The Gangster We Are All Looking For

by Le Thi Diem Thuy

  Ba and I envied the four uncles. They were never invited to come with us on the mountain drives. They spent their Sunday afternoons walking around the neighborhood, looking for signs of other Vietnamese people. It took them a while but they finally found some other Vietnamese men at a pool hall. Every Sunday after that, they would return to the pool hall.

  While Ba and I were following the grandmother around in the snow, the uncles were smoking cigarettes, drinking iced coffee, shooting pool and learning to watch and then bet on football games with their new Vietnamese brothers. They had such a good time they wouldn’t come home until late on Sunday nights. Ba and I would wake up early on Monday mornings and find the uncles asleep on their bunk beds.

  Often they would still have their coats on and one uncle, sleeping on a top bunk, never managed to kick off both his shoes. Ba would lift me up and I would wiggle the shoe from side to side until I could pull it off the uncle’s foot. Then I would fish under the bed for the shoe that had been kicked off the night before. I would pair the shoes and leave them in the middle of the room, with their toes pointing toward the door.

  Weekday mornings, after I’d brushed my teeth and washed my face, Ba would hand me one of the pastel-colored dresses the grandmother had given me. I’d pull the itchy, rustling dress over my head and let it hang for a moment around my neck, a huge flower whose petals were bunched and whose center had been replaced by my frowning face.

  “I don’t want to wear American dresses,” I’d say to Ba.

  Ba lowered the edges of his mouth and raised his eyebrows at the same time, like a clown about to cry. He shrugged his shoulders at me and reached under the bed for my school shoes, a pair of clear plastic sandals—also from the grandmother—that let the playground pebbles get stuck between my toes every time I kicked at the dirt.

  I’d run around the room and let the dress rise up and down around my neck, like rooster feathers ruffling before a cockfight.

  “Who wants to wear American dresses? Who?” Running in small circles I’d chant a litany of “Who? Who? Who?”

  Ba would sometimes join me by standing on one leg and kicking back with the other, with his hands cupped under his armpits and his elbows jutting out like wings. Tilting his head to one side, he’d furrow his brow and chant, “Who? Who? Who?”

  “Who’s there?” one of the uncles would ask, in a sleepy voice.

  I’d run out of the room pulling the dress on in the hallway. From inside the room, I could hear Ba’s voice, reassuring. “It was only the girl, dancing.”

  “Cooing like a common pigeon,” another of the uncles would complain.

  “Every morning that girl runs around like a headless chicken,” said another.

  “Isn’t she late for school?” asked yet another.

  I’d stand in the hallway, leaning casually against the wall, my legs crossed at the ankles. After a minute, Ba would come out of the room, quietly closing the door behind him. He’d hand me my plastic sandals. I’d sit down on the floor of the hallway and slip them on. As I tightened the buckles, I could hear the uncles rolling around in their beds, groaning, trying to find the comfortable spot they’d lost upon waking.

  Ba and I would tiptoe to the front door. Mel often slept until noon, so we all had to be quiet when leaving the house.

  We’d stand on the sidewalk and Ba would comb my hair with his fingers. Then he’d pull two barrettes out of his shirt pocket, push my hair away from my eyes, and gently snap the barrettes in place.

  As we walked toward the school, he’d often tell me not to make so much noise in the morning.

  Once, he told me Mel had complained to him that he could hear me “chattering in his sleep.” When Ba told me that, I said, “Dumb birds chatter. I don’t chatter.” Ba squeezed my hand and didn’t say anything.

  A block away from my school, Ba and I would stop at a red-and-white sign on the street corner and I’d put my arm around the post. We did this every morning. Ba would stand beside me and wait while I then wrapped one leg around the post and hung my head as far as it would go to one side.

  I liked looking at things from this angle. Everything was upside down. I would look at the long gray chain-link fence that surrounded my school playground. I imagined how all the children standing with their feet pressed firmly against the ground, and their heads pointing toward the top of the chain-link fence, would slowly slip into the pale blue sky. I imagined the children floating, their dresses ballooning out around them as the wind ruffled their hair across their faces. I’d look over at Ba, also upside down, and I would imagine him floating too, with his hands folded across his chest.

  While the blood was rushing to my head, Ba was studying the letters on the sign. He practiced reading the word. He would slowly part his lips and then close them, making this sound: “Suh-top!” “Suh-top!” “Suh-top!”

  I was the only Vietnamese student at my school. On the first day of class, the teacher introduced me to the other students by holding a globe in one hand as she gave it a spin with the other, and then pointing with her finger at an S-shaped curve near a body of water.

  Was that where I had come from?

  As I stood before them in a dress the color of an Easter egg, with my feet encased in clear plastic sandals, the other students looked at the globe and then back at me again. Some whispered behind their hands. Some just stared. I imagined the stripes on my underwear flashing on and off, like traffic signals, under the dress.

  At recess that first day of school, as I stood in the shadow of a big electrical box on the edge of the playground, I missed my older brother. Could he see me standing here? Was he wondering why I wasn’t playing with the other children? Wasn’t I exactly like our limp-footed schoolmaster in Vietnam? The one who used to stand in the doorway of the schoolhouse and watch his students run up and down the beach yelling,

  “Hey! Who can run faster than me?”

  “Who can jump higher than this?”

  “Who can swim past the horizon and back before the end of recess?”

  When the loud bell rang at the end of recess the students at my American school formed a line at the edge of the blacktop. In a line, my class walked into a big room with rows of plastic green mats on the floor. The mats were in groups of two or three, separated by shelves of children’s toys. Everyone lay down on a mat with eyes shut until we were given a signal to open our eyes again.

  “Go to sleep now,” the teacher would say. “If you can’t sleep, close your eyes and try to rest. Close your eyes. That will help.”

  Ever since my brother left, I’ve had a hard time taking naps. At school in America, I lay on the green mat and stared at the white ceiling. Sometimes I would see a blond baby doll lying beside me on the shelf of toys. I would entangle my fingers in her coarse hair and lie still, listening to the other students breathe. While the doll’s blue eyes were dutifully closed behind long brown lashes, I stared at the ceiling and studied the shapes I saw there: a chair, a tree trunk, the worried face of an old man, a sliver of moon.

  I began to play with the ceiling, a game that I used to play with the sky when I was lying in the fishing boat on the sea. At that time, I thought that everyone and everything I missed was hovering behind the sky. The game involved looking for a seam to the sky, a thread I could pull. I told myself that if I could find the thread and focus on it hard enough with my eyes, I could tear the sky open and my mother, my brother, my grandfather, my flip-flops, my favorite shells, would all fall down to me.

  Before I could find the thread that would split the ceiling wide open, a student wearing a cape and holding a silver stick with a shiny star at its tip would come around to wake us. The star-holder shuffled quietly among the sleeping bodies, touching the star to one after another. The sleeping students stirred and woke. But when the star-holder came to wake me, I always sat up before he could touch me. Once, I forgot that my fingers were still entangled in the doll’s hair. As I sat up, her body jerked forward with me, knocking the plastic f
ruit off the shelf. Apples and oranges bounced onto the floor. That day, the star-holder hurried past me.

  “Shhhh!” My teacher said, pressing a long finger against her fish lips. “Shhhh!”

  Over the years, Mr. and Mrs. Russell had collected small glass figures of animals, mainly horses. The animals had skinny glass legs you could see through, as through a clean window. After Mr. Russell’s death, Mrs. Russell decided that her son Melvin should have some of these glass animals, along with a number of other things that had once belonged to his father.

  One Sunday afternoon Mel and his mother pulled up to the house and Mel called for Ba and the uncles to come out and help him. A glass display cabinet was wedged in the open trunk of Mel’s car. After directing a couple of the uncles to maneuver the cabinet carefully out of the trunk, Mel told Ba and the other uncles to get the three cardboard boxes sitting on the backseat and then he waved for everyone to follow him. With his mother holding the front door open, Mel led the uncles and Ba up the five uneven steps and into the house. They carried the cabinet and the three boxes down the long hallway and around to the back of the house, to a room that was Mel’s office. I followed behind them, my hands tucked in the back pockets of my jeans.

  Mel’s office was a small and crowded room. Half-emptied boxes lay on the floor. Shelves bowing under the weight of books and files lined the walls, and in the center of the room was a large square desk, its top covered with pens, papers, receipt books, a tray of keys and spare change. Behind the desk was a leather swivel chair.

  Mel directed the uncles to place the glass cabinet in the far corner of the room, so that while sitting at his desk, he could look up and see into the cabinet.

  As we stood watching, Mel and his mother unpacked the contents of the three cardboard boxes and placed them carefully inside the glass cabinet. First we saw five pieces of blue-and-white china. Then came some red leather-bound books. Mel spun the wheels on a toy fire truck before placing it inside the cabinet. His mother unwrapped a pipe that still had tobacco in it and handed it to Mel. Mel lay the pipe down on its side gingerly. The last to come out were the glass animals. There were about twenty of them and they were lined up in pairs, like animals in a parade.

  We were invited to look into the glass cabinet. As we stood peering in at the contents, the old woman told Mel to tell Ba to tell the four uncles and me that the things inside were not for touching.

  Ba didn’t tell us anything; he just asked us, “Do you understand?” and the four uncles and I said, “Yes.” We had all sensed that the things in the cabinet were valuable, not because they looked valuable to us but because they had been separated from the disorder of the rest of the room and the rest of the house.

  As we were leaving Mel’s office, I noticed a golden brown butterfly lying atop some papers on his desk. I reached to touch it. Instead of the powder that usually comes off of butterfly wings, my fingers brushed across cold glass. Pausing in the doorway, I glanced over my shoulder toward the desk. What was that?

  At the beginning and the end of every school day, two older students stood in the middle of the street across from the school entrance; they carried signs they crossed like sabers in battle. This meant the cars—all of them, every one of them, even the big yellow buses—had to stop so the children could cross the street to go to school or cross the street to leave school and go home, wherever home might be.

  Each afternoon I would run past the crossed signs to meet whichever uncle had come to walk me back to Mel’s house. As the uncle and I passed the red-and-white sign at which Ba and I paused every morning, I’d brush my fingers against the post and whisper, “Hi.”

  The uncle would let me into the house and I would race down the hallway to our room and change out of the itchy dress into my jeans and a T-shirt. I usually had an hour alone before Ba or one of the other uncles would come home and start dinner.

  At first I used to spend the hour coloring or studying the reading book with pictures of the boy, the girl, and their dog, Spot, who liked to chase after the bouncing ball. But after the day we had watched Mel fill his cabinet, I would sneak into Mel’s office and spend the hour visiting with the butterfly and the glass animals.

  The butterfly was golden brown and I found it lying as before inside the thick glass disk atop the stack of letters and rent receipts on Mel’s desk. When I picked up the disk, I saw that the butterfly was trapped in a pool of yellow jelly. Though I turned the glass disk around and around, I could not find the place where the butterfly had flown in or where it could push its way out again.

  I held the disk up to my ear and listened. At first all I heard was the sound of my own breathing, but then I heard a soft rustling, like wings brushing against a windowpane. The rustling was a whispered song. It was the butterfly’s way of speaking, and I thought I understood it.

  I cupped the disk in my palms and, gazing down at the butterfly, carried it over to the window overlooking the back garden. When I held it up to the sunlight, the disk glowed a dazzling yellow and at the center of the yellow was the rich earthen brown shape of the butterfly.

  I carried the disk back to the desk and put it back atop the stack of letters and rent receipts. It pressed down on the paper the same way my Ba’s heavy head pressed down on the pillow at night, full of thoughts that dragged him into nightmares when all he wanted was a dream as sweet and happy as the taste of jackfruit ice cream.

  When Ba and I lay down to sleep one night, I whispered into Ba’s ear, “I found a butterfly that has a problem.”

  “What is the problem?” Ba asked.

  “The butterfly is alive …”

  “Good,” Ba said.

  “But it’s trapped.”

  “Where?”

  “Inside a glass disk.”

  Ba said nothing.

  “But it wants to get out.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because it said this to me: ‘Shuh-shuh/shuh-shuh.’ ”

  Ba sat up, shook his heavy head back and forth and tapped on the side of one ear, then the other.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him.

  “I must get these butterfly words out of my head before they grow bigger,” Ba said, tilting his head far to one side so the words could slip out like water.

  “Ahhh …” he sighed, pulling on his earlobes, “empty of all butterflies. Now I can sleep.”

  The next morning, I went out to where the uncles were working, in a corner of the back garden. They were trimming plants, pulling up weeds, refilling the bird feeder. When one of the uncles asked me why I looked so serious, I told him that I needed his help. All the uncles stopped what they were doing and wanted to know what was wrong.

  I explained with my fingers arching and meeting in an imperfect circle that there was a butterfly trapped inside a glass disk, and that when you held the disk up to the light—my arms now reaching toward the sun—the butterfly lit up, golden brown.

  I asked the uncles to help me get the butterfly out.

  “Impossible!”

  “That butterfly got itself into a lot of trouble flying into a disk.”

  “It’s not trouble we can do much about, though.”

  “Yeah, what do we know about butterflies stuck in glass. I never saw anything like it in Vietnam.”

  “But doesn’t it sound terrible?” I asked.

  “It must be dead now, that butterfly.”

  “Can’t do much for a dead butterfly.”

  “No, I heard it rustle its wings. It wants to get out!”

  “Listen to me, little girl, no butterfly could stay alive inside a glass disk. Even if its body was alive, I’m sure that butterfly’s soul has long since flown away.”

  “Yes, that’s how I think of it also. No soul in that glass disk.”

  “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.”

  �
�Just water for Mel’s lawn.”

  “Nothing.”

  They went back to work.

  The crying butterfly had once flown, but the glass animals lined up side by side on the shelves of Mel’s display cabinet had never run anywhere. They never had thick, heavy hooves, the kind that kick up dust and leave deep prints in the muddy banks of rivers. They never kicked at anything or bit anyone, even playfully. They never rubbed their bodies against a tree trunk or rolled on the ground with their legs whipping at the air. These glass animals had legs I could see through and small glass mouths that never opened to eat or drink. They never slept. Their legs didn’t bend. Their manes were brittle. The slightest breeze would blow these glass animals onto their sides, and unless I set them right, they would remain that way forever. They were the dumbest animals I had ever met.

  When I went into Mel’s office, I would open the glass doors of the cabinet and leave them open so the animals could get some air. I always touched the animals. I carried them to the windowsill and let them sit on the sunny ledge, beside my golden butterfly. I told the glass animals stories. I told them about the pigeons that lived atop Lady Six’s house. Squatting on the floor of Mel’s office, I mimicked the way the pigeons sat on the edge of the roof, waiting to pick at the clumps of day-old rice Lady Six tossed into her courtyard. I stood and made the sound of the pigeons swooping toward the rice. I told them about the roosters that would run along the beach with me, leaving strange scratches in the wet sand. I took a pen and a piece of paper from Mel’s desk and drew the rooster alphabet for the glass animals to see. I told the animals how Ma had promised me that when I was old enough, I could take the train into the city with her and she would show me around the big market. I explained that the market was bigger than the cabinet that they lived in, bigger than Mel’s house, bigger than the back garden.