The Gangster We Are All Looking For

The phone rings as her father watches firemen put out wildfires on the television screen. The phone keeps ringing as he watches scenes from a flood. Then he watches two politicians shaking hands. And then a scene of a woman wearing a blue kerchief and standing in a green field emerges. She speaks in a foreign language, points to the ground, and slowly shakes her head. The phone keeps ringing. He waters the potted plants on the stairs and a dog that he rescued from the side of the highway comes running out. The phone stops ringing.

The story abruptly shifts to state that the body of the Girl’s brother was pulled from the South China Sea 20 years ago. The body lies on the beach afterward, surrounded by friends and family. She says the moment is warped and lingers like “summer heat” (127). Her grandfather appears on the beach and picks up her brother. He carries her brother across the courtyard and into the house. That night, the Girl spots the lights on the fishermen’s squid boats as they float at sea, which calm her when she has trouble sleeping. She looks at her brother’s body and wishes that the women in the courtyard would stop crying and turn off the oil lamps so she and her brother can sleep.

We return to Linda Vista, where the Girl describes her father watering potted plants like desert rose on the steps of the apartment. The father thinks back on the television images of the charred remains of people’s homes from the fires and the woman in the field of grass, wondering what she was looking at. Meanwhile, the dog chases its tail on the steps. He recalls seeing a white dog by barking by a hillside as if protecting it, which compels him to take the animal home. He re-enters the apartment and finally realizes the intensity of the volume of the television, so he turns it down.

The Girl shifts back to Vietnam, where her mother is surrounded by women who tell her that her dead son is filled with “bad water” (131) and she may lose all her children to that same fate because the bad water has been brought inside the house. Her mother thinks of her husband who is in a reeducation camp for Vietnamese soldiers that fought for the Americans. She goes to the well in the courtyard. She sees her reflection in the bucket of water, grows upset, and pushes it back into the well. The sound of the bucket hitting the water fills her with “a violent sense of pleasure” (131), as if she is punishing the water for hurting her son. Her father—the Girl’s grandfather—reaches out to embrace her, but she imagines blood and water rushing out from his hands and she runs past him.

The Girl’s father sits on a bed in San Diego. He’ll head to the Vietnamese restaurant at midnight where his wife works to pick her up. He thinks the restaurant overcharges for bowls of pho—a type of Vietnamese soup—for American customers. He also thinks his wife is underpaid. His wife wants her own restaurant, but they can’t afford that. He offers her to work as a gardener with him, but she says, “You’re very particular. I would be afraid of watering the plants wrong” (133). Nonetheless, he pictures them gardening in old age in a town in Vietnam far from the sea.

The narrative flashes back in time in Vietnam. The women who warned about the bad water return to pray for the dead child while chickens strut behind them. The Girl’s brother lies on a straw mat in the house. She thinks her grandfather might tell her brother to get up, but he does not. She and her grandfather play a game where he pretends to pluck a star from the sky and place it in her palm. The Girl throws the pretend star toward her brother in hopes that it will make him move.

The narrative returns to the Girl's father lying in bed in Linda Vista while the phone rings and the dog jumps. He focuses on the dog and ignores the fact that “someone was calling for him” (135). The next scene flashes back to Vietnam, where the Girl's mother tries to persuade a Vietnamese soldier to allow her husband to return for the funeral. The soldier is unsympathetic as he observes her mother crying. He hears the anger in her voice when she tells him to leave. Shifting back to the Girl’s father, we learn that he avoids the calls because he fears it is his estranged father calling from Vietnam.

Back in Vietnam, her mother argues with the Girl’s grandfather about his decision to bring the boy into the house. She asks the Girl’s grandfather if the body was heavy. She guesses that the water was heavy and made the boy so. In Linda Vista, her father ignores the phone ringing by going fishing, even though signs state that it is illegal to fish there. He says that if the police come by, he’ll pretend not to understand English. He reflects on how he came to the U.S. more than twenty years ago and had hardly left the city of San Diego since. He contrasts the bright lights of the city with the dark water at his feet.

In Vietnam, the narrative depicts the funeral of the dead son from the perspective of the child himself. He laughs at the funeral activities like people dressed in white—a color for mourning in Vietnam—and at the incense blowing everywhere. He sees his sister trying to squirm away from his mother, who clutches her daughter’s hand. His sister just wants to find her brother, who she thinks is hiding behind a tombstone.

Switching to her father in California, the Girl describes her father driving and seeing homeless people. He picks up her mother as she stands by a stop sign and considers stepping into the light illuminated by a lamppost. We learn about how her father was dropped off at the side of a highway upon release from the re-education camp. He walks to his in-laws’ home. He wishes he could shed his clothes along with “the entire war […] like a useless skin” (144). He reminds himself that his son is dead and that he should not blame the sea. He arrives at the house, where Ma is astonished to see him. Meanwhile, the Girl peers intently into the well, looking for something that she has lost. Back in California, her mother asks her father if he is okay since he bears a troubled expression on his face. She closes her eyes in the car—not to nap, but to avoid her husband’s strange expression.

In Vietnam, the Girl hears women gossip about how the Girl’s brother died. He jumped between boats and likely slipped and hit his head, falling into a watery hole. In her imagination, the hole becomes an underwater house like theirs, except with fish instead of chicken. She says that her brother became “as smooth and brilliant as polished bone” (146) like the sea shells that her grandfather gave her—shells which her brother wanted. She says her brother glows underwater and that “his light would only shine brighter” (146) with time. She wants her brother to return, but will hold onto the shells and says, “I could wait forever” (146).

In California, her mother says that apartment living is like living in a village with its shared spaces and everyone knowing each other’s business. The people in the building know that her parents have a daughter who writes stories on the East Coast. They imagine that she speaks English well. While the Girl stops looking for her brother, she still imagines him next to her and dancing with her in courtyards in Vietnam. But when they go to America, she imagines that she’s left him behind with her grandfather and that both have them fallen into deep sleep for years in a house now covered with branches.

In the apartment, her mother turns on the lights and makes tea. Her father watches television with the sound off, strains the tea into glasses, and pours water into the dog’s bowl. The Girl reflects on the items that her mother sends home to Vietnam when they first move to America: money, soaps, shampoos, and cloth. She does this so that relatives back home can sell items on the black market that emerges in Vietnam after the war. But the Girl imagines her aunts back in Vietnam using the money to get horsemen who can tear through the branches around her family’s home and wake up her brother and grandfather. She imagines herself guarding this house and protecting them.

Back in California, her mother asks her father what happened in the news. Her father thinks back on the women with the kerchief in the green field that he compares to a rice paddy in Vietnam. He thinks that the woman was pointing to bodies buried underneath the field, and that’s why she was crying. However, her father only tells her mother about the weather. He jokes that the San Diego mayor will honor all Vietnamese women in Linda Vista who are married to gardeners. She laughs at his joke, calls him by his name, and kisses him.

The Girl returns to her old home in Vietnam as an adult and sees that no branches cover it as she imagined. However, despite knowing as an adult that her brother is dead, she still half-believes that he will reappear alongside her, as she has always felt him to be there. She heads to the town’s beach and watches schoolboys play soccer. When she is unable to sleep that night, she returns to the beach and swims straight out as far as she can go.

In California, the Girl's father is also unable to sleep and gets a glass of water while looking at the moon. He thinks about his wife being on her feet all day long and recalls a poem he once recited to her, which says that a man would “pull the moon out of the sky and turn it into a pool” (156) so that the woman he loves could wash her feet. He thinks about the woman in the green field, and imagines that she, like a gardener, will not be at ease until she has dug up the field. The field reminds him of bodies floating in rice paddies in Vietnam.

In the final scene of the chapter, the narrative shifts to the family’s first spring together in California. Ba drives the family to the beach at night. The sea appears dark, but after the crash of each wave, flickers of light emerge onto the beach. The lights turn out to be small silver fish. The father points to the fish “as if [they] knew them” (158). The Girl states what they all remember from the scene by reciting one line from her mother’s point of view, one from her father’s point of view, and one line from her point of view. Then she runs off “like a dog unleashed, toward the lights” (158).