The Gangster We Are All Looking For

by Le Thi Diem Thuy

  In my imagination, the hole became a room and the room was in a house, a house exactly like the one I was lying in, playing with shells my grandfather had given me, except that it was underwater. It was darker in my brother’s house than it was in mine—and colder—and fish instead of chickens crowded the courtyard.

  As the women continued talking about “the boy” and “the bad water,” I saw my brother rolling and turning with the tides. I knew him. He was stubborn. I knew that he would continue to do this: he would roll and turn, until, like the shells my grandfather had given me, shells my brother had wanted for himself, shells that had been stripped by the sea of all their markings, his body became as smooth and brilliant as polished bone.

  My brother floated across his underwater courtyard, glowing, knowing that in time he would not fade at all; he would only shine brighter.

  I wanted him to come back, but I too was stubborn. I hid the shells in my hand. I thought, if need be, I could wait forever. The shells were mine.

  • • •

  My father parked the truck outside the apartment building. The little white dog started barking as soon as it heard them pull up. As my parents climbed the stairs to their apartment, they heard the tailor’s husband in the apartment below mumbling about how noisy the neighborhood had gotten.

  My mother felt that living in the building was like living in a village. People communicated to each other by standing at their windows or doorways and talking out loud. When they met in the courtyard or at the local Vietnamese supermarket, they never mentioned anything they’d said or heard. My parents knew that until being told, both the tailor and her husband would pretend not to know my parents had gotten a little white dog. An old woman living alone in the downstairs corner apartment liked to sit at her window and complain about her grown children. They came to visit only once or twice a week. They didn’t bother to take off their shoes when they came in. Their children ran around and spoke only English. They talked to her as if she were old and blind but she could see that her daughter-in-law wore too much makeup. A young man living alone in one of the center apartments had started a small herb garden in a long rectangular planter outside his kitchen window. After work, he liked to talk to his girlfriend on the cordless phone while he watered the plants. No one in the building had ever seen the girlfriend and once a neighbor standing at the window had shouted down to him, “How come she never visits?” The young man cradled the phone against his ear, held the water hose with one hand and waved the question away with the other.

  It was known that my parents had a daughter who lived on the East Coast, somewhere near New York. Some people heard that she had run away and some people heard that she had simply gone away. That was many years ago and now the rumor was she was writing stories. No one had read them and no one had met her. They imagined that her English was very good.

  When I stopped looking for my brother, I began to feel that he was right beside me. So close, I couldn’t see him. I imagined everything that was happening to me was also happening to him. When I had a rotten tooth, he had a rotten tooth. When I made friends with a stray dog, my brother approved. When I took naps with our grandfather, holding on to his right arm, my brother held on to his left one. When I walked with my mother to the market, my brother ran ahead of us, weaving his way through the crowd. When my father sang at night and I danced in the courtyard, my mother said, “Stop dancing with your shadow.” But I was dancing with my brother.

  Everywhere I went in our town my brother went with me, but when I left for America, I left him sleeping with my grandfather on the low wooden bed by the window. Years passed and my grandfather’s arms grew into sinuous vines, wrapping the house in leaves and brambles. Inside the house, my brother and my grandfather fell into a deep sleep.

  Outside the thatched gate of our house in Vietnam, life went on. Up and down the street, the women laid out trays of small silver fish to dry. The bodies of the fish glinted like small broken mirrors. At night, the squid boats dotted the horizon. In the morning, the women carried the fishermen’s catch to the market. In the spring, firecrackers were lit to celebrate the New Year. When the rains came, the cyclo drivers pedaled laboriously through the mud. Schoolboys played soccer on the town beach in the late afternoons while a young girl made her way between the bathers, offering small bags of boiled peanuts to anyone who would buy them.

  My mother walked through the apartment, turning all the lights on. Though it was now a quarter to one in the morning, after a long night of cooking at the restaurant, she didn’t feel like going to sleep. She walked into the bedroom and put her pocketbook away, under the mattress. My father turned on the television in the living room and followed my mother into the bedroom. The little dog followed my father. My mother came out of the bedroom, turned the television off, and walked into the kitchen. She filled a small pot with water and put it on the stove to boil. She chopped some ginger and threw it in the pot to simmer. Her stomach felt jumpy and she thought the ginger tea might help. My father came out of the bedroom wearing his sleeping clothes: a San Diego Chargers T-shirt and loose sweatpants. He turned on the television and walked into the kitchen. “Are you making tea?” he asked. My mother nodded, walking by him on her way into the bedroom.

  While she showered, he watched the television. The sound was off but it didn’t matter; a weather map was on the monitor. First it showed their region, and then it showed the entire country. “Sunshine,” my father said, out loud. Then, reading off the monitor, “Highs. Lows.” When he heard the shower turn off, he walked into the kitchen and strained the tea into two glasses. The little dog ran through the kitchen, out to the patio. My father filled a glass with water and poured it into the dog’s water bowl.

  In the bedroom, my mother put on the slip-dress she liked to sleep in. It was cream-colored with a blue trim around the hem. She had bought the dress at a department store in Tijuana years ago. At the border crossing on the way back to the U.S., she used the dress to cover some mangoes she had hidden at the bottom of her purse. When they got home that day, and she pulled the dress out of her purse, it smelled of mangoes. She told my father and he raised his eyebrows and said, “What a delicious dress!”

  My mother sat on the edge of the bed and combed her hair. She heard my father turning out the lights in the other rooms. She put the comb down on the dresser and climbed into bed.

  When we first came to America, my mother used to save money and send it home to her family in Vietnam. She’d roll the bills in squares of tinfoil and hide them in tubes of toothpaste. Along with the money, she sent home soaps, headache tablets, asthma pumps, bolts of cloth, shampoos and conditioners. She explained to me that times were hard “over there”; my aunts could sell the goods on the black market to get some extra money.

  I imagined my aunts using all the money to hire horsemen who they hoped could charge the thatched gate and tear through the bramble to wake my grandfather and my brother. Team after team of horsemen had attempted the journey but none had made it past the gate that I, sitting an ocean away, guarded so closely. Chickens and roosters, stray dogs and the stench of dried fish did my bidding; in my absence, they kept the horsemen back.

  • • •

  My father walked into the bedroom carrying a glass of ginger tea in each hand. He handed the glasses to my mother and got into bed beside her. They sat up in bed sipping their tea and talking. She asked him what he’d done that day. He said, “Not much, actually. I mostly watched the news.” “What was in the news?” she asked.

  What immediately came to mind was the image of the woman in the blue kerchief, standing in the field of green grass. He had considered that image all day and it had taken him the entire day to understand that the woman had been crying. Every time the camera came back to her, she shook her head and pointed to the ground. When the camera shot the ground, all he had seen was a lush field. As lush as a rice paddy, he remembered thinking. Now he had a feeling that the woman was pointing to bodies, unseen bodie
s, under the grass. As she directed the eye of the camera back to the grass, she kept crying because of what it could not see and what she could not stop seeing.

  My father turned to my mother and instead of telling her about the woman, he talked about the weather. He said, “There was a wildfire outside L.A. and a flood in the middle of the country.” “What else?” my mother asked. “I don’t know,” my father said. “I turned the sound off after that.” She looked disappointed so he said, “I know that tomorrow a Santa Ana blowing in from the desert will bring snow showers.” She smiled. “Tomorrow the mayor honors all Vietnamese women in the San Diego area, especially the Vietnamese women living in the neighborhood of Linda Vista who also happen to be married to gardeners.” “That’s everyone!” she said. “In celebration,” my father continued, “the mayor says, ‘Free pho for everyone!’ ” “And who will cook it?” my mother asked. “I guess the gardeners,” my father said.

  My mother laughed. She said, “Anh …” and kissed my father goodnight.

  When I approached the entrance to my childhood home, there were no brambles to step around or tangled vines to cut through. There was no longer a thatched gate to push open or chickens to keep inside. I crossed the heat of the courtyard. A dog that had recently given birth to sand-colored puppies eyed me suspiciously from a corner of the front porch. I climbed the two steps leading up to the house. At the doorway, I took off my shoes. When I stepped into the shade of the inside, the coolness of the tile floor against my bare foot was like stepping into a pool of water.

  • • •

  I don’t know how time moves or which of our sorrows or our desires it is able to wash away. I return after twenty years still expecting my brother to step out of the sea. Though I’m taken to the cemetery the first day back, no part of me believes he is actually beneath the light blue plaster headstone. His name, the years of his birth and his death, all etched in red, do not identify him to me in any way. Walking along the streets and among the market stalls, I half expect to turn and find him, a young man moving along beside me, someone whose face I may no longer recognize but whose body my body will recall.

  I can’t sleep. If he was here, I’d press my head against his belly, the two of us like dogs sleeping through the heat of midday.

  I went to the town beach. In the early morning, the water was calm. I could stand in it up to my shoulders and lay my palms on the surface to feel the sea rippling beneath my fingertips like the fabric of a shawl. In the late afternoon, the wind picked up, drawing gusts of sand down the beach, like a transparent curtain behind which the waves were wildly dancing.

  I sat and watched as the schoolboys kicked their soccer ball from one end of the beach to the other. Sometimes the ball rolled so languidly, it seemed there was no goal to the game, but then the ball would be driven in just a few seconds, in a direct line, down the beach, or kicked so high into the air that when it landed, it made a hard sound, as of something heavy having fallen.

  Waking in a sweat in the middle of the night and unable to fall back to sleep, I left the house and walked down to the water. With the squid boats bobbing in the distance before me and the sleeping town at my back, I swam straight out, as fast and as far as I could go, my body rocking from side to side, my arms arcing through the air, my hands cutting into the dark water.

  My father glanced over at the clock on the dresser—4:35. Beside him, my mother was fast asleep. He hadn’t been able to sleep for the past couple of hours, had been trying to lie as still as possible so as not to disturb her, but now he decided to get up. Slowly, he turned onto his side and rolled out of the bed. Quietly, he left the bedroom and walked out to the living room. The little white dog was asleep on the couch. When my father walked by, it lifted its head to look but didn’t follow. He went into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water. He carried a chair out to the side porch and sat down. He drank the water and looked up at the moon. It hung like a hammock in the sky. He thought about my mother, on her feet all night. He was glad to know she was sleeping now.

  He leaned back in his chair, put his feet against the wall and thought about her feet. Lines from a poem he used to recite to her when they had first met now returned to him. In the poem, a man says that if he could marry the woman he loves, he would pull the moon out of the sky and turn it into a pool for her to wash her feet in. My father recited what he could remember of the poem quietly to himself, pleased to note how familiar it sounded, like an old song.

  He took another sip of water and sat listening to the night’s sounds. Crickets hummed under the juniper bushes on the edge of the driveway. A car with a bad ignition was chugging along Linda Vista Road. The face of the woman he’d seen on television—the one who had been pointing at the ground—came back to him. He thought about how when he had first seen the woman, standing in the field of grass, it was the color of the grass, that bright green of new spring leaves, that caught his attention. But now, when he thought of the news clip, he could see only the woman herself, shaking her head and pointing away. “Don’t look at me,” she seemed to be saying with her head and eyes and hands.

  My father thought the woman would not be able to rest until she had dug, with her own bare hands, through that field. He pictured her, on her hands and knees, slowly making her way. Like a gardener, she would feel for everything with her fingertips, sometimes caressing what her hands came across, gently shaking the soil loose from the roots, at other times pulling up in one motion what needed to be torn away.

  Thinking of the bright green field she stood in, he remembered the bodies that floated through the rice paddies during the war. All those badly buried bodies. What happened to such bodies?

  Sitting on his porch in Linda Vista he thought about loading all his gardening equipment into his truck. He would drive to wherever she was and offer her his help, his hands.

  Above him, the moon continued to cast its light. He said the word “moon” aloud, in English. Often when he said a word in English, he would think of how his daughter might say it.

  One night, during our first spring together in California, my father woke my mother and me and told us to grab our coats and put on our shoes. He wanted to show us something. When Ma reached for her pocketbook, Ba said that she wouldn’t need it, but she brought it anyway, clasping it under her arm.

  Ba drove us to the beach. We got out of the car and he led us toward the sea. At first, there seemed to be nothing but that long familiar expanse of darkness. We’d seen it before; it was the open sea, late at night, with no one around.

  As we walked toward the water, I noticed that in the silence following each wave’s crash scattered sparks of light appeared across the sand.

  The beach was covered with small silver fish whose bodies gave off a strange light. The fish made their way toward us, turning their backs and baring their bellies to the full moon. They writhed in the wet sand and it seemed that the more they writhed, the brighter they became. Up close, their little mouths moved busily, as if they could not get enough of the cool salt night air.

  Out from the darkness of the sea, wave after wave of small, luminous bodies washed to shore.

  My father turned to my mother and me and, smiling broadly, pointed at the fish, as if we knew them.

  My father remembers stroking my mother’s face.

  My mother remembers wearing my father’s coat.

  I remember taking off my sandals and digging my heels into the wet sand.

  As my parents stood on the beach leaning into each other, I ran, like a dog unleashed, toward the lights.

  author’s note

  When I was a child, I was given the formal name Trang. I had an older sister whose formal name was Thúy. At home, we were only called by our familiar/nicknames: Big Girl and Little Girl. Though it must have occurred, I have no memory of having ever been called Trang in Vietnam.

  In 1978, my father and I left Vietnam, by boat. Onboard the U.S. Navy ship that picked us up, my father incorrectly filled out the p
aperwork identifying me. He listed my name as Thúy and my date of birth as January 15, 1972. (He claims he never chose my formal name and, shrug of the shoulders, who could fault him for forgetting?) My mother arrived two years later and informed us that Ba had been wrong on both counts. She corrected my date of birth—it was now January 12, 1972—but insisted I keep the name Thúy.

  My older sister, the original Thúy, had drowned at a refugee camp in Malaysia. My mother saw my father’s mistake as propitious; it allowed a part of my older sister to come to this country with us. And so I kept my sister’s name and wore it like a borrowed garment, one in which my mother crowded two daughters, one dead and one living.

  When I decided to publish under my full name (in the Vietnamese fashion) and all in lowercase (because I prefer the way it runs), I knew that both Americans and Vietnamese may find fault with it; it is not how names go in either country. Nonetheless, it felt right to me; I had finally managed to break the name down, rebuild it and reclaim it as my own.

  acknowledgments

  Grateful acknowledgments are offered to the following:

  The Lê’s of Linda Vista—Minh, Thin, Trinh, Van, and Danny.

  Corita Brown, Tadd Fernée, Cheli Morales, and Cassidy O’Laughlin Richey—friends from the start.

  Tish Allan, Julie Fernée, Lynne Hanley, Carla Kirk-wood, and Nina Payne—for their early support and encouragement.

  Anna Grace, Margaret Kilgallen, Marjorie Gellhorn Sa’adah, and Lisa Schlesinger—for conversations along the way.

  George Andreou and Ursula Doyle—in whose capable hands I was fortunate to find myself.

  Nicole Aragi—who risked a speeding ticket to find me and then waited most patiently, and with great faith.