The Gangster We Are All Looking For

by Le Thi Diem Thuy

  To protect myself, I tried to forget everything: that first night at the refugee camp in Singapore; those early morning walks after we arrived in America; the sound of his voice asking a question no one could answer; the shapes his fists left along a wall; the bruises that blossomed on the people around him; the smell of the fruit he brought home from the gardens he tended; the way the air seemed charged with memories of blood; the nets we fell through, faster and faster, year after year, dreaming of land.

  The only thing I couldn’t drive away was the memory of my brother, whose body lay just beyond reach, forming the shape of a distant shore.

  Before I had run away for good, my father once came to pick me up at a shelter. As we sat in a conference with two counselors, he was asked if there was anything he wanted to say. He shook his head. When pressed, he looked down at his hands. He apologized for what his hands had done. The counselors understood this to mean he was taking responsibility for his drunken rages. They nodded in approval. But then he drew his palms together and apologized for all that his hands had not been able to do. He spread his hands wide open, and said, in Vietnamese, to anyone who could understand, there were things he had lost a grasp of.

  The room seemed to shrink in the face of his sorrow. Beside him the two counselors were like tight little shrubs no one had ever watered. I thought they had no right to frown at my father. I could not wait to get us out of there. I told the counselors that I was ready to go home. I remember crossing the parking lot, my hand in my father’s hand, the two of us running to the car as though we were escaping together again.

  After I ran away, I phoned my parents only a couple of times, to let them know I was all right. The last call was from the airport, to tell them that I was moving to the East Coast to go to school. My father wasn’t home. My mother said, “The East Coast? But it’s so cold and far away.” She urged me to remain in San Diego. When I said I couldn’t, she sighed. “I don’t understand you,” she said. We were silent. I listened to her breath. Then, as if I hadn’t phoned but had walked through the front door and was now standing with her in the kitchen, Ma asked if I was hungry. The question was a familiar one; it was what my mother said in lieu of “I love you.” I told her I had to go, the plane was boarding; and would she give my regards to Ba. She said that as soon as he returned from wherever he had gone to, she would tell him that his daughter had called.

  Ba would often come to visit me in dreams. We would pick out shirts together. Feel this one, he says, brushing a soft sleeve against my cheek. In another dream, we sit across from each other at a corner table in a crowded café. By the way we’re sitting, with legs slightly apart, hands flat on our knees, torsos bent forward, and by the way we’re laughing, first with our eyes and then our heads thrown back, it is clear to everyone around us that we have become each other. I dream we live in one room. It is a small room. We share a bed. As I am lying down to sleep, he is getting ready to leave. He sits down on the edge of the bed and I know, from the weight of his body, that he is leaving forever. I pretend to be asleep so he won’t wake me to say good-bye. But because it is my dream, I see everything. He puts on one shoe and then the other, carefully tying the laces. He buttons his coat, a dark blue trench coat with epaulets that jut out. He takes his fedora off a nail on the wall, runs his fingers through his hair, and dons the hat. He picks up his keys from the bedside table and walks backward out of the room, his gaze moving from me, to the windows, the table, the floor and back to me again. He goes through the door without opening it. I remain in the room, both as the one feigning sleep and the one whose dream this is. As if from the sky of the dream, I glance at myself, then the windows, the table, the floor, and back again. I do this obsessively, pinning everything to its place.

  The nightmare of my father’s departure: Like a folding table, like a bed that jumps into the wall to be swallowed whole, I see my father’s body disappearing. His elbows drawn in toward his stomach, his back bent like a bow. One leg, then the other steps backward and is gone. His shoulder blades fold—one into the other—like a pair of rented wings. His head rolls back onto his neck and I see that his eyes, once black and brilliant, are now empty of expression, like two pieces of volcanic rock that have been drowned in a river to cool.

  The nightmare of my return: I find him sitting at the kitchen table, staring out the window. “Get up,” I say. He doesn’t answer. “Get up,” I say, again. I’ve come to fight him. He knows this and doesn’t look at me. I am furious. I can hardly stand still. He continues looking out the window and very slowly he slides his hands to the center of the table. They are covered in dirt and horribly swollen. They tremble as he lifts them from the table. It destroys me to see his hands like this. Ma enters, from another room. “I didn’t know how to find you to tell you,” she says, wringing her own hands.

  Years after I ran away, my father managed to find me. I had not dreamed the phone call. I was standing at the sink, filling a blue-striped bowl with soap and water when the phone rang. Cradling the receiver against my ear, I heard my father say my name twice and then the word “Help” in English, followed by the word “Ba” in Vietnamese.

  I turned the water off and leaned against the kitchen counter in stunned silence. Instinctively, I looked toward the window, but could not see out. The midday sun glared against the pane. I remember how dark the window frame looked against the glass, like four pieces of wood trying to hold back a fire.

  I heard my father say that he was in trouble. He said the word “trouble” in English. In Vietnamese, he asked, “Do you understand?” “Yes,” I said, and again, “Yes,” and again “Yes.” Three times, in Vietnamese.

  What shook me? Was it the sound of his voice—reedy, high and thin? Or the fact that he was pleading? And then crying?

  Or was it that I could say nothing—in any language—to make him stop.

  Between us now there hangs the familiar smoke of small rooms crowded with people larger than their situation. People who, feeling they have no recourse to change the circumstances of their lives, fold down, crumble into their own shadows. This is what I saw my father do. He made himself small, so that in the world there was very little left of him, even while within me his hunger grew. It became expansive, billowing like an abandoned parachute searching the sky for the man who has fallen.

  • • •

  I fly over the streets and the stations that we passed through. I fly over the coastline of our town in Vietnam. I see the boat pulling away from the shore. The town doesn’t vanish behind us; it merely recedes. I see us standing at the small fountain in that park in downtown San Diego. We are waiting among the sleeping homeless for the Federal Building to open so we can apply for our “papers.” My father wets his hands in the fountain and rubs the sleep out of my eyes. I fly along Orange Street, cut over to University and circle the air above the Mexican bakery. I fly over the four blossoming lemon trees my father planted in the backyard of a house in La Jolla. I fly over Westinghouse Street and see the pink condominiums with their fenced-in swimming pools built after they kicked us out of our house and tore our block down. The smell of eucalyptus draws me toward a canyon. As I alight on the soft dirt of the canyon, I catch my father dancing.

  One night, before Ma arrived, Ba took me to a party at the house of a friend of his down in Florida Canyon. Bored among the adults, I wandered outside. Slowly circling the house, I caught glimpses of the party as I passed each open window. I saw someone’s necklace on the floor. I saw my father standing alone, his body swaying slightly from side to side. He had his hands down on either side of his hips and was moving them faster and faster, like the connecting rods of a locomotive getting ready to take off. I saw a woman turn her head to look toward him. She smiled slowly. I saw him lift one foot and then the other, a soft stamping. I saw someone stand and walk toward the stereo. I heard the music go up. My father shook his head and almost laughed out loud as though he just couldn’t believe how fast he was moving now; snaking beside rivers, tunneling
through mountains, with each stamp of his foot the train whistle exclaiming, “I’m here and gone, here and gone, here and gone!”

  I looked away, distracted by the sound of something stirring in the canyon. When I turned back, I saw my father standing quite still, struggling to remain on his feet. His eyes were closed and his body, leadened by drink, twitched, as if he felt suddenly surrounded. He gulped air, and after a while it became the rhythmic hiccupping of someone who has been sobbing for hours.

  I stood outside, looking in through the open window. He looked small. I thought of the bones of birds. I thought of a prized pebble in my palm. I closed my hand into a fist and pressed it hard against my body.

  nu’ ó ’c

  My father was sitting at the kitchen table watching the evening news when the telephone began to ring. He turned up the volume on the television and focused on the images. It was summer in southern California and there were wildfires in forests and canyons across the state. He watched footage of firemen in orange suits, moving slowly and deliberately like so many lobsters, trying to hose down a flaming bank of trees. Above their heads, the sky filled with bursts of black smoke while, before them, the trees and the hill they were standing on burned calmly. Jets of water shot from the fire hoses and arced through the air. The phone continued to ring. My father picked up the remote again and changed the channel. More news. He watched footage of a flood in the middle of the country. A man and his son were traveling by canoe down the main street of their small town. The boy smiled and waved at the news cameras but the father’s expression remained grim. The story changed. Two politicians in dark suits stood on a well-lit stage, shaking hands. Like the boy in the previous story, they waved at the news cameras. Somewhere below them, an audience was applauding. The story changed. A woman wearing a blue kerchief stood in a field of green grass. My father wondered if this was Europe. The phone continued to ring. My father thought the grass looked as lush as a rice paddy. The woman pointed to the ground and said something in a language my father didn’t understand. The camera moved in closer. She continued pointing at the ground and then very slowly shook her head from side to side. For a moment, my father thought the footage was in slow motion. Then he decided, no, it was not. The phone continued to ring. He changed the channel. A baseball game: men adjusting their caps and spitting. He walked to the kitchen sink and filled a pot with water from the faucet. As he carried the water out the front door to water the potted plants on the stairs, the little dog he’d found wandering along the side of the highway last week came running out of the bedroom, and the phone stopped ringing.

  Twenty years ago, my brother’s body was pulled from the South China Sea and left lying on the beach to dry. Friends and relatives encircle him. Two young boys lean against each other, staring at my brother’s body. One of the boys scratches the ankle of his left foot with the toes of his right foot. The uncle who dragged my brother out is squatting beside the body and breathing hard, exhausted. There is a hum of indecision. No one has yet begun to cry. The moment is warped, sensuous. It hovers like summer heat.

  From down the beach, you can see my grandfather running. He approaches arms first, reaching through the circle of people to lift up my brother and carry him away. As he leaves the beach, my brother in his arms, my grandfather isn’t running but he isn’t walking either. Like a dark, wiry bird he seems to be hopping and then gliding across the hot sand. At our house he pushes open the thatched gate with the side of his foot and sends the chickens scattering. He carries my brother across the small courtyard, up the two steps, into the shade inside.

  That night, as they did every night that season, the squid boats dotted the horizon. The lights the fishermen lit to lure the squids into the nets bobbed in and out of sight, troubled beacons. I sat up in bed and looked out the window at the lights on the water. The sight of them always calmed me when I couldn’t sleep. But that night, I lay back down and stared through the mosquito netting at my brother’s body. It was like magic, how still he lay. It impressed me and I tried to lie as still as he. Women were gathered in the courtyard crying. I wished that they would be quiet and that someone would turn down the oil lamps, so my brother and I could sleep.

  In Linda Vista, my father moved up and down the steps to the apartment, watering the potted plants. There were three jasmine, a couple of pepper plants, an ornamental orange tree and a desert rose. He had planted the desert rose three years before and was happy to see it was now beginning to bud. As he watered the plants, his thoughts went back to the news. The woman standing in the field of grass—what was she shaking her head about? And why was she alone? He remembered a view of mountains in the distance behind her. He picked dead leaves from the jasmine plants. He remembered the firemen and thought about how after a fire or a flood a camera crew would follow a family as they walked through what was left of their home. Tomorrow evening’s news might show some man or woman pointing out the charred remains of a stairwell, or a hole in the ceiling, or a waterlogged floor. Occasionally, the camera lingered on the view from a window, of trees curled on the ground, their roots raised against the sky or a hillside, black and barren. It was these shots that stayed with him the longest.

  • • •

  The little dog was on the landing at the top of the stairs. It was chasing its tail and then jumping up on its hind legs. He remembered when he first saw the dog. It was early morning and he was on his way to a gardening job. As he drove along the highway, he came across a hillside covered in goldenrod and wildflowers. Dew glistened on everything so that even the ice plant looked lush, more alive.

  He was looking at the flowers, and then he saw the dog. It was one of those small, white ones that barked a lot and didn’t run very fast. It was running back and forth on the side of the road, barking at the cars as if it was protecting the entire hillside from them. He didn’t know from what direction the dog had come and but for his feeling that the dog had somehow emerged from the hillside, he might not have pulled over and called to it.

  When he walked back inside the apartment and heard the roar of a crowd, he realized—as if for the first time—how loud the television was. With his finger pressing down on the volume-lowering button, he watched two seconds of the baseball game. A ball was shooting through the air, moving at 100 mph, when he turned the TV off.

  My mother stood in the courtyard of the house in Vietnam. It was night. She was surrounded by women crying and whispering about my brother. They told my mother that my grandfather had made a terrible mistake carrying the boy into the house. They said that my brother—they called him “the boy”—was full of “bad water” and now that the water had been brought inside the house, it was too late, and if my mother wasn’t careful, they said, pointing their fingers at her, she would lose all her children to the “bad water.” “That’s enough!” my grandfather said. “Why don’t you busybodies go home?”

  It was dark but they could see him standing in the doorway, his figure lit from behind by the oil lamps on the family altar. He called for my mother to come inside. The women hushed themselves and slipped away, leaving my mother standing alone in the courtyard.

  She closed her eyes and listened as the sound of the women’s footsteps digging into the sand slowly faded. When she couldn’t hear them anymore, she turned and looked toward the house. She thought about my father who was being held in a reeducation camp. She heard a noise and her eyes darted to the thatched gate at the entrance to the courtyard. It was one of her mother’s chickens pulling on a piece of straw. Why wasn’t her husband there, impatiently pushing open the thatched gate, running across the courtyard to find her?

  She walked to the well at the side of the house and, placing her hands on its lip, she leaned forward and looked down. It was too dark to see anything. She picked up the empty water bucket and, with all her strength, threw it down into the well. She remembered how, as a girl, she liked to watch the bucket dance on the rope as it dropped into the darkness of the well. What had delighted her then
was the way the bucket hit the water, tipped over on its side, slowly filled with water until—too heavy to float—it disappeared.

  The rope went taut against her hand. It now sickened her to picture the bucket filling with water. She pressed her left leg against the well for leverage and began to pull ferociously, bringing the bucket up faster than she had ever done before. She wrapped her arms around the bucket of water and clung to it. As she lifted it the weight was comforting, but when she saw her own face reflected in the water, she immediately felt betrayed. She set the bucket down on the lip of the well, took a step back and stared at it. Then she leaned forward and, placing the palms of both her hands against the bucket, she shoved it down the well. Once it had hit the bottom and sunk, she pulled it back up again. This time, she didn’t bother to set the bucket on the lip of the well; she simply gripped it with two hands and, holding it high over the mouth of the well, she let it drop straight down. The full bucket slapped the water and as the sound of this echoed up to her, she was filled with a violent sense of pleasure. She thought the sound should never stop.

  She heard her name and turned to see her father standing in the courtyard. His arms looked impossibly long and he was holding them out toward her. She thought of how in those very arms he had carried her son home that afternoon. Was it true, what the women had said, about the boy’s body being filled with bad water? She turned to look at her father and all she could see was the image of him running, his arms empty, his hands cupped before him, spilling blood and water. She shook her head slowly from side to side trying to erase this image of him but she could not. When he called to her once more, she ran past him and into the house.