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The Gangster We Are All Looking For, by Thi Diem Thuy Le
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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.
- Sales Rank: #67150 in Books
- Brand: Le, Thi Diem Thuy
- Published on: 2004-05-11
- Released on: 2004-05-11
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .50" w x 5.10" l, .37 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 160 pages
From Publishers Weekly
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.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
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, leaving his widow and reluctant son to care for the refugees, an arrangement that ends with the sort of disaster only a lonely and imaginative child can create. Her mother was left behind in the confusion of their dangerous escape, and she also misses her dead older brother. Her mother finally joins them, but their lives remain unsettled, perplexing, even demoralizing in the face of undisguised prejudice and resentment. As le's narrator grows into adolescence, her perspective expands accordingly, illuminating not only her parents' passionate but violently troubled marriage, a much-objected-to union between a "Catholic schoolgirl from the South" and a "Buddhist gangster from the North," but also the many horrific and indelible psychic consequences of war. There is much pain in this exquisite novel, and much beauty. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“A brilliant evocation of human sorrow and desire. . . . Heartbreaking and exhilarating. . . . As vivid as a fairy tale, as allusive as a poem.”
The New York Times Book Review
“Breathtaking. . . . Flows in luminous paragraphs that mingle past and present, creating a fluid sense of time.” —Vogue
“Slender and elegant. . . . A beautifully rendered description of the personal, psychological and historical threads that link father to daughter.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
"lê captures the magical thinking of childhood with its shifting awareness of the wonders and apprehensions of life." —Village Voice Literary Supplement
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
A Honest Novel that Touched Me
By kenofunited
An Asian girl abandoned her two heavy baggage, her parents, and chose to run away; it was surprising but real. Through The Gangster We Are All Looking For, Le Thi Diem Thu ignited my passionate flame for Asian American's novel. With Western literature, it was the unnecessary limitations and cultural differences that caged me from pouring my entire emotion in the book. Because of the requirements that I needed to follow and look for in reading European literature, my reading habit slowly faded away. When I was reading Gangster, I began to learn again what it means to truly enjoy a novel. I enjoy a novel not because of its short pages and large fonts or its vibrant colored cover, but because of my ability to develop a personal relationship with the characters and the plots in the book. This novel is different because it wasn't just empty words but each passage is significant to me because I always remember a similar scene that happened in my life. Some scenes brought down teardrops from my eyes.
Gangster is a true and touching story about a family of Vietnamese refugees. After they went through a very challenging passage, the little girl was trying to find her place in this new and foreign country. It was familiar to me when Ma was crying and screaming in the truck when her whole family had to move out, abandoning all their stuffs in their apartments because of a sudden evacuation notice. She was screaming "Why...why does someone on the outside always wanting someone from the inside...why there's always a fence...why are we always leaving". Often, I ask the same questions myself when I feel oppressed in any ways because of my ethnicity. Living in this so-called free country, why do I still get discriminated based on my race or gender? Ma's unrestricted yelling in the truck is moving and for the first time, I agree with the words on the page. Those words gave me the courage to yell out the same questions. Those questions gave me strength in fighting for what privilege I righteously deserve. The words on the page are heartfelt.
Knowing how the family was going through stressful time, it was a very memorable part in the novel when the girl decided to run away to East Coast to pursue her interest in writing. Instead of being bounded by familial obligation often enforced in many Asian cultures, she chose to pursue her dream and takes off. She has decided on her own identity in this gigantic land of America. Many feelings rushed through my mind when I was reading this passage because abandoning one's family is absolutely prohibited by many elders in Asia. I can never imagine myself abandoning my own parents and running away. However, her action actually widened my traditional view and brought forth a new idea to me. Her action may seem disrespectful at first but it is actually her own attempt to bridge the large gap between the East and the West. The young girl was once a Vietnamese but now she is a Vietnamese-American. This is an eye-opening concept to me because I was often hindered by the traditional Asian morals and was never able to cross into the opposite side of the spectrum.
The Gangster We Are All Looking For is an honest and exciting novel. I wanted to follow the girl's footstep as she was trying to find her place in the States. I looked forward to the next page and the page after that. It was emotional when her family was having terrifying challenges through the loss of their homes. It was shocking and new when the narrator decided to relieve herself from traditional bounds and pursue her dream. This novel provides something new for everyone. For me, its truthfulness reopened the door of reading for me. This is a great book to start on the road to truly experience the intriguing Asian American's culture.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
A Hot and Repetitive Narrative, Poetic Nonetheless
By Michael Nardo
I read this book in my Vietnamese American Literature class not too long ago and out of all of the four books that we read (the other three are South Wind Changing, Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam, and Fake House: Stories), this became one of my favorite novels.
It's simply an amazing story about the unnamed girl, who migrated to Vietnam, along with his four uncles and dad (Ba) and later on her Mom (Ma) shows her growing up in the U.S., creating a magical curtain around her when reality looks dim upon her, as the uncles and her parents represent the cold reality that is being a first-generation immigrant living in the U.S.
I found the writing to be more poetic, as the author published previously published her work in bits and pieces. There is no straight forward narrative, but it does show the growth of the girl, which she observes and comes into a magical place that seems dull and ugly to be covered by other conventions that hide reality. From a butterfly trying to get out of the glass to wanting to "sleep" with her brother, when in reality her brother is dead and the adults are all mourning at his dead body while she tries to shush them, a fantasy convolutes the issues of Vietnamese-American identity, the past, and death (many more themes can be found in the book, but I chose to focus on these).
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Beautiful, haunting tale of Vietnamese diaspora
By pinkkitty
I bought this book a few years ago and couldn't put it down. I was a baby when my family fled Vietnam, so I have no memories of it, but I do have vague memories of my early childhood in an apartment complex and then later a townhouse during the mid to late 70s, in the northern California suburb where I grew up, and like Le's description, they are often just images, flashes in time, dreamlike. I was often in tears while reading this book - it's like someone crawled into my head and captured all those memories and expressed them in words that I could never find. One of the prevailing themes of The Gangster We Are All Looking For is the elusiveness of our parents' losses and sorrows, how they are somehow ingrained in us and haunt us. If you like books with a "plot," this book is not for you. To everyone else, and ESPECIALLY to Vietnamese Americans, I highly recommend this lyrical, heartbreaking book.
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