63 pages • 2 hours read
Le Thi Diem ThuyThe Gangster We Are All Looking For
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “the gangster we are all looking for”
The Girl describes her perception of Vietnam through the lens of her grandparents: “Vietnam is a black-and-white photograph of my grandparents sitting in bamboo chairs in their front courtyard” (78). Her grandparents—who come from the south of Vietnam and are Catholic—disown Ma for marrying Ba. Ba is a “Buddhist gangster from the North” (79) and that factor likely plays a role in the grandparents’ disapproval. Before meeting Ba, Ma had been courted by suitors who ran errands for her parents, but she says that she didn’t understand what love was at the time. She says that “love came to her in a dark movie theater” (79) where she sees Ba for the first time. She’s memorizes the features of his handsome face, which she recalls after being separated from her family. Ma dreams about the end of the war, smokes cigarettes with Ba, and is recklessly in love. These actions contrast with the image of the responsible daughter that she projects to her parents. She becomes sullen around her family and spends her nights thinking of Ba’s hands and what Vietnam had been like prior to the war with America, which dropped chemicals onto the trees that left them empty of leaves.
The Girl’s first memory of her father’s face is a bit different. She remembers seeing him through barbed wire at a military site in Vietnam. Ma calls his name—Anh Minh—through the wire in a loving manner: “She wants to be engulfed by him. Anh Minh, em My. Anh Min, em My” (82). When the gates open and her parents meet, the Girl says they act like they’re “meeting for the first time, savoring the sound of a name, marveling at the bones of a face cupped by the bones of the hand” (82). Ba tells a story of his origins: he comes from a “semi-aristocratic northern family” (82) and cites his long second toe as proof of his aristocratic blood. Due to his “tall nose” (88)—uncommon among the Vietnamese—Ba claims to be the son of a French mistress of his Vietnamese father. After finding this out, Ba runs away to south Vietnam. However, no one can confirm Ba’s story. Ma compares Ba’s toes to two sets of five fishing boats, in which his long toe—the second boat—always leads.
The Girl describes her birth in an alley behind her grandparents’ house. Her father is away fighting in the war with America. Her mother lives with her sister, who cares for the Girl’s older brother. On the night the Girl is born, Ma leaves the house where she lives and walks alone across the beach. She feels intense labor pains. Ma looks at a long metal tube in front of the schoolhouse and pictures it as the “badly burnt arm of a dying giant buried in the sand” (86). Ma thinks of a girl who walked outside during a napalm bombing—a type of chemical warfare—and was killed, leaving her body to float in the sea. Ma cries thinking about the giant and the girl. Ma feels unsafe and tries to go inside the tube where she sometimes slept as a child, but her pregnant belly stops her from getting inside. The next subsection of this chapter refers to tall noses—presumably, the Girl’s. An unknown voice says that “[t]all voices come from somewhere—” and another voice replies, “Not from here” (86). Ma refuses to entertain the judgmental accusations from strangers that the Girl’s father is an American soldier, stating: “[S]he knows where she pulled me from” (87). War is dangerous, but those who survive it—like the Girl—are both a “curse and a miracle” (87).
We pivot now to Anh, who is the Girl’s next-door-neighbor and friend. Ba refers to Anh as “the chicken egg girl” (88) because she sells eggs from a cart and her backyard is filled with chickens. The family lives in a yellow house on Westinghouse Street in Linda Vista, which is a village in San Diego. They reside in former Navy housing, which now houses many refugees from the Vietnam War. She says that the homes in Linda Vista are “painted in peeling shades of olive green, baby blue, and sun-baked yellow” (88). By contrast, the homes in the new Navy housing units in another part of Linda Vista seem to be filled with more affluent families. The children of these homes are given designations like “Most Popular, Most Beautiful, Most Likely to Succeed” (89) in school. However, the majority of students, who are Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian refugees, are not given any such positive designations in school. The children in these new Navy housing units refer to their refugee classmates as the racist, generic moniker “Yang” (89), despite these children coming from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds.
Ma says that Anh’s house reminds her of Vietnam because the blue tarp covering her backyard seems similar to the blue of the South China Sea bordering Vietnam. The Girl asks, “If the sky and sea can follow us here, why can’t people?” (89). Ma brushes off her question. Meanwhile, Ba has become a gardener and runs a business called “Tom’s Professional Gardening Service” and enlists his daughter’s help to serve as secretary for the business because she speaks English more fluently than he does. The Girl notes that their area is hot and that people often perceive the refugees’ homes as dirty. She also says that these strangers are not aware of the care that they’ve put into their homes through herb gardens filled with lemongrass or Ba’s staircase that he hand-built. She contrasts this home in Linda Vista with her previous home in the Green Apartment, which seems less welcoming with a clanging gate and steps plastered in fake grass. But what prompts them to leave the Green Apartment is the discovery that the building manager has murdered a woman. Ma does not want to live in the presence of the woman’s ghost, so they move to Linda Vista and find a community of “Vietnamese people like us, whose only sin was a little bit of gambling and sucking on fish bones and laughing hard and arguing loudly” (91).
Ma is upset with Ba for becoming drunk and gambling away their money, so she shaves her head. Ba offers her a blue baseball cap to cover her shaved head, which the Girl says Ma wears “like a real badass” (91). Some community members think Ma is crazy, but the Girl brushes off their judgments. A photo of Ma’s parents arrives from Vietnam—likely the one mentioned at the beginning of the chapter—and causes her to cry because she feels that she abandoned her parents. When Ba says that her parents forgive her, Ma tells him to remove his gangster hands. This causes Ba to become upset and punch the wall until they bleed. He yells, “Let me see the gangster! Let me see his hands!” (92). Ma throws dishes and plates out the window to relieve her anguish while the Girl gulps air in the hallway, traumatized by witnessing her parents’ turmoil. Ba sinks his bloodied hands into their home’s fish tank, gets into his car, and leaves. To stop the neighborhood children from staring at her parents’ troubling behavior, the Girl dances wildly to distract them and stares them down when they mock her. In an act of penance, Ma moves her parents symbolically into her home by placing their photo in the attic with the help of her daughter. Ba comes home drunk and rolls and cries on the rooftop, scaring the Girl. Ma gets on the rooftop with him. The Girl says, “And all night, two bodies rolled across my ceiling” (95).
An eviction notice arrives, but the family does not believe they can be kicked out of their home, so they throw it out. The notice says that the new owner of the buildings on the block intends to build new properties with higher rents that the current residents cannot afford. The owner puts up a fence, which Ba and a few uncles break through to retrieve their family’s possessions after they’ve been evicted. Ma cries and wonders why a fence is always keeping them out and making them move from place to place. Ma realizes that she has left behind the photograph of her parents and says she has “left them to die” (98). She wants to go back to the home to collect the photograph, but Ba and the uncles don’t understand. After the Girl’s home is torn down, signs are put up describing the new family homes that will occupy the block. The Girl hears someone—likely her mother—calling “Ma/Ba, Ma/Ba” like “two butterfly wings rubbing against [her] ear” (99). She imagines the photo being crushed by the wrecking ball and says that there is blood in her throat as she recites this story.
Chapter 3 Analysis
The Girl says that when she looks at the photo of her older grandparents: “I always envision a beginning. To or toward, I don’t know, but always a beginning” (78). There are many ways to interpret this statement, but one is that no matter our age, we always have the opportunity to start over and build a new future for ourselves, which reflects on the Girl’s tendency to keep running and starting over towards a new beginning throughout her adult life in later chapters.
In this chapter, the importance of facial profiles emerges, particularly in the context of Ma’s relationship with Ba and her daughter. Ma memorizes all the details of Ba’s face, which serves as “a warm companion for her body on the edge of the sea” (80) as she resides in Vietnam separated from her family. This detail will become important later on in the book when Ma stares at the Girl’s face while her father is away at war because she so closely resembles her husband whom she misses. Names also become increasingly significant in this chapter, such as when Ma utters her husband’s name after a long separation: “His name becomes a tree she presses her body against […] when she utters her own name, it is the second half of a verse that begins with his” (82). These lines also serve to illustrate how deeply in love these two are and how dependent they are on upon one another, even if that love is not always healthy. The Girl recognizes this joint nature of her parents when she says the went from being like two dogs chasing each other in their youth to “one dog, one tail” (95). She attests to the overwhelming power of her parents’ love, which is so strong that the Girl is pulled along by that love like “the silken banner on the body of a kite” (82).
Like in previous sections, metaphors serve to illustrate the cinematic quality of this book and the strong depth of characters’ emotions. We feel like we are the Girl and are better able to visualize scenes from the book to the precise language and literary metaphors, such as in this scene where the Girl imagines dead fishes after seeing her father sink his bloodied hands into their fish tank: “I am drinking up the spilt water and swallowing whole the beautiful tropical fish, their brilliant colors gliding across my tongue, before they can hit the ground, to cover themselves in dirt until only the whites of their eyes remain, blinking at the sun” (93). The Girl becomes like one of the fish, tormented by her parents’ behavior, swimming in circles and unable to “see for all the blood” (93). Related water metaphors permeate this chapter. The sea—and by extension, the color blue—serves as a reminder of Vietnam through the swimming pool and the blue tarp over Anh’s home. This sense of memory is shattered when they search for the “blue sea” in the wreckage of their home after the eviction and find a “flat world” (99) instead.
Readers also see the return of boat metaphors. Ma is abandoned alongside boats. Ba’s toes are described as like boats. Children sit a topa tube like it’s a “canopied raft” (85). These boat icons tie into the overwhelming effects of the war, which pervade this chapter and affects Ma in particular, who cries thinking of these dead bodies and feels frightened and alone in a world at war. The cruel effects of the war are succinctly summarized in this eloquent simile: “[W]ar is a bird with a broken wing flying over the countryside, trailing blood and burying crops in sorrow” (87).The trauma of war is transmitted directly to the Girl through her mother’s grief and fright, which leads Ma to state that she could have thrown the Girl against a wall so she could cough up the war that is killing them. The Girl says that her mother carries around her burdens like “invisible bundles no one but she can reveal” (96).
But the Girl recognizes that there is no end to water, which she says “crosses oceans like a splintered boat” (87) in yet another poignant boat metaphor. The war precipitates the family’s flight to America—the site of their new home despite the fact that it was America that destroyed their country. The war continues in the trauma it leaves behind in Ba, Ma, the Girl, and other refugees. This grief transfers to the Girl, who in addition to suffering from the loss of her own brother and upheaval to a new land, has to bear witness to her parents’ trauma, saying:“I breathe in the breaking and the bleeding” (93). She carries on this trauma like the waves of the sea, unable to fully break from the weight of her family as her feet carry her “to and away from, to and away from, family” (96).
She illustrates how war makes people feel helpless like children, and how parenthood disrupts the bond between our child selves and adult selves. Ma wants to hide in the tube like she did when she was a child, but her pregnant belly—the obligations of motherhood—prevents her from returning to that childlike state. Her marriage to Ba at a young age and Ma’s abandonment of her parents when she flees Vietnam also forces her prematurely into adulthood, leading Ma to call herself a “child” (92) when a photo from Vietnam reminds her of her fractured relationship with her parents. Ba’s status as a gangster from North Vietnam tears a wedge between Ma and her family, and Ma references his gangster side whenever she wants to renounce him. Ba, in turn, becomes violent, thus reinforcing the gangster perception. The Girl, witnessing his violent behavior, declares: “When I grow up, I am going to be the gangster we are all looking for” (93), suggesting that trauma and learned behavior continues on to the next generation. When the wrecking ball crushes their home and the photo of the grandparents, it symbolically severs the connection between Ma and her parents, effectively burying their relationship into the ground.
This chapter reveals what it feels like to be an immigrant or an outsider from mainstream American culture. One example is the form requiring that building residents—who are largely from Southeast Asia where fish is common in the diet—not put “fish bones” (88) in the garbage disposal. The treatment of children at school comprised of majority refugee students from southeast Asia is another example. None of these children are seen by their peers or their teachers as being equals to their non-refugee peers. Once again, like how Mr. Russell conflates the Vietnamese refugees with the Samoans in the first chapter, here, the children conflate all the Asian children under the stereotypical moniker of “Yang” (89). “Yang” functions as a racial slur here to distinguish the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian children from their non-Asian peers. These divisions also manifest in the silver fence erected to keep out the primarily Vietnamese tenants on the block in Linda Vista. It functions as a symbol of class and racial divides separating the Vietnamese refugees from the wider community, and a symbol of the forces at work that prevent people like Ma, Ba, and the Girl from having a permanent home—the American dream. There are also a few examples of how xenophobia forms within ethnic groups in Vietnam. For example, people spit at Ma and suspect the Girl is the daughter of an American soldier due to her “tall nose” (88), even though she inherited that from Ba.
The Girl also describes how their refugee status alienates them in more subtle ways, such as when she imagines that the strangers passing by their homes perceive them as dirty. Yet she challenges that xenophobia when she says that these strangers aren’t aware of their lush gardens full of herbs or the faux “Great Wall of China.” These are objects that the Girl presents with pride for her culture and the home—the community—that her people have built here in America. But then, once she has been forced to leave her home, the Girl realizes that the Great Wall is just a piece of cardboard—a flimsy defense against outside forces who would do harm to her community, like the property owners who evicted her family. This otherness also surfaces when the family must mask their Vietnamese identity in order to survive or assimilate within white America. A key example is how Ba picks a stereotypically Anglo name (Tom) for his business, puts a photo of a generic man mowing lawns on his business cards, and has his young daughter—who speaks English more fluently than Ba—to serve as his secretary. The situation also illustrates the adult roles that immigrant children often occupy for their parents in America due to cultural and language barriers that their parents face. The Girl’s strong-willed nature comes out in defense of herself and her family as well, such as when she stares at a boy mocking her “as if [her] eye is a bullet and he can be dead” (94).
Once again, colors play a role in this chapter, illustrating that all is not well in Linda Vista. There is a sense that the homes may be decrepit through the drab descriptions of brown and yellow houses, “same as ours, watching us like a sad twin” (88).Ghosts also pervade this chapter, such as the idea of the ghost of the murdered woman in the green apartment; the ghost of Ma’s parents who haunt Ma for abandoning them; and the ghost of the Girl’s brother, whose presence follows her as she walks home from the grocery store. Distance cannot stop these ghosts. When the Girl worries that she has pushed the photo of her grandparents too far out of reach in the attic, Ma says, “[S]ometimes you don’t need to see or touch people to know they’re there” (94). Her words can also refer to the Girl’s dead brother, whom she feels despite not be able to touch or see him.
