The Gangster We Are All Looking For

“‘Why white?’ Mel said, ‘It’s clean.’” 

Although Mel is talking about white paint being a clean color for a wall, he’s actually getting at something deeper that the book underscores: the meaning of whiteness in America. White is seen as the norm. By the very color of their skin, the non-white Vietnamese—who see white as a color of mourning—are shut out of that mainstream American culture and are perceived as outsiders. 

“Ba’s voice echoes from deep down like a frog singing at the bottom of a well. His voice is water moving through a reed pipe in the middle of a sad tune. And the sad voice is always asking and answering itself. It calls out and then comes running in. It is the tide of my Ba’s mind. When I listen to it, I can see boats floating around in his head. Boats full of people trying to get somewhere.” 

This is the Girl’s childlike way of describing her father’s sorrows and trauma, which manifest in his sad voice. She interprets the crowded memories of his haunted mind as akin to boats trying to get somewhere, much like the boat that they took to flee Vietnam. 

“‘If there’s no soul, how can the butterfly cry for help?’ I asked. ‘But what does crying mean in this country? Your Ba cries in the garden every night and nothing comes of it.’” 

The Girl is describing the butterfly trapped in glass, which she thinks should be freed because it has a soul and can cry for help. But the uncles whom she relates this story to are unsympathetic to the butterfly’s supposed cries. They use Ba as an example, implying that this country—the U.S.—does not care for the sorrows of Vietnamese refugees trapped in their trauma. 

“Maybe the Americans on the ship were laughing at us. Maybe that’s why it took them so long to lower the ladder. Maybe they laughed so hard at the sight of us so small, they started to roll around the deck like spilled marbles and they had to help one another to their feet and recall their own names—Emmett, Mike, Ron—and where they were from—Oakland, California; Youngstown, Ohio; Shinston, West Virginia—before they could let us climb up and say our names—Lan, Cuong, Hoang—and where we were from—Phan Thiet, Binh Thuan.”

In this passage, the Girl describes the U.S. naval officers who pick up her, Ba, and the uncles from their small boat on which they fled Vietnam. She insightfully depicts their own sense of American superiority over the Vietnamese refugees, which she surmises leads them to laugh at her and Ba.

“People look like they’re flying but in fact they’re being pulled along by invisible strings.” 

This line refers to Ma’s explanation of the actors in the Chinese movie who look like they’re flying, when really, invisible or small strings are pulling them into the air. This could be seen as a metaphor for the Girl, who wishes to exercise her free will to fly like the actors or fly like one of the birds she sees in the sky. Instead, she is being pulled along in her life by invisible forces that she does not yet understand. 

“Vietnam is a black-and-white photograph of my grandparents sitting in bamboo chairs in their front courtyard […] when I think of this portrait of my grandparents in their last years, I always envision a beginning. To or toward what, I don’t know, but always a beginning.” 

This passage can be interpreted in a variety of ways. First, the Girl remembers Vietnam primarily through the lens of whom she has left behind there, which include her grandparents. Ma gets a black-and-white photo of the Girl’s grandparents in the mail. When the Girl says that she envisions a beginning, it can perhaps mean that despite their age, there is still a chance for a new future for her grandparents—and for herself. We can always change the course of our future and chart a new beginning, despite our past.

“Over and over, she calls him to her, ‘Anh Minh, Anh Minh.’ 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.” 

Ma calls out Ba’s name after she is reunited with him following the war. The way she lovingly calls out his name shows the significance of names in creating bonds between important people in our lives. Moreover, the passage makes clear the inseparable bond between these two people. 

“‘My family’s a garden full of dreamers lying on their backs, staring at the sky, drunk and choking on their dreams.’”

Ba says this line in reference to his estranged parents and siblings. He implies that his family was comprised of impractical people who spent their lives failing in pursuit of a dream instead of waking up to reality. Due to that upbringing, by contrast, Ba is very practical, choosing modest jobs and not aiming for lofty goals in life. However, ironically, he is still stuck in dreams—or rather, nightmares—of the war in Vietnam. 

“War has no beginning and no end. It crosses oceans like a splintered boat filled with people singing a sad song.” 

After witnessing the trauma that her parents both suffer due to the war in Vietnam, the Girl understands that there is no escape from war, which can continue to haunt people across distances and across time. 

"If the sky and sea can follow us here, why can’t people?’”

The Girl asks this question of Ma, who declines to give an answer. What the Girl means by this seemingly innocent question: why can’t her brother follow them from Vietnam to the U.S.? She fails to understand that her brother has died, and that is why he cannot rejoin them in California.

“Some people think it’s dirty but they don’t know much about us. They haven’t seen our gardens full of lemongrass, mint, cilantro and basil […] How about the Great Wall of China that snakes like a river from the top of the steep hill off Crandall Drive to the slightly curving bottom? Who has seen this?” 

This quote highlights the divisions between the Vietnamese refugees and the wider American public, who often demonstrate xenophobic attitudes their immigrant neighbors on the basis of their lower-income status and ethnicity. The Girl defends her Vietnamese community by describing the care they have taken with their herb gardens and the walls they have built. 

“When I grow up I am going to be the gangster we are all looking for.” 

Ba is often described as a gangster from North Vietnam, and in some ways, he lives up to that reputation through his violent behavior. Because she is similar to her father, the Girl sees her future in Ba and believes she will grow up to be a gangster and mirror his own behavior. She later tries to escape this destiny by running away and forging her own life. 

“‘I want to know, why—why there’s always a fence. Why there’s always someone on the outside wanting someone…something on the inside and between them…this…sharp fence.’” 

Ma is upset after the family has been evicted from their house in Linda Vista, which marks yet another upheaval in the family’s life after they’ve had to move several times already. She refers to the fence put up around their former home, but what she really refers to is how there is always someone—in this case, a greedy landlord—locking them as Vietnamese refugees out of the American dream and the chance of a permanent home.  

“I hadn’t yet found a way to return to where my parents waited, in that house that was on fire. As it turned out, I ran past the summer into another fall, another spring, another summer, and I kept on running.”

After witnessing so much disturbing behavior in her parents’ home, the Girl finally decides as a teenager to flee the situation. But she is unable to bring herself to return, and so she keeps running away from them as the years go on and she becomes as an adult. Her way of coping with trauma is to run from it. 

“In this picture, what reveals him most is the will to give nothing away.” 

This is a description of a photo of Ba as a younger man. In the photo, he is wary and forms a fist with his hand. His stubborn nature and habit of isolating himself and his thoughts from the world around him manifest in this black-and-white photograph.

“Years later, even after our family was reunited, my father would remember those voices as a seawall between Vietnam and America or as a kind of floating net, each voice linked to the next by a knot of grief.” 

Ba recalls voices of countless Vietnamese individuals also trying to flee as he gets into a boat with his daughter and leaves the country. It is only after he has left that he realizes one of them is his wife, whom he has left behind. This memory haunts him even across oceans, even many years later, after he has moved to America and is reunited with his wife.

“In this way, she tried to divine all the answers to her questions about his well-being. As though floating just beneath my own gaze was the reflection of my father, hundreds of dark miles away.”

Faces are an important symbol in this book, and perhaps no more important is the Girl’s. The Girl resembles her father closely, so while her father is off at war, her mother will look into her daughter’s face and try to imagine her husband safe and sound. This physical appearance also correlates with similarities in personality between father and daughter.

“‘He couldn’t have been heavy. He was just a little boy. It was the water, wasn’t it? It was the water. The water was heavy.’”

Ma is racked with guilt and shame over the death of her son. She consoles herself by blaming the water, which she says made the boy heavy when her grandfather carried him off the beach. 

“The stillness of my body led Ba to understand that I had just lost something in the water, something I could not see much less retrieve.” 

Ba returns home in Vietnam after being released from re-education camp, but the Girl does not notice, as she is staring deep in the family well. She has lost her brother in the water—due to his drowning—and is searching for him, not fully realizing that he is no longer alive. 

“I wanted him to come back, but I too was stubborn. I hid the shells in my hand. I thought, if need be, I could wait forever. The shells were mine.” 

The Girl clutches some shells that were given to her by her grandfather—shells that her brother wanted. Although she misses her brother, she is still a stubborn little girl who wants to hold onto her shells, highlighting both the Girl’s serious side and her immature nature as a child. 

“I don’t know how time moves or which of our sorrows or our desires it is able to wash away. I return after twenty years still expecting my brother to step out of the sea.” 

The Girl here challenges the common notion that time heals all wounds, instead stating that our traumas and desires can become heightened with time. She has not fully recovered from her brother’s death, and perhaps she never will stop yearning for her older brother. 

“Like a gardener, she would feel for everything with her fingertips, sometimes caressing what her hands came across, gently shaking the soil loose from the roots, at other times pulling up in one motion what needed to be torn away.” 

Ba becomes fixated on an image of a woman he sees on television who stands in a green field while crying and pointing to the ground. Stuck in his own memories of bodies that floated in rice paddies in Vietnam during the war—and the similarities of these rice paddies to the green field of the woman—he projects his own life experiences onto that of the woman. He imagines that she is digging through the field to find these bodies, much like he digs through the soil as a gardener.

“He said the word ‘moon’ aloud, in English. Often when he said a word in English, he would think of how his daughter might say it.” 

Although father and daughter are separated after the Girl runs away, he still thinks of her. The Girl has always had excellent English-language skills and helps her parents as a child with her language abilities. Her father’s struggle to learn English has presented challenges to him as an immigrant in America, so he thinks of his daughter when trying to learn the language.