27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Six Stars for a Poetic First Novel!, May 14, 2004
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.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful and Terrifying, September 10, 2003
This review is from: The Gangster We Are All Looking For (Hardcover)
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.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful, haunting tale of Vietnamese diaspora, September 12, 2008
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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