90
Gangster We Are All Looking For, The
lê thi diem thúy (2003)
The partly autobiographical novel, The Gangster
We Are All Looking For, is a series of vignettes re-
counting the experience of a nameless narrator. A
refugee of the Vietnam War, the six-year-old nar-
rator “stepped into the China Sea” (3) to travel to
“the other side” (4) in San Diego with her father
and four uncles. When the narrator and her family
are taken in by Mel, the son of their sponsors, the
narrator becomes obsessed with Mel’s glass animal
collection, specifically a brown butterfly “trapped”
in a glass disc. In an effort to free the butterfly, the
narrator breaks most of Mel’s glass animals, result-
ing in the expulsion of the family.
The narrator and her father, “Ba,” are eventu-
ally joined by the narrator’s mother, “Ma.” LÊ THI
DIEM THÚY uses “Ma” to provide the most palpable
response to sorrow, loss, and exile, whereas “Ba”
is prone to silence, tears, and drunken rage. The
marriage becomes volatile, eventually revealing
Ma’s lament for her past, parents, and home-
land. As her sorrow over exile grows, she begins
to blame her husband for her disconnection from
family and home. “Ba” is the “gangster,” a Buddhist
man from the North who served in the South Viet-
namese army, possibly a black market vendor, and
a prisoner of re-education. In marrying him, the
mother has defied her Catholic parents and been
disinherited. The exile in America has ensured
her inability to reconcile with her parents, and she
seeks solace in minor things, such as a pool at their
apartment. It creates a connection to her family by
water, and when the landlord fills it with cement,
she is greatly troubled. In the second apartment,
“Ma” receives a photograph of her parents. How-
ever, the family is evicted, and Ma later realizes the
photo, the only tangible connection to her parents,
has been left behind, and she has betrayed them
again. Her sense of loss and guilt is subtly mirrored
by the narrator’s longing for her dead brother. At
times his absence is so overwhelming that the nar-
rator is overcome with fear and panic.
Le’s novel has been hailed for its precise and po-
etic prose. It is a refugee story of loss, “of youthful
yearning and adult resignation,” and “the tenacity
of memory” (Baumann). The novel is a look into
an aspect of the Vietnam War that is rarely seen:
the effects of exile and immeasurable loss on the
Vietnamese. A piece of the novel was originally
published in The Massachusetts Review and later
in Best American Essays ’97.Bibliography
Baumann, Paul. “Washing Time Away.” New York
Times Book Review, 25 May 2003, p. 26.
De Jesus, Linda. “Le Thi Diem Thuy.” Asian American
Poets: A Bio-Bibliographic Critical Sourcebook, ed-
ited by Guiyou Huang. Westport, Conn.: Green-
wood Press, 2002.
Mehegan, David. “Refuge in Her Writing.” Avail-
able online. URL:http://faculty.washington.edu/
kendo.thuymehegan.html. Accessed September
23, 2006.
Tina PowellGathering of Pearls
Sook Nyul Choi (1994)
Gathering of Pearls is the third novel in SOOK
NYUL CHOI’s autobiographical series that begins
with YEAR OF IMPOSSIBLE GOODBYES. In Gathering,
the protagonist Sookan has achieved her dream
of traveling to America to attend Finch College, a
Catholic all-girls college. The novel is introspec-
tive and explores the many fears and cultural chal-
lenges that Sookan faces when she arrives and lives
in the United States. Sookan must come to terms
with trying to live up to her Korean family’s ex-
tremely high expectations of her, while fulfilling
her own personal desires as well. The novel opens
with Sookan’s meditative apprehensions about
her arrival in a strange country and of the many
unknowns she will face. When she arrives to find
that no one is there to meet her at the airport, the
realization of just how far she is from home over-
whelms her: “The memory of Mother’s soothing
voice rang in my ears. I was glad she was not here to
see me standing all alone in the big, empty airport,
feeling scared and unwanted” (4). Sookan soon
settles into the school, where she begins to make
insightful observations on daily life and the many
different aspects of Korean and American cultures.90 Gangster We Are All Looking For, The