The Gangster We Are All Looking For

Rating:
Summary: Inside the mind of a girl
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: New Life in a Foreign Land
Review: A six-year old girl, born and raised in Viet Nam, escapes together with her father and winds up in San Diego. She tells her story of growing up in a foreign land. But she still remembers her daydreams from the land of her birth. She remembers that she had a little brother who drowned. And grandparents who stayed behind, while her mother could join them a few years later.

There are connections such as their life near the water, both in Viet Nam and in San Diego. There is repetition within the life of the refugees, such as the various fences, first in Viet Nam, then in the detention camp in Saigon, and finally in the housing complex in San Diego. The mother tries very hard to become an "American" without really knowing what that involves. The father works as a handyman and later as a gardener. But the foreign land breaks him in spirit and body. The little girl grows up and leaves to live on the east coast.

Obviously, the book has a large content of biographical remembrances. But it is never written in a maudlin tone, although the family shatters on these foreign shores. And though it is nobodies fault. The dreams of the orderly past among family and friends are just too strong and repetitive.

It is a wonderful story, told with a great heart and without complaints.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful read. very enlightning.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Exquisite storytelling.
Review: In 1978 six Vietnamese boat people were intercepted in the South China Sea and sent to a refugee camp in Singapore. After being sponsored by a church group they were sent to live in San Diego and start a new life. The young girl and her father are the first to arrive followed by the mother several years later. Their relationship with their sponsor is strained and the girl and father eventually move out on their own and forge out a new life in their strange surroundings; the girl attends school and the father works odd menial jobs.

In many aspects THE GANGSTER WE ARE ALL LOOKING FOR is an unconventional novel; there is no plot and little action. Rather, this book contains streams of consciousness of the young girl who is the narrator. There is an abundance of fanciful dreams and child-like perceptions of the world around her, along with her view of her parent's relationship and her mourning of her brother's death. Admittedly this book is slim but there is much essence packed within its 160 pages. Le Thi Diem Thuy performs an admirable job in re-creating the experiences of a Vietnamese family who immigrates to Southern California in a marvelous and unique style.

Rating:
Summary: Six Stars for a Poetic First Novel!
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Six Stars for a Poetic First Novel!
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful and Terrifying
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A simple but moving story of a family of boat people.
Review: This is the story of a girl who escaped from Vietnam by boat in the seventies with her father and four uncles when she was only six. They landed in a refugee camp before being sponsored by a family in San Diego. Her mother later joined her in the States. Throughout the story, the image of her brother's drowning during the escape kept haunting her.

The beauty of this book lies in the fact that it was written without pretense. Her father was an ARVN grunt who went on to become a handyman, then a gardener in the US. His past, however, troubled him. He kept on starring at the sea across the ocean trying to make a sense of his tumultuous life in Vietnam: his years fighting the enemy during the war and then his incarceration in communist reeducation camps, his escape by boat, the memory of his drowned son, and the lack of news from his extended family stranded in a communist land.

This is a moving story of one family of boat people trying to survive in a foreign land while battling with the horrors and demons of the past.

Rating:
Summary: Growing up with conflicts and memories of Vietnam
Review: This small novel is based on the experiences of the author, who, in 1978, at the age of 6, left Vietnam with her father, and settled in Southern California. It's a short book, merely 158 pages long, but yet it pulled me right into the story of this young girl's life and captured me with its simple yet lyrical quality.

Mostly, it's told from a child's point of view and we get to experience it all. First there's the well-meaning but misguided sponsor, and later there are several rundown apartments. There's a whole new language to learn. And an American school to master. Her father and mother work hard at low paying jobs. The father drinks. There are many arguments. Growing up full of conflicts and misunderstandings. And memories of Vietnam which can't be erased.

Through it all the girl keeps her sense of wonder. And that is where the beauty of this small book lies. The voice is fresh, the words are simple. And yet it rings with poetic beauty.

Rating:
Summary: Growing up with conflicts and memories of Vietnam
Review: This small novel is based on the experiences of the author, who, in 1978, at the age of 6, left Vietnam with her father, and settled in Southern California. It's a short book, merely 158 pages long, but yet it pulled me right into the story of this young girl's life and captured me with its simple yet lyrical quality.

Mostly, it's told from a child's point of view and we get to experience it all. First there's the well-meaning but misguided sponsor, and later there are several rundown apartments. There's a whole new language to learn. And an American school to master. Her father and mother work hard at low paying jobs. The father drinks. There are many arguments. Growing up full of conflicts and misunderstandings. And memories of Vietnam which can't be erased.

Through it all the girl keeps her sense of wonder. And that is where the beauty of this small book lies. The voice is fresh, the words are simple. And yet it rings with poetic beauty.