Making America

Lucy Carlyle 

lê thi diem thúy

The Gangster We Are All Looking For.

 
        Before The Gangster We Are All Looking was published in the United States in 2001, lê thi diem thúy was a performance artist with a reputation for thoughtful, autobiographical theatre. In works such as Red Fiery Summer and the bodies between us (now being developed into a novel), she explored war, cultural colonization, memory and identity, drawing on her childhood experience of transplantation from Vietnam to the USA. With The Gangster We Are All Looking For she translates this intimate exploration of the relationships between Asia and the West into fiction.

Like the author, the narrator is a young girl taken out of Vietnam on a boat by her father, settling in Southern California, where her mother later joins them. The books draws on thúy’s own  experience to relate the aftermath of that emigration – relocation from one unsatisfactory dwelling to another, the discomfiture of being stranded in a strange land and the fear of implosion as the family turns in on itself in frustration.

Through the eyes of her younger self, the child refugee, thúy translates the details of Californian life into mysteries and wonders.

We stood in front of Ken's admiring the many shining pairs of dress-up shoes, each positioned at such an angle as to suggest the wearer had floated out of them, while the shoes, too heavy to follow, had to stay behind.

By means of such imaginative misinterpretation, America becomes something other than itself: not Amenca, not Vietnam, but a place of dislocation, of overwhelming foreignness and mystery. But thúy extends this inexplicability to her own family. She imagines how their entraced late-night visit to the supermarket must have appeared to passers-by: “they made no purchase and left shortly before 1 a.m., lay down in the spice aisle while the man was absorbed with the different varieties of salt available”. If the family make America strange, America likewise converts them into strangers in a process of mutual alienation.

Reflecting the alien nature of both the country and its new inhabitants, the narrator conveys not only a foreigner's interpretation of Western Iife, but a perplexed knowledge of her parents. She notes strictly unintrusive eye that her mother shaves her head after an argument and  wears a baseball cap; that while watching kungfu movies she slaps her legs with pleasure; that her father becomes "prone to rages" and then inscrutably sits still all night, The daughter believes that her mother was once a good Catholic girl, her father a gangster but the veracity of either claim is not established.

Partly, we understand that this failure in understanding is due to the misapprehension inherent in love, to the mysteriousness of childhood. But it also appeals to spring from the loss of memory caused by the family’s transplantation. Unexplained reference a lost brother suggest a disconnection from history, while the confused reactions of her parents to the realities of American life convey a disengagement with the present moment.

In possession of neither past nor present, the focus of the narrative between both, just as the central character floats between the world of home and the outside world. Meanwhile, a disturbing sense of unsatisfied, unlocated blame drifts around the household, and in particular the narrator's father, prompting the daughter to resolve that one day she will become “the gangster we are all looking for-, swallowing blame and restoring the family to emotional dry land.Thúy explores these watery dislocations in language as delicately as a butterfly. A perverse sense of beauty informs her narrative, bestowing grace on acts of violence and passion and suggesting the charmed perception of a dreamer. She provides some magnificent metaphors. Eyes are “empty of expression, like two pieces of volcanic rock that have been drowned in a river to cool"; pebbles fall on her mother like “warm kisses on the curve of her back”; a bruise unfurls like a "blossom".

Through her exquisite, transformative sensibility, lê thi diem thúy creates the possibility of understanding unfamiliarity as both dangerous and wonderful. She suggests that this double-edged sense of strangeness is an inevitable component not only of emigration, but also of the most intimate human relationships. And, while anatomizing the traumatic discontinuities which scar her family's story she creates the possibility of eventual return to a lost past through careful remembering.

TLS số Jan 9 2004