The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003)

The Gangster We Are All Looking For is the first novel by Vietnamese-American author lê thi diem thúy, published in 2003. It was first published as a short piece in The Best American Essays of 1997 and was also awarded a Pushcart Prize “Special Mention.”

The novel is a fragmented sequence of events recollected by a nameless narrator. In a first-person narrative, the narrator tells the stories of her past experiences as a Vietnamese immigrant. The time and place continuously shift throughout the novel; the story takes place both in Vietnam and America. The novel is concerned with themes of identity, family dynamics, war, and liberation. Images of water are prominent symbolically and literally throughout the novel.

Narrative style

The novel is told through the voice of the immigrant girl when she is six, and continues building until she was 26.

The flow of the prose is anachronistic, often jumping from life in America to life in Vietnam, at times even to a time in Vietnam before the narrator's birth. The tenses also switch from present tense to past and back. The novel is also told episodically fractured, because as the author stated, "memory, by its nature, is very fragmented". She wanted “ruptures”, “disturbances”, and “pauses”, since she believed that people's memory, especially the traumatic memory are naturally fragmented.

Also, Le is good at using descriptive sentences and providing vivid details to draw images and scenes for readers. When the little girl thinks back about the swimming pool, Le emphasizes a lot of small things with a series of “I remember...” to make the paragraph rhythmic and thought-provoking (Le 54). Details like the bouncing ball and the fluttering sheets are dramatic flashbacks, which encourage readers to imagine the surroundings, in which the tragedy happens.

Themes & Symbols

Water

Throughout the novel, water is the most prominent motif. From the beginning, lê thi diem thúy inserts that “In Vietnamese, the word for water and the word for a nation, a country, and a homeland are one and the same: nu’ó’c.”The reason why water is so important for Vietnamese is that Vietnam is a country that is surrounded by water. They live beside the water for generations. So it can be said that water is a holy thing for Vietnamese. In a similar sense, water plays a symbolic role in diverse ways in the text—-often, with dual/opposite meanings. Most of the themes within the text are somehow related to and entwined with the flow of water. Except for water, the palm is also an important symbol in the book to symbolize the hometown. The palm is mentioned for many times in the book because both Vietnam and California is tropical area

In fact, she always consciously and unconsciously seeks out the dead brothers to heal the trauma caused by the loss of her sibling. The representations of water are prominent symbolically and literally throughout the novel which also reflect narrator’s action after her brother’s death. Water connected Vietnam and her brother's death.

Repression

The narrator was constantly haunted by her brother' s image “As she directed the eye of the camera back to the grass, she kept crying because of what it could not see and what she could not stop seeing.”(The Gangster 19) The repression memory on the conscious become a consistency imagination in narrator's mind. People will intend not to see the cruel fact, but it still exist. If the death is hide from others, they search is never end. "The denial and repression only increase the narrator's determination to obtain the affirmation of the brother's death. " Prior to that, she imagines that her brother is alive and is around her.

The Mobility of Memory through the Photograph

Through the photograph, The Gangster We Are All Looking For explores the nature of memory and its ability, or inability, to travel from generation to generation. In le's narrative, the photograph can be understood not only in terms of reference and time, but also “perspective of mobility".

The Mobility of Behaviors through walking and wandering

The image of water not only symbolizes their nation, Vietnam and open sea, but also shows their flexibility of their behaviors and actions, to assimilate the social activities. Chen illustrates their actions to“use physical mobility to discover their host society and to validate their existence through their bipedal adventures as active diasporic subjects” (13). Their actions to be involved in new community are as fluid as water. Her father helps her hold an advisable attitude after moving in a new land, rather than finding ways to return. More than that, their mobility on their identifications as Vietnamese Americans makes them walk and wander and find their ways to fit into the society. This quality of their identifications also causes the daughter to move around and live away from her parents.

“Arrival 1: Listening to the Mortified Eloquence of the Photograph”

From the beginning, the photograph is not presented as an object to be viewed, but as a force which disturbs the narrator's somewhat settled family. Although the photograph is not accompanied with text or a written message, to the mother, the picture is a demand, a message which tells of a time when the mother had been disowned.

Because the photograph is loaded with deep emotion and grief for the mother, “she loses herself, literally her self, to it entirely” (8). But for the daughter, who does not associate much experience with the photograph, the picture does not offer any sort of access.

“Arrival 2: (At)Tending to the Split Photograph”

Treating the photograph as if it was an actual immigrant, Ma tells the narrator that the photograph has come to move in. The narrator's response is: “I don’t really know what she is talking about but I say ‘O.K.’ anyway,” suggesting the alienation and challenge of intergenerational remembering.