Customer Reviews

The Gangster We Are All Looking For

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

A half remembered quote by Antonin Artaud should preface this book: "No one has ever written (or drawn, painted, composed, etc.) except, quite literally, to get out of hell" (sic). What I find so moving about Le's narrative is that she does just this, but with a heartbreaking sympathy and understanding of the damned who populate the novel -- the father who went from being her guardian and companion to a fearful, mad domestic abuser, the mother haunted by the abandonment of both her parents and her dead son, and of course the (sometimes) narrator herself. Reading Le's snapshots of time perpetually out of joint, one feels the inconsolable longing and lament of wanting to understand and be understood; even as the family's separation from both the past in Vietnam and mainstream America in the present forces them to perpetually drift in the starless waters of San Diego's endless suburbs. The novel reads like a dark, dreamy prose poem, streaked with the violence of war and the innocence of first loves that can't outlive their episodic telling. Some philosopher once said: "In exile, the only home is that of writing," and I think this applies to "the gangster..." and the experience of displacement and uprootedness that it conveys. This book should have been awarded a prestigious prize, but I also feel lucky, like many of the other reviewers, to have "discovered" it without the help of advertisement or any bookstore blurbs. A book that will stay in your memory.

I bought this book a few weeks ago, and was very touched by it. I live in San Diego and just this week this book was featured in the Reader. I am so glad! This book is what I will be recommending to anyone who asks. Thank you for this wonderful read.

This is the story of a girl who escaped from Vietnam by boat in the seventies with her father and four uncles when she was only six. They landed in a refugee camp before being sponsored by a family in San Diego. Her mother later joined her in the States. Throughout the story, the image of her brother's drowning during the escape kept haunting her.

The beauty of this book lies in the fact that it was written without pretense. Her father was an ARVN grunt who went on to become a handyman, then a gardener in the US. His past, however, troubled him. He kept on starring at the sea across the ocean trying to make a sense of his tumultuous life in Vietnam: his years fighting the enemy during the war and then his incarceration in communist reeducation camps, his escape by boat, the memory of his drowned son, and the lack of news from his extended family stranded in a communist land.

This is a moving story of one family of boat people trying to survive in a foreign land while battling with the horrors and demons of the past.

"The Gangster We Are All Looking For" is probably one of the more amorphous novels I've come across in quite a while. In place of an obvious plot is an eddying flow from vignette to vignette, and image after image drifts into and out of the narrative a bit clearer every time but never quite resolved fully, as if to say in life there are indeed very few true resolutions. As a novel it is short but substantial, but in its pronounced lyricism it somehow comes across more as a rather extended and deeply reflective prose poem and scintillates as such. Readers expecting a standard story with a clear plot and sharply defined characterization will be sorely disappointed, but those willing to go with the flow of Le's prose will be richly rewarded, eventually finding that it does indeed meanderingly follow a certain progression full of memorable characters.

In such a richly multifaceted though brief work as this, various aspects will doubtlessly well up in prominence for different readers. For me, Le's talent as a writer for depicting the worldview of a child so evocatively, in a protean stream of consciousness in which colors and vivid images predominate--all without even once lapsing into any hint of sappy sentimentality or condescending idealization--is indeed remarkable. So is her binocular ability to at once convincingly depict both the loving solidarity of a family and its dysfunctional tensions--true of any family, certainly, but in this case given a very specific character due to the extreme experiences of fleeing a war-torn homeland and surviving on the seas as refugees before settling into a new country to live a life at once dislocated and yet getting by--again handled with a sure narrative hand that can move you deeply without jarringly yanking on your heartstrings. As an author's first published work it's extremely impressive, as a vividly subjective document of the Vietnamese-American experience it's irreplaceably significant, and as a work of fiction it's unconventionally elusive but carefully crafted, personally heartfelt, and utterly unforgettable.

At first I didn't think much of the book but it was only 156 pages so what could I loose? It's hard to describe this book. There is a certain charm about it. I read some of the reviews and they're right. There is no central plot or climax to the story. It's just a little refugee girl's story of her family. It's filled with real life truth and sorrow of how her family dealt with the era. I fell in love with it after page 100. It's a good story with poetic flow.

A beautiful, universal book. It takes you inside the mind of a girl. It could be a girl of any ethnic background that has to learn coping skills to deal with the craziness around her.

With brilliant, eloquent descriptions of life from a child's perspective. The narrative style reminded me of Night by Elie Wiesel, the boy who wrote of the holocaust.

Looking forward to future books by Le.

A six-year old girl, born and raised in Viet Nam, escapes together with her father and winds up in San Diego. She tells her story of growing up in a foreign land. But she still remembers her daydreams from the land of her birth. She remembers that she had a little brother who drowned. And grandparents who stayed behind, while her mother could join them a few years later.

There are connections such as their life near the water, both in Viet Nam and in San Diego. There is repetition within the life of the refugees, such as the various fences, first in Viet Nam, then in the detention camp in Saigon, and finally in the housing complex in San Diego. The mother tries very hard to become an "American" without really knowing what that involves. The father works as a handyman and later as a gardener. But the foreign land breaks him in spirit and body. The little girl grows up and leaves to live on the east coast.

Obviously, the book has a large content of biographical remembrances. But it is never written in a maudlin tone, although the family shatters on these foreign shores. And though it is nobodies fault. The dreams of the orderly past among family and friends are just too strong and repetitive.

It is a wonderful story, told with a great heart and without complaints.