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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