The Gangster We Are All Looking For
By Le Thi Diem Thuy
Picador $170
The gangster in Le's memoir is her father, a soldier in the South Vietnamese army. He was a Buddhist from the North who married Le's mother, a Catholic schoolgirl from the South.
Le (who will be in Hong Kong next month for the 2004 Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival) was six when she and her father escaped on a fishing boat. Mixed signals left her mother stranded on the beach. Le, her father and four men were picked up by the US Navy, but Le remembered 'the ships that kept their distance ... the people leaning over the decks ... to study us through their binoculars and not liking what they saw, turning away from our boat'.
Le and her father were deposited in a refugee centre in Singapore before being settling in San Diego. Her mother joined them two years later, resuming a tempestuous relationship with her father.
The memoir centres on the themes of remembering the old, and awakening to the new and the ghosts trapped in between. It moves between Vietnam and San Diego, between Le's childhood and troubled teenage years and between the ghettos in which they lived: 'The familiar smoke of small rooms crowded with people larger than their situation. People who, feeling they have no recourse to change the circumstances in their lives, fold down, crumble into their own shadows.'