunt his confused little sister. The story opens slowly but gathers strength, and though it remains somewhat muted, le's lyrical writing and skill with the telling vignette will reward patient readers.
School Library Journal , March 2005
In fragments of memory, a Vietnamese girl recalls her life before and after immigration to San Diego, after the war that destroyed her parents' old way of life and left them stranded like fish out of water in a new world. This thinly disguised memoir features beautifully crafted prose and an accessible and engaging look at the immigrant experience.
Publishers Weekly, April 21, 2003
Le's first novel is a bracing, unvarnished, elliptical account of a Vietnamese refugee family, in America but not yet of it, hobbled by an unfamiliar environment and their own troubled relationships. It's narrated by the family's young daughter, newly arrived in San Diego with her father after being sponsored by a well-meaning but condescending American family. Her mother soon joins them, and the family endures an itinerant existence of low-wage jobs and cheap rental apartments. Other Vietnamese wander namelessly through the book, sharing space with the family but providing little of the warmth of community. Nearly plotless, the novel is organized into vignettes that each features one piercing image: a drunken parent, a shattered display cabinet, a drowned boy. As the narrator makes her halting adjustment to America, she also tries to discover what the family has left behind in Vietnam. Her father's mysterious past caused him to be rejected by his in laws; these grandparents are now known to the girl only thro ugh a worn photograph. Then there is her brother, whose fate is mentioned only in whispers. Le allows no sentimentality to creep into this work - indeed, she hints only subtly at the narrator's emotional state ("there is no trace of blood anywhere except here, in my throat, where lain telling you all of this"), as though any explicit show of feeling were too frivolous for the subject at hand. This is a stark and significant work that will challenge readers.
Asia Pacific Arts Online Magazine, April 9, 2004
When I first heard of lê thi diem thúy's The Gangster We Are All Looking For, I was half expecting a mystery novel or a gang-land saga, but to my pleasant surprise, the novel was nothing like I imagined. Instead it focused on the experiences of a Vietnamese immigrant family attempting to make sense of their place in America while trying to reconcile the past.
Separated into five chapters, the novel is narrated through the eyes of an unnamed protagonist as we follow her through various life stages. At six years old, she is a curious child learning to adjust to itchy American dresses and plastic sandals in Linda Vista, San Diego. In those first few years, everything from Sunday trips to the mountains to the corner stop sign becomes a point of discovery for her. Her navet one day leads her to attempt to free a butterfly from a piece of amber, which results in disaster, but in these accounts Le is able to capture the simplicity of the child perfectly.
As a teenager, the protagonist deals with typical adolescent issues of fitting in and finding interest in members of the opposite sex. But at the same time, this is a period of reflection for her as she begins to view the world though a more analytical perspective. Amidst her parents' quarrels, she also learns and makes sense of her parent's past and the reason for their tumultuous relationship, which ultimately adds to her sense of identity. In the chapter for which the book was aptly named, we learn that the "gangster" refers to her father. He was a Buddhist gangster from the north, whereas her mother was a Catholic schoolgirl from the south. When the two married against the objections of her family, her mother was disowned, and this then became an issue of discontent in the couple's marriage.
Finally, as a matured young woman, she is looking back on the past, trying to find solace and closure in her experiences. She comes to terms with the tragedy of a drowned sibling whose memory has haunted her. In this sense, the novel is a soul-searching journey of a young Vietnamese refugee as she finds and negotiates her identity through different places and time periods.
Throughout the novel, two themes abound. The first is identity. For the mother, it is losing and reclaiming identity. When she receives a picture of her parents in the mail, thus signaling their forgiveness, she is overjoyed as though she has been able to reclaim the identity that she lost when she married the gangster and left home. But when the family gets evicted from their
apartment, she becomes frantic and accidentally leaves the picture behind, once again abandoning her identity. In a heated argument with the mother, the protagonist's father exclaims, "What hands?! Let me see the gangster! Let me see his hands!" This exemplifies the anger he has for being discriminated against for an identity that he has tried so hard to leave behind upon starting anew in the United States.
Used literally and figuratively, water is a recurrent theme in the novel but this shouldn't be a surprise since the opening page dutifully informs the reader that "In Vietnamese, the word for water and the word for a nation, a country, and a homeland, are one and the same: nu'o'c." Water becomes a symbolic force that not only connects the characters but separates them. For example, the protagonist and her father are connected to the four uncles "not by blood but by water," but at the same time, water is separating them from reuniting with the mother. Water is also seen as the basis of the characters' identities, linking them with their homeland. For example, we can sympathize with the mother's frustration when she finds out that the landlord had filled the pool with cement and stone so that it no longer resembled the view of the ocean and of her homeland.
With its upbeat pace, the novel, which seems more like a short story, is a fast read, but this doesn't necessarily make it an easy read. Shifting the time frame between past and present, the story seems at first to be full of aimless thoughts and recollections pasted together with no particular coherent order. Filled with numerous metaphors, the beginning chapters are difficult to comprehend, but as the story unravels, particularly in the final chapter, "nu'o'c," everything comes together making the story a complete whole.
Since my parents are also Vietnamese refugees, this novel struck a personal chord with me. It was like reading my own family's story. It doesn't take that experience to be able to relate to the book, however, because the situations presented can be related to by anyone, regardless of background.
The Independent, January 30, 2004
If you don't often read first novels, make an exception for this brief, elegiac work, which recreates in a skilfully shaped mosaic the life of a Vietnamese family who came as boat people to the US. It divides, like the life of the family, into two halves, each composed of vivid fragments, a diaspora of story-telling through which images of water run in a unifying stream.
In the first half, "Suh-top!", the still-childish narrator tells the story of her life after arriving in America as a six-year-old with her father, known as "Ba", and four uncles. Her mother, My, has been accidentally left behind, shouting in the water. The name of the section, "stop" as pronounced by the narrator's horrified uncles, recalls the mother's cries as well as an incident where the child tries to release a butterfly from the middle of her host's paperweight by smashing it against the wall, getting the family thrown out of their haven.
They embark on a long trail of uneasy displacements. The mother, My, eventually arrives, but wherever they settle quickly becomes spoiled. One landlord demolishes an area beloved of Vietnamese exiles in order to build condominiums they can't afford; another anxiously concretes over the swimming-pool which the family loves, in the central courtyard, because boys are diving happily into it from the windows of their second-floor flats.
This image of daring, freedom and mortal danger gains depth in the second part, "the gangster we are all looking for", in which the narrator has grown up. She focuses more sharply both on the father she adores and on her brother, lost by drowning in Vietnam when he jumped, risking his life like the swimming-pool boys, from boat to boat. Though her parents still love each other, they are always exhausted, the mother an underpaid cook, and the father, with his specialist knowledge of herbs and plants, caring for the featureless green lawns that Americans demand.
When "Ba" gets drunk, they argue violently: My smashes crockery, and the fights escalate beyond the calmative powers the child's imagination possessed in the first half. Now, there is nothing to dull the blade of perception. Her beloved father is a drinker and a former gangster, and although "it is clear to everyone around us that we have become each other", her only way to escape is to run away - until the heart-breaking call comes that brings her home.
Le Thi Diem Thuy has a brilliant touch with physical detail, and a sorrowful universal wisdom about the power of previous generations to harrow us with our neglect of them, our abandonments. But the vision which ends the book shows her narrator opting for vigorous survival, leaving her parents, who stand on the beach "leaning into each other", behind, and
running "like a dog unleashed" towards the spot where wave after wave of small silver fish is being washed up on the American shore, the "little mouths" of the new arrivals moving busily, "as if they could not get enough of the cool salt night air".
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