le thi diem thuy's The Gangster We Are All Looking For

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

Last week we discussed lê thi diem thúy's The Gangster We Are All Looking For in class. I enjoyed reading the novel. It's very short and reads quickly. The chapters are kind of like linked short stories.



The students didn't really seem to like what they saw as a "postmodern" narrative structure. I didn't see the fragmented narrative particularly difficult to follow. What threw me a little were the many spaces every few paragraphs, even if there wasn't a narrative break (for a flashback or other time shift).

We talked a lot about what is going on with the unnamed narrator, a Vietnamese refugee woman reflecting on her childhood in Vietnam and in the United States. Why does she tell the story at this particular moment? What propels the narrative? What are the back stories of the parents and of the narrator herself that might explain intense emotional outbursts and actions? The interlaced narratives are very suggestive but ultimately frustrating (not necessarily a bad thing) in their refusal to lay out explicit cause-and-effect connections. For example, the haunting presence of the narrator's older brother surfaces in each chapter, but the novel never really makes his story the simplistic reason why the parents or the narrator feel or do certain things. I like this kind of indeterminate narrative, one that offers possible explanations but is ultimately unwilling to nail down a single explanation for things. The father, for example, might sit in the dark at home for hours at a time because of his experience fighting in the Vietnam War for the South Vietnamese army and because of his time in reeducation camps. But there are other things that also might partially explain his actions.

I thought the novel was also notable for its imagingings of the relationship between the narrator and her father. The little moments of connection between them are beautiful and sometimes heartbreaking.