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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: #18897 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 .44" w x 5.18" 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
35 of 35 people found the following review helpful.
Six Stars for a Poetic First Novel!
By Steve Koss
Le thi diem thuy has penned an extraordinary first novel in The Gangster We Are All Looking For, worth six stars if such a rating were offered. Unlike so many books today, le offers the reader a work which truly follows the writerly dictum, "Show, don't tell." Her work is a prose poem, lyrical in style, a masterpiece of understatement and mystery, beautifully combined with a childlike sense of magical realism. This is the new immigrant's experience in America, with all its confusion, loneliness, personal and familial disconnection, and the sense of loss of one's roots, of all that was once so familiar and normal.
At the center of the novel is the author/narrator, a nameless young Vietnamese girl who struggles desperately to cope with her sudden dislocation from her home country to Southern California, the absence of her mother, and the loss of her older brother. At the same time, she must decode the mysteries of American life, technology, and culture: the mysterious power landlords and bosses exert over her father, the racist behavior of schoolmates who begin referring to all Southeast Asian immigrant students as "Yang," to the awakening sexual behavior of neighborhood boys. A wonderfully-rendered episode early in the book gives a child's-eye view of glass animal figurines and a butterfly encased in glass. The narrator's magical fascination with the butterfly faintly recalls a butterfly scene in Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude," although the scene in this book ends in unfortunate consequences for the little girl and her family.
The Gangster We Are All Looking For is not written in a strictly chronological sequence, but le's non-linear approach adds to the sense of childlike wonder as well as its sense of permanent loss. Her powerful descriptions and imagery, and her portrayal of her narrator's musings, echoes these feelings and creates an inescapable air of sorrow, as if her life will never be what it could and should have been. For these characters, America is not a land of opportunity but a refugee camp for displaced persons, a land that will forever be foreign for lives that will never feel fulfilled. This is a harsh but exquisitely-written fictional treatment of the underside of immigration: America as impossibly strange and culturally closed to outsiders, American life as the breaker of immigrant families, not just America as the mythical "Gold Mountain" or as the healer of lost souls. A wonderful exploration of the immigrant experience, marvelously told through a child's eyes.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Beautiful and Terrifying
By Jeffrey Sharlet
This is a novel that could easily be mistaken for a memoir, written in a style that often resembles that of prose poetry. Which is to say, genre is beside the point -- The Gangster We Are All Looking For is that very rare thing, an original story about an immigrant experience. It's been some time since I read the book, but Thuy's images remain in my mind, not as literary constructions but as if they were sensory memories. This is a beautiful, terrifying, important book, simultaneously familiar and like nothing I've ever read before.
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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