The Gangster We Are All Looking For
Le Thi Diem Thuy, 2003
Knopf Doubleday
160 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375700026
Summary
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 father’s hopeless rage. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 2, 1972
• Where—Phana Thiet, South Vietnam
• Education—B.A., Hampshire College
• Awards—Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships
• Currently—lives in western Massachusetts, USA
Le Thi Diem Thuy (pronounced lay tee yim twee) is an award-winning poet, novelist, and performer. She is the author of the 2003 novel, The Gangster We Are All Looking For. Born in the South Vietnamese village of Phan Thiet during the heart of the Vietnam War, Le left her homeland in 1978, alongside her father in a small fishing boat. They were picked up by an American naval ship and placed in a refugee camp in Singapore.
She and her father would eventually resettle in Linda Vista, in San Diego, California, where they shared in decaying 1940's-1950's Navy housing with fellow Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian "boat people" immigrants displaced by war. Le's mother and sister joined them two years later via a camp in Malaysia. Two of Le's siblings drowned during her childhood—her eldest brother in the ocean in Vietnam when he was six, her sister in a Malaysian refugee camp. Le adopted the name of her deceased sister after her father mistakenly reported her name when they were rescued at sea. She has four surviving siblings, two of which were born in America.
Le took her inspiration for writing from her love of fairy tales.
I wanted to write because I loved fairy tales. Reading a book of Grimm fairy tales, she recalls, I felt transported. Things happen very suddenly in fairy tales: A man puts on a cloak and vanishes. I could relate to that. Once I was somewhere and then I was here, and everything had vanished. I didn't take it as fantastic. I thought it was real.
She moved to Massachusetts in 1990 to enroll in Hampshire College where she concentrated on cultural studies and post-colonial literature. In 1993 Le traveled to Paris to research French colonial postcards from the early 1900s—images of Vietnamese people taken by French photographers. Some of the images she collected would later appear in her performance work. It is in France, that she solidified her identity as an American and English as her preferred language. Being in France and not hearing English every day, she says, helped clarify how "I hear English and carry it inside me."
On her return to Hampshire, she wrote poems, prose and pieces of dialog that would form the foundation for her senior thesis and first solo performance work, Mua He Do Lua / Red Fiery Summer. After graduation, she traveled the country from 1995 to 1997 performing Red Fiery Summer in community spaces and formal theaters. In 1996, she was commissioned to write her second solo performance work entitled The Bodies Between Us, which was subsequently produced by New WORLD Theater.
In the same year, she published a prose piece entitled "The Gangster We Are All Looking For" in Massachusetts Review. It was rerun in Harper's Magazine later that year, where it caught the attention of literary agent Nicole Aragi, who urged Le to expand the work into a novel. The unfinished book was picked up by Alfred A. Knopf and published in 2003 to glowing reviews.
In 1998, while working on her book, Le returned to her birthplace Vietnam for the first time in 20 years with her mother. Her trip made her appreciate the how much her parents had suffered when they settled in America.
It was profoundly sad for me. The most powerful thing was this [extended] family. I must have been related to 200 people there. I realized how isolated my parents must have felt, the extent of what they had lost and had never been able to regain.
Her mother returned to Vietnam permanently in 2001 after she was diagnosed with cancer. She is buried in her home village of Phan Thiet. Le's father moved back to Vietnam in 2003.
Shortly before publishing The Gangster We Are All Looking For, Le was cited by the New York Times as one of its "Writers On The Verge." Her work has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Harper's Magazine, and The Very Inside anthology, and among her awards are Fellowships from the Radcliffe and Guggenheim foundations.
Her powerful solo performance work, including Red Fiery Summer and The Bodies Between Us, have been performed throughout the United States (at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Vineyard Theater, among others), as well as in Europe. While the former piece reflects many stories later included in The Gangster, her next novel will be based on Bodies. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Though dense with allusion and simile, Le's prose is precise and uncluttered. She has a strong pictorial talent, and can make the reader see everything from the wings of a butterfly preserved in a glass paperweight to the giddy acrobatics of little boys jumping into a pool. An unerring eye for the seemingly mundane details of everyday life guides her story, and a sly sense of humor graces an imagination busily occupied with the possibilities of metaphor.
Paul Baumann - New York Times
While the novel brilliantly illuminates its unlikely troika, what the narrative leaves out is just as striking. It seems significant that descriptions of the Vietnam War barely figure in the story and that American characters remain fuzzy, undifferentiated and impressionistic. In this way, the relationship of this engaging and original novel to more conventional American narratives of Vietnam may be thought to be like a photographic negative: What's white is dark, what's dark is white, and the image is strange and mesmerizing.
Peter Zinoman - Los Angeles Times
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 feature 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 through 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 I am 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.
Publishers Weekly
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. For all Asian/immigrant collections.
Library Journal
The narrator of Le's poetically spare but psychologically rich debut novel is only six when she and her father and four other Vietnamese men arrive in San Diego, thanks to a generous man who learned of the plight of Vietnamese boat people at church. Sadly, he dies before they arrive.... There is much pain in this exquisite novel, and much beauty. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
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, thúy 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.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Gangster We All Are Looking For:
1. The young narrator of Le's novel is nameless. Why is she never given a name? What might have been the author's reason?
2. Describe Ba, the father. What kind of a man is he? What is the source of his rage? Is he to be admired...pitied...disliked...or what?
3. What is the significance of the book's title? In what way is—or was—Ba a gangster? Has he changed since his escape from Vietnam and arrival in the US? When his daughter says that of all her father's friends, "he alone managed to crawl here, on his hands and knees, to this life," is she speaking of his will to survive...his predatory nature...his new found humility...or what?
3. The narrator refers to her own birth in the middle of the war as "both a curse and a miracle." What does she mean?
4. War comprises a setting of this novel. Talk about the mother's remark that war is "a bird with a broken wing flying over the countryside, trailing blood and burying crops in sorrow." What does our young narrator mean when she tells us that "war has no beginning and no end. It crosses oceans like a splintered boat"?
5. Follow up to Question #4: If you are old enough to have lived through it, what is your remembrance of the Vietnam War? If you are too young, what is your understanding of the war. If you are of Vietnamese descent, talk about the ways in which the war transformed Vietnam. What it was like (or what must it have been like) to experience the horror of the war on your homeland?
6. The word for water, in Vietnamese, is the same as for nation, country, and homeland; water is found everywhere in The Gangster, literally and figuratively. Talk about the symbolic use of water in this novel. What does water signify?
7. How does the narrator's mother adjust to her new life? Why is she distraught, for instance, over their landlord's draining of the swimming pool. What more might she mean when she laments, "I open the door and what is there to see?" How does Le's language alert us to the possiblity of something more significant than the loss of a pleasant view?
8. When the family is evicted from the apartment, a photograph is left behind. What does its loss signify for the mother? Why does she believe she has betrayed her parents...again?
9. Consider how self-identify, the sense of who one is, gets lost or overwhelmed in the course of a migration to a another land that is vastly different—as well as indifferent and even hostile. How would that feel? Does Le adequately describe her family's profound sense of displacement? Have you read other narratives about the immigrant experience? If so, how does Le's compare? If you have come from another country, what is it like to land in an alien culture?
10. Critics have expounded on the poetic and lyrical style of Le's prose. Are there passages that strike you as particularly beautiful in their use of language and imagery? How does Le's artistic vision affect your experience of reading her novel?
11. Le uses five interlocking stories in her novel, shifting time, place and point of view. Does this structure engage you...or do you find it distracting? Why might she have structured her novel in such a way? What advantages might it give a novelist, as opposed to a straightforward perspective and timeline?
12. Comment on the young narrator's remark: "I don't know how time moves or which of our sorrows or our desires it is able to wash away." Is time able—or not—to heal this family's sorrow and sense of loss?
13. In the story "Nu'o'c," the mystery that has permeated previous stories is revealed. Does its revelation bring the novel into focus for you? Does it pull the disparate elements together into a unified whole?
14. Do you like this book?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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