The Gangster We Are All Looking For, is the first novel by Vietnamese American writer, Le Thi Diem Thuy, who left Vietnam by boat with her father in 1978, settling in Southern California. The story describes the life of a Vietnamese family in America through the knowing eyes of a child. The story moves back and forth between Vietnam and California. Mother and father are ”Ma” and ”Ba,” and the unnamed girl is the narrator. Author creates her own identity through the images and silent sounds which constitute imagined space in the book. This compensates for the loss she has been through during the assimilation process. In fact, The Gangster We Are All Looking For embodies in itself a struggle of Vietnamese children, as outsiders, to integrate into the American mainstream, with only a vague conception of what their original culture was. The traumatic experience in the war, the escape, as well as the battle she has to fight every day in her life, enhances the difficulties she faces in integrating. Her comfort zone is the imagination; spaces of her own in which she can establish a self and find her own voice despite the marginalization she has to face.
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“I was the only Vietnamese student in my school. .As I stood before them in a dress the color of an Easter egg, with my feet encased in clear plastic sandals, the other students looked at the globe and then back at me again. Some whispered behind their hands. Some just stared. I imagined the stripes on my underwear flashing on and off, like traffic signals, under the dress”(19)
She seems to be out of place. First of all, she is a stranger to the rest of the class. The strangeness is expressed in her Vietnamese body with the American Easter-eggcolor dress on. By excluding herself as “the only Vietnamese student in her school” (19) she shows the marginalization; she felt in her first encounter with the new culture. And it creates a sense of loss, the loss of a self. After all, she is a Vietnamese who is wearing an American outfit. Does that make her American? She is completely out of place in her attempt to assimilate. In other words, she was rejected, at least in her own interpretation.
Struggles and conflicts result in the constant feeling of loss, one that, unfortunately, keeps occurring in her life over and over again. She loses her country because of the war. She loses her brother and her sister because of the treacherous escape out of Saigon. She loses her first shelter in America because of the obsession that she develops with the animated animals, stemming from her traumatic memories of the war. She imagines that she is the butterfly strapped in the dish; she wants to free the butterfly and thus free herself. She loses her stable home with having been evicted many times. She continues to lose her peace of mind because of the family’s situation with her father’s desperate rage and the mother’s constant mourning. The loss reaches the climax when she runs away, probably after being hit by her father, which means she loses a family and her self-confidence in life. To her, all start with the war, something she recounts with sorrow:
“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”(87)
So war follows her from Vietnam to America, and she ends up having so many voids created by war.
The protagonist in the memoir also uses her imagination to create her own world and her own identity through the construction of space. That space then in turn portrays the author’s state of mind. Often, she gets lost and absorbed in her own creation. For instance, she recounts one of her experiences during the very first days arriving in the U.S and staying in an isolated room:
“I began to play with the ceiling, a game that I used to play with the sky when I was lying in the fishing boat on the sea. At that time, I thought that everyone and everything I missed was hovering behind the sky. The game involved looking for a seam to the sky, a thread I could pull. I told myself that if I could find the thread and focus on it hard enough with my eyes, I could tear the sky open and my mother, my brother, my grandfather, my flip-flops, my favorite shells, would all fall down to me.”(21)
This is like a fairy tale. What seems to be impossible in real life is possible here in her childhood game. Actually, it is the game of her life, the game she plays when she is in the middle of nowhere, in a transition zone waiting to be accepted. That sky and that ceiling perform as a barrier that needs pulling down. That space in her imagination is the whole world to her. Another example occurs when she finds out about the dish with a butterfly in it. She recalls telling her father:
“When Ba and I lay down to sleep one night, I whispered into Ba’s ear, “I found a butterfly that has a problem. What is the problem? Ba asked. The butterfly is alive.. ..Good,. Ba said. But it’s trapped. Where? Inside a glass disk… Ba said nothing. But it wants to get out. How do you know? Because it said to me: .Shuh-shuh/shuh” (26)
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Here, she is a trapped butterfly that needs releasing, at least in her imagination whereas before, she is someone who wants to crack open the sky to enlarge the space. In case, the thirst for a place with more freedom and comfort is obvious. The marginalization leaves her no comfort zone. And that urges her to create her own space. The girl finds everything related to her present state problematic. In fact, it is a lack of connection with her beloveds such as her mother, her belongings, and her culture in a way; moreover, it is the lack of freedom of mind in the new land. There is a sense of incompleteness, of some sort of unfulfilled state and a sense of loss. A transformation cannot be completed; thus the imagination of spaces and the assimilation process continue. She, as someone who does not belong to anywhere, is trying to adapt with a traumatic experience in an unfriendly place.
She imagines herself as the butterflies speaking .Shuh-shuh/shuh-shuh…
She recalls:
“I held the disk up to my ear and listened. At first all I heard was the sound of my own breathing, but then I heard a soft rustling, like wings brushing against a windowpane. The rustling was a whispered song. It was the butterfly’s way of speaking, and I thought I understood it.” (25)
She is speaking from a confined space without being physically heard, and she is the trapped butterflies whose voice is silenced in the new society. It is felt and recognized through the pain, the suffocating state and the imprisonment. Such audible silence can also be traced elsewhere throughout the book. For example, when she talks about her dead grandparents, she writes, “There is not a trace of blood anywhere except here, in my throat, where I am telling you all this.”(99) The reason is simple, only in such an imagined world can she find a comfort zone for her identity and only in such an imagined world can her voice be heard.
Le thi diem thuy is successful in representing her unstable identity with the movement and shifting of time and space, making the world reflect her state of mind. As a matter of fact, in that world she can also be the self she wants to be with all the haunting memories and the everlasting inner conflicts entailed by the experience of the war and her recollections of it.
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