Lê Thi Diem Thúy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For.  Anchor, 2004, 176pp., $11.95.

Asian American literature, until about 15 years ago, was predominated by Chinese and Japanese American writers who chronicled their immigrant experience of trying to negotiate between their new-found subjectivity and their disassociated cultural origins.  

With Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (considered by many to be the urtext of Asian American literature), Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Asian American writing soon became largely a women’s affair (this is not to imply that there are no Asian male writers, but they are not as commercially or critically successful). It focused on the mother-daughter relationship which directly portrays the generational and cultural conflict experienced by and between many first and subsequent generations of Asian Americans. 

Brutally honest and sometimes deeply sad, Asian American literature captures the emotional and psychological trauma that immigrants experience in being transplanted from their homeland – sometimes forcefully – to embrace a new cultural landscape that is initially confusing and subtly racist as well.  

Thúy’s novel continues in this tradition of immigrant narratives, but focuses instead on a father-daughter relationship. I am actually quite impressed with this shift in familial emphasis: too often in Asian women’s writing, male figures occupy marginal, sometimes stereotypical roles. Despite lip service paid to the male immigrant’s equally harrowing experiences, this is often casually delivered, or ensconced within the story of mothers, which is their story in the end, and not the men’s. 

Thúy’s narrative is constructed as a series of vignettes. Stylistically haphazard, this fragmented approach to writing mirrors the difficult transition that her characters undergo in trying to assimilate into a new country and invent a new identity.  

The new world is often confusing, and for a little girl (the narrator) to see her own father helpless and humiliated can be a painful and unforgettable experience. In fact, Thúy’s novel has lesser sympathy for the mother who is portrayed as somewhat complaining, demanding and intolerant. Here, Thúy resists the oft-told tale of how the male immigrant would first leave homeland to assimilate into a new country before bringing his family over, but who would then get sidetracked by success or another woman and eventually forget the family. Instead, she writes about men who keep true to their word to bring their family over, and the struggles they undergo in order to fulfil their promise. 

The Gangster does not romanticise the diasporic experience nor does it exoticise Asian-ness. In fact, the novel is quite uncompromising in its depiction of harshness.  

In certain theories of post-colonialism, existing as a hybrid individual is empowering because it suggests the resistance against cultural hierarchy, and the happy miscegenation of differences that promotes the adoptive capacity of the individual. But this kind of theorising often forgets, or ignores, the “real” experiences of many immigrants whose hyphenated existence is fraught with economical impoverishment, social biasness and ideological contradictions. Living in the interstice is often more diminishing than empowering. This is evident in Thúy’s novel, which provides a useful criticism of simplistic theorising which fails to consider “real life” contexts. 

One important theme in this novel is memory. As in many Asian American literature (Tan’s novel is a good example), the reconstruction of history is often a difficult process because of the unreliability of memory. This directly leads to a compromise of one’s subjectivity: if memory is unreliable, the self becomes a hazy feature that is also constantly being shifted by the new cultural landscape one has adopted. To be able to tell one’s story – the story of the immigrant, and the story of the self before being uprooted – is thus discoloured by the inability to recount one’s existential moments. What results is the difficulty in translating one’s experience to one’s children in order to help them appreciate their cultural and historical heritage. In Thúy’s novel, the protagonist’s parents often cannot relate to her their past because pain, embarrassment and misremembering have diffused the urgency of their history. Consequently, she can only know her parents in fragments even as she tries to piece together their tragic lives into a coherent story.  

The narrator also cannot seem to mourn the death of her brother, and continues to register his presence. This is because at the time of his death, Vietnam was experiencing war, which thus made his demise inconsequential. With death ubiquitously experienced and bodies left unburied everywhere, one little boy’s death does not count for much. But what remains unburied returns to haunt the living, making the latter the site of their wasted lives.  

This is evidenced further in the narrator’s demeanour which she and others sometimes mistake to be that of a boy’s. It is as if he now lives through her, having failed to survive the war. 

The Gangster is a notable first novel that, in my view, attempts to break away from the conventional familial depiction in Asian American writing. It suffers from being overly poetic at times, but this is balanced by the honesty of the telling. Fans of Asian American literature will certainly find this a worthwhile read.