The Gangster We Are All Looking For (Paperback)

by Thi Diem Thuy Le (Author) "Linda Vista, with its rows of yellow houses, is where we eventually washed to shore..." (more)
Key Phrases: thatched gate, four uncles, glass animals, Linda Vista, San Diego, Jehovah's Witnesses (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (May 11, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375700021
• ISBN-13: 978-0375700026
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #88,546 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Six Stars for a Poetic First Novel!, May 14, 2004

By	Steve Koss (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars New Life in a Foreign Land, September 11, 2003

By	lvkleydorff (CT. USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Gangster We Are All Looking For (Hardcover)

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.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful and Terrifying, September 10, 2003

By	Jeffrey Sharlet (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.