Evaluation of "The Gangster We Are All Looking For" Essay

Le Thi Diem Thuy in her poetic novel "The Gangster We Are All Looking For" explores the significance of trauma in the lives of Vietnamese refugees from the perspective of a naive young girl whose identity is concealed. The young girl is the narrator in the novel and is unable to fully understand death and trauma that engulfs her family and manifested through her phantom brother. However, in the course of the story, the young girl matures and she realizes the pain and the past experiences of her parent. Most importantly, her maturity helps her to comprehend her own traumas. Therefore, the essay seeks to evaluate the novel from the point of view of a young Vietnamese refugee. As a result, the evaluation leans towards a coming of age narrative the explicitly reveals how trauma is passed onto children without their knowledge.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Thuy symbolically illustrates how parents determine the life of their children. When Mrs. Russell takes the young girl and her father, Ba into the mountains, the narrator explains how she made a game of following her father's footsteps so that she could not leave her own tracks on the snow. "When I stopped and looked back in the direction we came from, I could see only my Ba's footprints and the grandmother's" (Thuy 14), the narrator explains. The visit to the mountain presents a serene moment where the scene symbolizes how the narrator's childhood is marked by her parents' paths. At the same time, the symbolism creates a clear picture of how the narrator remained ignorant of the influences the lives of her parent have on her. Since the novel tries to illustrate the difficulties refugees face while trying to assimilate into the American culture, the narrator's naivety underpins her ability to comprehend the condition of her family. When the narrator, her father and "four uncles" were rescued by the US Navy and taken to America, the young girl's mother was left behind in Vietnam. Therefore, the narrator's trauma at first is evident in the way she misses her mother as opposed to her dead brother. The brother is sporadically mentioned in the novel. The narrator introduces her brother through the sentiments " Ever since my brother left, I've had a hard time taking naps" (Thuy 20). The introduction of the brother showcases the narrator's as a naive young girl ignorant of the realities of death.

The author uses the phantom brother in the narrative to illustrate the duality of fear and how the narrator struggles to find solace in her childhood ignorance or accept the brother's death. However, during the narrator's encounter with other boys playing a war game, she acknowledges death for the first time. In the scene, she explains how the youngest boys had trouble playing dead and had to be constantly reminded they were dead. Nevertheless, there is a disconnect in the scene because the narrator plays as an adult explaining the concept of death to the young children. However, despite her newfound comprehension of death, she has an arrested development when it comes to her brother. Similarly, when the narrator and her family move to a red apartment, she sees reckless and fearless adolescent boys jumping into the pool from the second floor. The narrator felt sharp chills of fear that she imagined feeling her brother's breath on her (Thuy 75). Her fear at this point when she is a teenager is to acknowledge the fact that her brother is dead. Nevertheless, the scene dramatically shows how the narrator lives with trauma by holding onto childhood memories when her brother was alive and well.

Apart from death, the narrator faces the struggle of adapting to school life because at first, she is a stranger to her classmates. The strangeness is expressively shown by her dislike of American clothes and by excluding herself as "the only Vietnamese student in her class" (Thuy 19). The marginalization she experiences in school creates a sense of loss because wearing an American outfit does not make her American. Furthermore, the struggles and conflict the narrator experiences are traumatic because they keep occurring repetitively in her life. According to the author, the narrator loses her country due to the Vietnam War. She also lost her siblings in the treacherous escape out of Vietnam. Moreover, the family loses the first home in the US because of the obsession she develops with animals, the impact of her traumatic memories during the war. At one point in the novel, the narrator attempts to free a butterfly from its glass disk in the sense that she imagines herself as the insect that needs to be freed from her traumatic experiences. Besides, she experiences conflict due to her father's drunkenness, violence, and her mother's frequent mourning, thus losing her peace of mind.

Conclusion

In conclusion, "The Gangster We Are All Looking For" tells the story of a Vietnamese family struggling to adapt to the American culture. The novel is a narrative with intertwined memories depicted from the lens of a young girl who experiences trauma because her past life in Vietnam haunts her in America. From childhood to maturity, the narrator fully comprehends how the trauma from her parents transfers onto her. In summation, Le Thi Diem Thuy uses the fictional narrative to represent her unstable identity as a Vietnam refugee. The story is full of haunting memories and inner conflicts stemming from the war experiences. Most importantly, the narrative teaches the world that it is difficult to leave the war behind because the consequences of war follow refugees to wherever they go in search of peace, harmony, and stability. As such, the narrator pursues the path of being a writer as a way of expressing her pain, views, and emotions. Moreover, she is depicted as a person avoiding something like family confrontation, an act that makes her feel like a "gangster" hence the novel's title.

Works Cited

Le Thi Diem Thuy. The Gangster We Are All Looking For. New York: Random House, 2003. Print.