a book
The Gangster We Are All Looking For
lê thị diễm thúy · 2004 · 176 pages
The highly acclaimed novel that reveals the life of a Vietnamese family in America through the knowing eyes of a child finding her place and voice in a new country.
“A brilliant evocation of human sorrow and desire.... Heartbreaking and exhilarating.” —The New York Times Book Review
In 1978 six refugees—a girl, her father, and four “uncles”—are pulled from the sea to begin a new life in San Diego. In the child’s imagination, the world is transmuted into an unearthly realm: she sees everything intensely, hears the distress calls of inanimate objects, and waits for her mother to join her. But life loses none of its strangeness when the family is reunited. As the girl grows, her matter-of-fact innocence eddies increasingly around opaque and ghostly traumas: the cataclysm that engulfed her homeland, the memory of a brother who drowned and, most inescapable, her father’s hopeless rage.
“A brilliant evocation of human sorrow and desire.... Heartbreaking and exhilarating.” —The New York Times Book Review
In 1978 six refugees—a girl, her father, and four “uncles”—are pulled from the sea to begin a new life in San Diego. In the child’s imagination, the world is transmuted into an unearthly realm: she sees everything intensely, hears the distress calls of inanimate objects, and waits for her mother to join her. But life loses none of its strangeness when the family is reunited. As the girl grows, her matter-of-fact innocence eddies increasingly around opaque and ghostly traumas: the cataclysm that engulfed her homeland, the memory of a brother who drowned and, most inescapable, her father’s hopeless rage.
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Ocean Vuong
“A truly innovative book that centralizes oscillation and destabilization as a mode of inquiry and storytelling. Moving through multiple points of view, voices and non-linear time, thúy builds a narrative that feels, at times, more like landscape art than writing—all to a tremendous embodied effect. This book was so important to my education as a novelist because it shows how easily writers of color can be relegated incomprehensible if they choose to enlist unconventional, non-canonical models to work from.”↗