The Gangster We Are All Looking For
by Thi Diem Thuy Le
Lyrical Hydrodynamics Of The Buddhist Gangster Blues
This acclaimed novel reveals the life of a Vietnamese family in America
through the knowing eyes of a child finding her place and voice in a new
country.
In 1978 six refugees—a girl, her father, and four “uncles”—are pulled from
the sea to begin a new life in San Diego. In the child’s imagination, the
world is transmuted into an unearthly realm: she sees everything intensely,
hears the distress calls of inanimate objects, and waits for her mother to
join her. But life loses none of its strangeness when the family is reunited.
As the girl grows, her matter-of-fact innocence eddies increasingly around
opaque and ghostly traumas: the cataclysm that engulfed her homeland,
the memory of a brother who drowned and, most inescapable, her father’s
hopeless rage.

Personal Review: The Gangster We Are All Looking For by Thi
Diem Thuy Le
"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.
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