El gánster que todos andamos buscando

by Lê Thi Diem Thúy, Maria Notó Mora (Translator)

La historia de una niña, y luego joven,que observa e interpreta, pero no siempre entiende. Es la crónica de conflictos culturales, el aislamiento de quien está lejos de su hogar y lo recuerda con dolor y nostalgia. La narración ocurre en Estados Unidos y expone los desgarradores procesos de resignificación por los que pasa quien ya no puede ser quien estaba destinado a ser, pero que no puede convertirse en otra cosa. Aquí, Vietnam no es un lugar, sino el recuerdo de quién es la niña, quiénes son el padre y la madre y qué es lo que se perdió en el camino. Una obra que, incluso en su estructura y su estilo narrativo, huye de las convenciones del país en que se publicó para formar un texto híbrido entre las dos culturas que conviven en la autora.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Asian American, School, Novels, Literary Fiction, Asia

164 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Lê Thi Diem Thúy left Vietnam on a boat with her father in 1978 and grew up in San Diego, California. In 1990, she moved to Massachusetts and enrolled in Hampshire College. After graduating in 1993, Thúy traveled to Paris to research French colonial picture postcards made in the early 1900's.

Today, she is an author and performance artist based in Northampton. She recently finished a one-year Radcliffe fellowship and has been on the road performing her one-woman show "Red Fiery Summer."
She is currently working on a new novel entitled The Bodies Between Us.

Reviews

[Brendan · Rating 3 out of 5]

As novels go, The Gangster We Are All Looking For -- Le Thi Diem Thuy's beautifully told account of a Vietnamese immigrant family -- is soaking wet.

The sea is a constant, foreboding presence. Bodies are washing ashore on the first page and they are washing ashore on the last page. A man tells his beloved that if she would marry him, "he would pull the moon out of the sky and turn it into a pool for her to wash her feet in." "Bad water" is blamed for the death of a young boy, and a simple glass from the tap is drunk "desperately, as though it were a reprieve."

Such pervasive dampness is hardly an uncommon phenomenon in the literary fiction of Vietnam, which is a coastal nation, after all. One practically requires a raincoat to peruse the work of Duong Thu Huong, the Communist state's leading writer-dissident and water-conjurer. In Memories of a Pure Spring (2000), where all epiphanies come equipped with monsoons, the hero searches for freedom in "the sea of the sea," only to end up drenched in a storm: "Rain, still rain. Water and more water, white sheets of it, as far as the eye could see."

The Gangster We Are All Looking For goes a step further, telling us right at the start that in Vietnamese, "the word for water and the word for a nation, a country, and a homeland are one and the same: nu'o'c."

The irony is that this novel, Thuy Le's first, is not actually Vietnamese but American, retelling the oldest of American stories: that of immigrants desperately seeking assimilation. It features a dysfunctional family worthy of a Todd Solondz film, where the parents scream and fight ("like two dogs chasing each other's tails"), the mother chops off her hair in a fit, and the daughter runs away to become a writer.

In Confucian Vietnam, the family is the gravity that keeps one anchored to the earth. In a California housing development called Linda Vista, on the other hand, a family portrait is secreted away up to the attic and left behind in the next move. A ringing phone is met with terror for the obligations that may wait on the other end.

Still, as this family stumbles through its stormy version of the American Dream, where everyone is an outsider trying to fit in, Vietnam lingers close by. It's a connection not so much of blood, the narrator is fond of saying, as of water.

Read my full review here: http://bit.ly/2feKtIN

[Laubythesea · Rating 4 out of 5]

4,5 ⭐️

“Vietnam es una fotografía en blanco y negro de mis abuelos sentados en sillas de bambú en el patio de su casa. […] Cuando pienso en aquel retrato de mis abuelos en sus últimos años, siempre me imagino un comienzo. De qué, no lo sé, pero siempre un comienzo”.
 
Luchar, huir, emigrar, empezar de nuevo, llevar mochilas a cuestas que hunden, pero guardan tu esencia e identidad, querer olvidar y no olvidar nada al mismo tiempo, aprender, tener heridas que nunca dejar de sangrar, crecer, y, en definitiva, (sobre)vivir. De eso habla ‘El gánster que todos andábamos buscando’.
 
Una niña abandona su Vietnam natal junto a su padre y otros paisanos en una barca. Dejan atrás su hogar, sus raíces y parte de la familia. Dejan atrás Vietnam, pero también se lo llevan dentro. Se van por agua, esa palabra que en vietnamita es la que se utiliza también para ‘nación’, ‘país’ y ‘patria’ y no es casualidad. Un elemento con el que se reencontrarán una y otra vez, en una playa en la otra punta del océano, en una piscina que les será arrebatada, colonizada, en la lluvia… Esa idea de agua como ‘casa’ simbólica es evocada por la autora una y mil veces, de formas variadas, con significados cambiantes, profundos y sensitivos.
 
De la mano de esta familia, que se completará con la llegada de la madre años después, se nos muestra un retrato de Estados Unidos a finales de la década de los 70’s desde un nuevo ángulo. Este libro le da voz a los ‘otros’, quienes llegan como refugiados para empezar de cero. ¿Pero se puede hacer borrón y cuenta nueva de una vida entera? Esta familia de tres que es todo un universo. A esta familia se le ha muerto su vida en Vietnam, pero ellos han sobrevivido. Unas personas para las que el choque cultural o no saber el idioma, será lo de menos.
 
Se tratan temas muy duros como el estrés postraumático y el alcoholismo, la culpa, la pérdida de la identidad, el duelo y la pérdida, de tantas cosas, de tanta gente. Pero también me ha parecido una oda a los vínculos, a la familia, a la resiliencia y al descubrimiento.
 
Hay situaciones extremas a las que a quien toca enfrentarse, le marcan para siempre. También hay momentos vitales donde somos especialmente permeables, donde todo nos afecta, aún incluso sin darnos cuenta: como la infancia, cuando se define gran parte de lo que luego seremos. Así, que este libro tenga una narradora infantil hace que su impacto se multiplique por mil. Alguien que crece entre dos mundos, que observa y narra, muchas veces sin entender el horror que está viviendo. Al mismo tiempo, ese filtro que suponen los ojos infantiles, hace que la lectura no sea tan desgarradora como podría; eso sí, es una herida que vas notando cada vez más profunda con el paso de las páginas. Ver crecer a la protagonista permite adentrarse en nuevas brechas, generacionales, pero también culturales, mentales… y hablar de independencia, crecimiento, identidad… ¡podría hablar tantas horas sobre este libro!
 
La autora, Iê thi diem, también dejó Vietnam junto a su padre y creció en California, y aunque no se trata de una autobiografía, ni siquiera una auto-ficción, creo que es imposible no intuir que sus vivencias tienen peso en este libro, aunque no cuente su historia.  Ella, además de autora, es poeta y es algo que se aprecia en la intensidad de ciertas frases, normalmente cuando evoca recuerdos, llenos de color, aromas, sentimiento. También brilla esa parte más poética cuando quiere decir algo sin escribirlo, muchas cosas se intuyen, se sienten y no se leen, ¡es una cosa increíble! Lo mágico es cómo consigue crear un perfecto equilibro entre un estilo sencillo y muy directo, que te atrapa por su ritmo y esa belleza que te hace querer detenerte a observar el paisaje que pinta ante tus ojos.
 
Admirada por como la autora es capaz de decir tantísimo en apenas 155 páginas. Una maravilla, una puerta de oro a la literatura vietnamita, donde Vietnam es una ausencia, uno de esos libros que no se olvida.

[Nan]

I just read this book for the 5th time. I have to admit that I did not like the book when I first read it, but with each reading, my appreciation for this book increases. I love its poetic language and fragmented narrative. Here is one of my favorite passages:

"After I ran away, I phoned my parents only a couple of times, to let them know I was all right. The last call was from the airport, to tell them that I was moving to the East Coast to go to school. My father wasn't home. My mother said, 'The East Coast? But it's so cold and far away.' She urged me to remain in San Diego. When I said I couldn't, she sighed. 'I don't understand you,' she said. We were silent. I listened to her breath. Then, as if I hadn't phoned but had walked through the front door and was now standing with her in the kitchen, Ma asked if I was hungry. The question was a familiar one; it was what my mother said in lieu of 'I love you.' I told her I had to go, the plane was boarding; and would she give my regards to Ba. She said that as soon as he returned from wherever he had gone to, she would tell him that his daughter had called."

With a few simple lines, the completeness of the mother's love for the daughter is conveyed. The mother's question, her ability to bypass barriers between her and her daughter, makes me weep.

[Shannon · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

Kind of a random pick for me and although it's rather short, it's a very interesting read. Not a ton of substance but it's a nice slice-of-life type of story. I probably should have read this in summer though, especially since it made me homesick for San Diego weather while we've currently got freezing rain falling here on the east coast. 😬

[Bill on GR Sabbatical · Rating 3 out of 5]

Early in this semi-autobiographical first novel, the narrator reminisces about one of the series of San Diego apartments she and her family lived in after fleeing Viet Nam as "boat people" in 1978, when she was six.

In the shade of the evening, as you looked over the second-floor railing into the swimming pool below, the shapes of things that had happened would slowly take form and come into focus. The day would return to you, and with it, like a school of fish, all the other days. You could lean against the railing then and watch, with wonder, as the people, places, and objects from all the days gathered.

In lyrical prose, rich with striking similes and metaphors, lê thi diem thúy (she does not capitalize her name) records these gathered impressions of the people, places, and objects remembered from, or imagined out of, her family's odyssey.

She describes placing a paperweight on a stack of letters and receipts:

It pressed down on the paper the same way my Ba's heavy head pressed down on the pillow at night, full of thoughts that dragged him into nightmares when all he wanted was a dream as sweet and happy as the taste of jackfruit ice cream.

She listens to her parents on the roof above her bedroom, making up after a fight:

Slowly and firmly, they pressed against my sleep, the Catholic schoolgirl and the Buddhist gangster, two dogs chasing each other's tails. They have been doing this for so long, they have become one dog, one tail.

lê has acknowledged the influence of Coming Through Slaughter, Michael Ondaatje's fictionalized sketch of jazz musician Buddy Bolden's life, on this book, and it is there in the disjointed narrative and poetic language. Don't look for plot or character development here, but if you enjoy beautiful imagery and observations, or want to know how it felt to be a Vietnamese immigrant in San Diego after the war ended, you should give this short novel a try.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

poetic novel about Vietnamese immigrants to USA (California). Told from the p.o.v. of a young girl I enjoyed her descriptions of the weird place she's ended up in, and the behaviour of those around her (particularly teenage boys). Slim, almost plotless (although there is the story of her family's disintegration under the pressure) but full of memorable imagery.

[Greta · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had to read this for my Advance Fiction class. This is not a bad book, in fact I love how the voice stays true to six year old narrator. However, this book didn't leave me with the feeling of "man, I am so sad that book is over", ya know?

[Harrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

5⭐️
Lê Thi Diem Thúy 🤝🏼 Ocean Vuong

This was so good! Poetic, emotional, harrowing; deeply, deeply personal and so important.

I read some other reviews on this book, and I'm sure this work means a lot more to me - a Vietnamese-American descendant from immigrants - than it might for others. "The Gangster We Are All Looking For" honestly had me verging on tears multiple times and just reminds me of the hardships that many other people like myself had gone through - from immigration to integration to self-realization and further.

If you're a fan of Ocean Vuong's intimate and honest writing about the Vietnamese American experience, this book is perfect for you!

[el · Rating 5 out of 5]

The greatest book I have ever read. It is so beautiful.

"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."

"Ba and I were connected to the four uncles, not by blood but by water."

"Ba's voice echoes from deep down like a frog singing at the bottom of a well. His voice is water moving through a reed pipe in the middle of a sad tune. And the sad voice is always asking and answering itself. It calls out and then comes running in. It is the tide of my Ba's mind. When I listen to it, I can see boats floating around in his head. Boats full of people trying to get somewhere."

"In the picture, our boat looks like a toy boat floating in a big bowl of water. There are little people standing in the boat. We are among the people in the picture but I can't tell who is who because we are all so small. Small faces, small heads, small arms reaching out to touch small hands. Maybe the Americans on the ship were laughing at us...Maybe they laughed so hard at the sight of us so small, they started to roll around the deck like spilled marbles and they had to help one another to their feet and recall their own names- Emmett, Mike, Ron- and where they were from- Oakland, California; Youngstown, Ohio; Shinston, West Virginia- before they could let us climb up and say our names- Lan, Cuong, Hoang- and where we were from- Phan Thiet, Binh Thuan."

"I stood in that small room and wept into the desert of my palms."

"My first memory of my father's face is framed by the coiling barbed wire of a military camp in South Vietnam. My mother's voice crosses through the wire. She is whispering his name and with this utterance, caressing him. Over and over, she calls him to her, "Anh Minh, Anh Minh." His name becomes a tree she presses her body against. The calling blows around them like a warm breeze and when she utters her own name, it is the second half of a verse that begins with his. She drops her name like a pebble into a well...Shy and formal and breathless, my parents are always meeting for the first time, savoring the sound of a name, marveling at the bones of the face cupped by the bones of the hand. I trail behind them, the tip of their dragon's tail. I am drawn along, like a silken banner on the body of a kite."

"'There are thieves, gamblers, drunks I've met who remind me of people in my family. It's the way they're dreamers. My family's a garden full of dreamers lying on their backs, staring at the sky, drunk and choking on their dreams."

"The night I was born, my mother, looking at the tube, imagined it to be the badly burnt arm of a dying giant buried in the sand. She could not decide whether he had been buried and was trying to get out or whether he had tried to bury himself in the sand but had failed to cover his arm in time. In time for what? She had heard a story about a girl in a neighboring town who was killed during a napalm bombing. The bombing happened on an especially hot night, when this girl had walked to the beach to cool her feet in the water. They found her floating on the sea. The phosphorus from the napalm made her body glow, like a lantern. In her mind, my mother built a canopy for this girl. She started to cry, thinking of the buried giant, the floating girl, these bodies stopped in mid-stride, on their way somewhere."

"Ma says war is a bird with a broken wing flying over the countryside, trailing blood and burying crops in sorrow. If something grows in spite of this, it is both a curse and a miracle. When I was born, she cried to know that it was war I was breathing in, and she could never shake it out of me. Ma says war makes it dangerous to breathe, though she knows you die if you don't. She says she could have thrown me against the wall, until I broke or coughed up this war that is killing us all. She could have stomped on it in the dark, and danced on it like a madwoman dancing on gravestones. She could have ground it down to powder and spat on it, but didn't I know? War has no beginning and no end. It crosses oceans like a splintered boat filled with people singing a sad song."

"We live in the country of California, the province of San Diego, the village of Linda Vista. We live in old Navy Housing bungalows built in the 1940s. Since the 1980s, these bungalows house Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian refugees from the Vietnam War. When we moved in, we had to sign a form promising not to put fish bones in the garbage disposal."

"I am in the hallway gulping air. I breathe in the breaking and the bleeding. When Ba plunges his hands into the fish tank, I detect the subtle tint of blood in water. When he throws the fish tank out the front door, yelling, 'Let me see the gangster!' I am drinking up the spilt water and swallowing whole the beautiful tropical fish, their brilliant colors gliding across my tongue, before they can hit the ground, to cover themselves in dirt until only the whites of their eyes remain, blinking at the sun. All the hands are in my throat, cutting themselves on the broken dishes, and the fish swim in circles; they can't see for all the blood. Ba jumps in his truck and drives away. When I grow up I am going to be the gangster we are all looking for."

"There is not a trace of blood anywhere except here, in my throat, where I am telling you all this."

"I have a black-and-white photography of him at sixteen, in which he wears a hat of canvas camouflage cocked to one side...In this picture, what reveals him most is the will to give nothing away."

"The year I left home, my father and I would sit at the kitchen table in the evenings and pass the silence back and forth, like a smoke."

[Noelia Alonso]

An out-of-my-comfort-zone type of book for me due to its fragmentary and non-linear narration, I was pleasantly surprised. I have to say, though, that the author left so much up in the air and I had so many questions during the narrative that of course were left unanswered. It might not work for all readers but I think it's worth giving it a shot, especially due to its beautiful writing.

[kel · Rating 4 out of 5]

i like how this book was about a Viet family that immigrated to San Diego, the author’s memories in each area she’s lived in really explain how linda vista and normal heights have a rich SE Asian immigrant history.

realized i should talk to my family more about their lives in VN, experiences immigrating to California and how they adapted to living somewhere that is a whole ocean away from the home they once knew.

the way this story was told was a bit confusing w the way the author kept jumping back and forth between memories but maybe that’s just how she can tell her story best.

[Sierra Takushi · Rating 3 out of 5]

A butterfly caught in a glass case, trapped. A girl who wants to free the butterfly from its trapping shatters the glass, and the entire shelving unit, so that the butterfly can fly free. She discovers that the butterfly is dead. (this is a metaphor about the girl, right? a trapped butterfly?)

This book is haunting and depressing. It’s written in a poetic prose that is fitting… but it felt too abstract for me this time around. You all know I like the topic/genre, but this one didn’t hit the same way for me.

[Ljuneosborne · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading this book was for an English class, and I'm very glad for it, as I doubt I would have come across it otherwise.

I've read a handful of books about Vietnamese people living in America after the war, my favorite being Catfish and Mandala by Andrew X. Pham. This book is focused more on the child's view of the story, specifically the relationship between the narrator and her father, who she refers to as Ba. In the first part of the book Ba is a sort of protector as she struggles to understand American life and customs, while in the rest his happiness deteriorates and he begins drinking heavily. The prose is delightful and simple, filled with the type of wise words one comes to expect when reading something written by, or from the point of view of, children. A child's voice brings a profound sense of innocence and double meaning to each sentence, phrase, and word.

The style of this book also reminded me of Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street but focusing on darker situations and feelings. Only 158 pages of memorable prose but I might have liked it better if it were longer. It feels like most all of the punchlines of each story were vague and full of hints, sometimes it would be nice if they were elaborated upon.

[Kate Causey · Rating 2 out of 5]

For better or for worse, I can rarely get into a novel/memoir without a solid story line. I did appreciate reading about this family of Vietnamese immigrants to Normal Heights (my new neighborhood)

[أحمد ناجي · Rating 4 out of 5]

عيطت مرتين تقريباً

[Teachers4socialjustice Book]

Here are some discussion questions that came out of our book club:

1. How does the passage on p. 95 beginning with “…two dogs chasing each other’s tail…” describe the parents’ relationship?
2. What is the significance of the title?
3. How does this book showcase father and daughter relationships?
4. This novel focuses on the places in between such as pages 109 and p. 37. Does the reader always know where these places are?
5. How is this novel about running away to find yourself? Look at p. 158 (“…I ran, like a dog unleashed, toward the lights.”)
6. How does the title of the last section of the novel unify the ideas of the book? How does that word itself, with so many interpretations, tie in?
7. Is there a disconnect between experience and culture? Check out p. 88, “We live in the country of California…”
8. What’s up with the dead brother? A little bit of heaven on earth? How come she cannot move on?
9. Why did the author choose a young girl’s voice as the narrator? Also notice on p. 99 the change of style, “….where I am telling you all this.”
10. Why does the novel get choppier at the end? What is the intention behind that? Discuss the news story on p. 110.
11. The theme or topic seems to be immigration. What does it mean to leave something behind? A country behind?
12. There are so many stories here, but without a central continuous topic? What is the story she is trying to tell?
13. How does memory function? This appears to be the raw material of a girl’s life with many interpretations?
14. Was it the author’s intent note to tell a story at all?
15. Some of us felt that the there was no plot to grab on to. But what is it about the poetic language that compels you? Does it?
16. Is there a climax? Is the book a climax of everyone’s emotions?
17. What is your connection with the characters? Does age matter? P. 122
18. How developed is the idea of the gangster?
19. What is symbolic of the narrator’s escape from her family?
20. How would our students relate to this novel?
21. Do children always want to fix what’s wrong?
22. How does the father’s hope for his daughter change over time?
23. How does Ba’s role as a father change over the course of the novel?
24. What is symbolic of water?
25. How does learning about your past affect who you are?

[frolick inthe machine · Rating 4 out of 5]

lyrical novel of a child's memories of leaving Vietnam with her father as boat refugees and settling down in San Diego, CA with her partly reunited family (father, mother, herself, but without her older brother, who has drowned back in Vietnam but remains as a ghostly presence by her side). beautiful and haunting images (kept imagining this as a film), enjoyed the vignette-based, episodic nature of the narrative, felt true to how you recollect memories of childhood. interesting to read asian am stories that center daughter-father rships instead of the daughter-mother. I wish there had been a bit more about the particular knottiness of the protagonist's rship to her father. i felt like it captured the kind of enclosed, almost claustrophobic world that you inhabit as a child, and particularly a child w parents who form a tight nuclear unit as displaced ppl in a foreign place. the cues that you take from your mom/dad/parent that you don't yet know are bad for you but that hover underneath and sometimes rise to the surface, rendered explicit. Thuy doesn't unravel or interrogate things as much as impress the image of how something felt in that moment.

the narrator's POV swings from the kind of naivete of childhood to wiser, more jaded adulthood; this felt a bit confusing, but not necessarily in an off-putting way. it made me curious about how the child's rship to her father developed over a lifetime, how she related to him as an adult, which is hinted at but never explained.

i loved the fish, lights, butterfly, and water motifs...if anything i admire how loyal Thuy is to the child's way of being and making sense of the world.

[Candace · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am always interested in immigrant stories and in the Vietnamese-American community, so this was a good choice for me. Le's prose is almost like reading a poem. She weaves a lot of memories and experiences of the protagonist together to create a story that works. I loved this book and read it in just a few days.

[Sydney · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish I could write like this.

[Linnae Chau · Rating 4 out of 5]

piercing & beautiful. will have to think about this one for a bit🤔

[Bạch Thố · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5
Bằng một chất giọng dịu dàng, điềm tĩnh, tác giả dẫn dắt người đọc len lỏi vào những mảnh ký ức mới nghe qua tưởng chừng như rời rạc và vụ vặt, nhưng sau rốt lại xâu chuỗi thành một đoạn tuổi thơ-tuổi niên thiếu nhiều biến cố. Những mất mát, những xung đột gia đình, những khám phá về giới tính và tính dục đầu tiên của một cô bé tuổi mới lớn, tất cả được thuật lại gần như một cuốn phim tài liệu. Không nhiều bình luận và xúc cảm, như một người đã tìm được an yên với quá khứ. Và toàn bộ câu chuyện được đặt trong một bối cảnh thời đại - những sự kiện mang tính bước ngoặt với nhiều phận người, gây nên bởi chiến tranh - và khó tránh khỏi việc ảnh hưởng đến những nhân vật đó.
Càng về đến cuối cảm giác văn càng thơ, càng đáng yêu quá đỗi.

[HoboWannaBe · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this book could have been so much more. While the prose seems clipped and offer blunt, the writing is also sometimes very descriptive and full of imagery. Interesting story written in an interesting fashion— short blurbs here and there that sometimes are connected & sometimes not.

Questions- How did the dad express his rage? How did the daughter (narrator who is all-knowing babies point of her father sometimes) feel about her parents? What did the girl DO most of her days? How did she feel about her native country when she returned to Vietnam?

Short & quick read about Vietnamese immigrants and their struggles.

[Thien · Rating 5 out of 5]

J'ai trop pleuré. Un des meilleurs livres sur la violence de l'exil 😭. Quelle délicatesse et quelle poésie ... comment est-ce possible de raconter des choses aussi traumatisantes avec tant de beauté ??

[☕Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ratings:

Writing 5
Characters 4
Story line 4
Impact 4

Overall rating 4.25

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

Today--speedily even by my standards--I read thuy lê's new book The Gangster We Are All Looking For. It is one of those new novels-in-stories, or stories-as-a-novel pieces that are so popular now. It reminded me primarily of two other books about the Asian-American experience: When the Emperor Was Divine and The Woman Warrior.

lê, who isn't into capitalization, has written a quasi-autobiographical series of vignettes about a young Vietnamese girl in California. It includes scenes from when she and her father first arrived on our shores, when her mother finally joins them, and a flashback to the death of her older brother in Vietnam. The best parts of the writing aren't specific to the immigrant experience, but rather descriptions of how children think and play.

When the Jehovah's Witnesses weren't there, we chased each other up and down the stairs and around the towers of their castle. That summer, we made up a game called Kingdom. At first, Kingdom was about pretending we were in Heaven [about which they'd learned from the Witnesses:]. We tried to be the people in the little books. We swept the stairs and kept the castle clean. We walked around smiling, waving to invisible people in our heavenly community. We put our hands on each other's shoulders and said things like "My son," "My friend," "God knows." When we got bored, Kingdom became about having fights and waging war. (49)

The vignette format reminded me of Julie Otsuka's book about the internment of Japanese-Americans, but it's less abstract here for the simple reason that lê uses the first-person. Otsuka uses "the girl," "the woman," etc. to describe her characters, and this serves only to reinforce the impression that the characters are diaphanous and distant. lê, on the other hand, is just "I," and the reader succeeds in understanding her outlook, if not all the facts surrounding her immigration experience.

This book also provokes the question of how to write a work of this type in the wake of Maxine Hong Kingston's seminal "Memoir of a Girlhood Among the Ghosts." I certainly found resonances of Kingston's writing in Gangster, such as when lê writes "There is not a trace of blood anywhere except here, in my throat, where I am telling you this." (99) The elemental, intentionally brutal, mythic aspects are quite similar. Perhaps the comparison is to Kingston is unfair, since I first read her book as a teenager, and it made a searing impression on me--but I think that's a reading experience I share with many others.

Gangster is a success, as far as it goes. Like so many novels-in-stories/stories-as-a-novel, it felt to me unformed, embryonic, a sketch for a great novel that could have been. I wonder if the current atmosphere of bright young writers expecting publishing contracts on the basis of mere stories isn't at fault. But that is a separate question, and the thought of what might have been shouldn't be allowed to prevent anyone from tackling this densely impressionistic, but brief book.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

The personal history of le thi diem thuy is certainly one worth telling. She was born in Vietnam at the height of American involvement in their war. Two of her siblings drowned during her childhood. Her oldest brother drowned in the ocean in Vietnam, and a sister drowned in a Malaysian refugee camp. At the age of six, le and her father were picked up by an American naval ship and placed in a refugee camp in Singapore. Eventually they would be reunited with her mother and a sister in southern California, where she spent the rest of her childhood.

"Gangster" is, in a sense, her memoir, in that the narrator's story very closely mirror's le's story. But she chose not to tell events as they happened to her, instead constructing a story from her own reflections about her family and other people she has known or met. After I finished reading the book, I found it telling to see her describe it this way: "It's a novel about memory, the memories these characters hold onto of their lives in Vietnam while they are in San Diego. 'Gangster' is not my personal active recollection; it is the personal recollection of the narrator of the book as she tries to face the death of her brother."

Normally, I find work that closely resembles real events, but chooses to tailor them to suit the wishes of the narrator, to be unsettling. From the standpoint of telling the story of actual people and actual histories, it's too easy to distort real events and real characters in such a way as to distort reality. But le's story is "honest" in the sense that the author is inspired by her own story and her own feelings and not constructing them from her idea of someone else's experience. And the author is clearly telling her story in such a way as to reflect well her own talents. This book is a beautiful piece of work.

I was blown away at a couple points during the book, moments that were less about plot development and more about expressions of emotion. I'll leave it at that.

San Diego's public library and public radio station team up each year to choose one book to promote in the "One book, One San Diego" program. The event series seeks to unite San Diego through book chats, author and scholar lectures, and film screenings that relate to the themes of a single book. This book was chosen for 2011, and it seems they have really picked a winner. It's more a story of Vietnam than it is one of San Diego, but both places are very much characters in the book. It's also the first selection in five years to be a work of fiction.

[Glady Juria · Rating 3 out of 5]

«El gánster que todos andamos buscando» es una «novela de fragmentos».

Es lo que decían de este libro… y tenían razón. Aunque le encontré un mayor sentido cuando lo terminé de leer.

También diría que es una novela de sutilezas.

Si estamos acostumbradas a leer novelas con la tradicional fórmula de «introducción, nudo y desenlace», este libro te resultará atípico. Porque aunque sí hay un nudo —o varios—, son todos muy sutiles. Quietos, guardan silencio, como si jugaran al escondite.

Es una novela que casi construyes tú misma, y, dependiendo de dónde pones tu foco de atención, creerás que habla del viaje migratorio y sus consecuencias. O que trata sobre la pérdida de un ser querido. O de las consecuencias de la guerra. O del alcoholismo. O de la relación entre un padre y su hija.

O de todo lo que acabo de mencionar.

Tenemos a una narradora infantil, sin nombre. Una niña que, con toda naturalidad, nos cuenta sus recuerdos de Vietnam y de Estados Unidos. Sin un orden lineal, esa multitud de escenas se asemejan a mirar un cuadro con muchos detalles: pasan muchas cosas en un lado, y también en el otro. Pero cuando te vas alejando, encuentras una nueva perspectiva y una imagen más completa.

Cuando lo ves de cerca —o a medida que lees— ves solo ciertas cosas: un padre amoroso con su hija, una piscina, un paseo nocturno por el supermercado.

Un recuerdo bonito que forma parte de un relato más grande, envuelto en la inocencia característica de los niños, pero que cuando lo relacionas con otros recuerdos o escenas, forman parte de algo mayor, con un trasfondo doloroso.

Ese padre amoroso guarda en su interior los estragos de pasar años en un campo de reeducación; el agua de la piscina esconde una sombra que persigue tanto a la niña como a sus padres, y los paseos nocturnos hasta el supermercado ocultan ese insomnio que llega por el estrés, por el trauma, por la separación.

Una novela llena de fragmentos. Fragmentos de recuerdos, pero también fragmentos de personas. Fragmentos de sucesos, fragmentos de la vida.

La literatura vietnamita está llegando para quedarse. Y yo que me alegro ver libros como este en español.

[Libby · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book, a fictionalized memoir of a Vietnamese girl who settles in San Diego, was selected for the One Book, One San Diego initiative. The book plays fast and loose with time and memory and feels like at least two different books smushed together. The first is a pretentious rendering of the protagonist's childhood that I found about as meaningful as the plastic bag dancing in the wind in "American Beauty" (which is to say prettily imagined but lacking something in essentials). In fact, it wasn't until about 3/4 of the way through the book that the author provided a compelling reason to care about the characters. If I had to guess, I'd guess that the final quarter of the novel was the part published as a short story, since it's compelling in a way that the first part of the novel isn't. There, Le's writing facilely leaps from memory to memory, a surprisingly spirited revisiting of a destructively painful family memory. The prose is graceful and neat, and the figurative language illuminates rather than calls attention to itself. There the childhood memories seem the clearest and most realistic- the specificity of the family's behavior in the face of adversity is wonderfully human. If one has not read enough fictionalized memoirs with literary pretensions to be sick of the genre, I would recommend this book, if only for the book's final quarter.

[lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's certainly poetic, and perhaps this is why I only found it to be an OK book, because poetry always makes me feel intellectually stunted. The author has some beautiful language and descriptions of events in her life, but most of the time I found myself frustrated because I couldn't get the symbolism that I assumed was there and figured I must be too slow to understand. Also, from what I've heard, this started out as one short story in a literary magazine (the title story) and she was urged to turn it into an entire book. I like the idea of essentially writing multiple short stories to tell a more complete story, but as with most books that begin as something shorter and are extended into something longer, I feel like the first shorter version was the best.

[Arturo · Rating 5 out of 5]

You know that moving feeling of the ocean that lingers inside your belly after a long swim in the ocean? It is that same lingering feeling I have in me after reading The Gangster We Are All Looking For, by lê thi diem thúy. I think it will remain with me for a while.