The Gangster We Are All Looking For

June 5, 2013 by Narith Ta 1 Comment

Le Thi Diem Thuy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For brings readers to the perspective of civilians who were affected first hand by the plight of the Vietnam War. Reading through the journey that the narrator and her father took to get to America, I found most compelling the moment in Chapter 4, “the bones of birds”, when the narrator recounts the moment that her father and family attempted to escape from Vietnam on the fishing boat. “The night I left Vietnam, it was my father who carried me down to the beach and placed me on the fishing boat” (105 Le) . What was most compelling about this moment was the fact that it was not only an attempt to escape from the oppression that the family was surrounded around, but it involved many more people attempting to escape; wherein even the narrator’s father lost sight of her mother and “he couldn’t find her anywhere”. “[Her] mother must have been among the many voices, each calling for help as he passed by in the water” (105 Le). Throughout the discussion in class, I created this image of the narrator’s father as being a someone who was not only angry at the world, but also an individual who could not come to terms with the death of his son and the ordeal he had to be put through going from Vietnam to the refugee camp and ultimately to America. This scene on Pages 103-106 provide an intense scenario in which we witness a father who was compelled by his moral duty to protect his family and his strength was shattered by the fact that as he rescued his daughter, his wife was left in the midst of the chaos surrounded by a crowd of people who were equally determined to escape. “In America, my father worked as a house painter and then a welder. After he’d been laid off from his welding job, he became a gardener ” (105 Le). As these details provide an opportunity to understand the ways in which Ba acts in Chapter 5 (i.e. when he goes fishing and looks at the black water or when he decides to not answer the phone and decrease the volume), I found a sense of understanding as to why he did act strangely after dealing with such intense periods of his life.