The Gangster We Are All Looking for

A half remembered quote by Antonin Artaud should preface this book: "No one has ever written (or drawn, painted, composed, etc.) except, quite literally, to get out of hell" (sic). What I find so moving about Le's narrative is that she does just this, but with a heartbreaking sympathy and understanding of the damned who populate the novel -- the father who went from being her guardian and companion to a fearful, mad domestic abuser, the mother haunted by the abandonment of both her parents and her dead son, and of course the (sometimes) narrator herself. Reading Le's snapshots of time perpetually out of joint, one feels the inconsolable longing and lament of wanting to understand and be understood; even as the family's separation from both the past in Vietnam and mainstream America in the present forces them to perpetually drift in the starless waters of San Diego's endless suburbs. The novel reads like a dark, dreamy prose poem, streaked with the violence of war and the innocence of first loves that can't outlive their episodic telling. Some philosopher once said: "In exile, the only home is that of writing," and I think this applies to "the gangster..." and the experience of displacement and uprootedness that it conveys. This book should have been awarded a prestigious prize, but I also feel lucky, like many of the other reviewers, to have "discovered" it without the help of advertisement or any bookstore blurbs. A book that will stay in your memory.

Le thi diem thuy has penned an extraordinary first novel in The Gangster We Are All Looking For, worth six stars if such a rating were offered. Unlike so many books today, le offers the reader a work which truly follows the writerly dictum, "Show, don't tell." Her work is a prose poem, lyrical in style, a masterpiece of understatement and mystery, beautifully combined with a childlike sense of magical realism. This is the new immigrant's experience in America, with all its confusion, loneliness, personal and familial disconnection, and the sense of loss of one's roots, of all that was once so familiar and normal. At the center of the novel is the author/narrator, a nameless young Vietnamese girl who struggles desperately to cope with her sudden dislocation from her home country to Southern California, the absence of her mother, and the loss of her older brother. At the same time, she must decode the mysteries of American life, technology, and culture: the mysterious power landlords and bosses exert over her father, the racist behavior of schoolmates who begin referring to all Southeast Asian immigrant students as "Yang," to the awakening sexual behavior of neighborhood boys. A wonderfully-rendered episode early in the book gives a child's-eye view of glass animal figurines and a butterfly encased in glass. The narrator's magical fascination with the butterfly faintly recalls a butterfly scene in Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude," although the scene in this book ends in unfortunate consequences for the little girl and her family. The Gangster We Are All Looking For is not written in a strictly chronological sequence, but le's non-linear approach adds to the sense of childlike wonder as well as its sense of permanent loss. Her powerful descriptions and imagery, and her portrayal of her narrator's musings, echoes these feelings and creates an inescapable air of sorrow, as if her life will never be what it could and should have been. For these characters, America is not a land of opportunity but a refugee camp for displaced persons, a land that will forever be foreign for lives that will never feel fulfilled. This is a harsh but exquisitely-written fictional treatment of the underside of immigration: America as impossibly strange and culturally closed to outsiders, American life as the breaker of immigrant families, not just America as the mythical "Gold Mountain" or as the healer of lost souls. A wonderful exploration of the immigrant experience, marvelously told through a child's eyes.

I bought this book a few weeks ago, and was very touched by it. I live in San Diego and just this week this book was featured in the Reader. I am so glad! This book is what I will be recommending to anyone who asks. Thank you for this wonderful read.

This is a novel that could easily be mistaken for a memoir, written in a style that often resembles that of prose poetry. Which is to say, genre is beside the point -- The Gangster We Are All Looking For is that very rare thing, an original story about an immigrant experience. It's been some time since I read the book, but Thuy's images remain in my mind, not as literary constructions but as if they were sensory memories. This is a beautiful, terrifying, important book, simultaneously familiar and like nothing I've ever read before.

A beautiful, universal book. It takes you inside the mind of a girl. It could be a girl of any ethnic background that has to learn coping skills to deal with the craziness around her. With brilliant, eloquent descriptions of life from a child's perspective. The narrative style reminded me of Night by Elie Wiesel, the boy who wrote of the holocaust.Looking forward to future books by Le.