Exploring The Gangster We Are All Looking For For this reflection, respond to th

Exploring The Gangster We Are All Looking For
For this reflection, respond to the questions below. Your combined answers should total approximately 600-900 words (NOT including copied and pasted portions of this prompt). You can and should quote and paraphrase from course texts; when you do so, please be sure to use in-text citations following MLA Links to an external site.format or another recognized academic style. Of course, the words and ideas you post must be entirely your own. You must never post someone else’s words or ideas without proper citation. You should not use outside (of our course) sources for this assignment, but if you do consult ANY outside sources for ideas, you MUST cite them.
Important: You don’t need to have all the “right” answers to do well on this assignment. This is a place to try out ideas and to do your best to work through difficult texts and concepts in writing.
1. Ethnic Studies Professor Yen Lê Espiritu writes the following:
By most accounts, Vietnam was the site of one of the most brutal and destructive wars between western imperial powers and the people of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. U.S. military policies— search and destroy missions in the South, carpet bombing raids in the North, free-fire zones, and chemical defoliation— cost Vietnam at least three million lives, the maiming of countless bodies, the poisoning of its water, land, and air, the razing of its countryside, and the devastation of most of its infrastructure. Indeed, more explosives were dropped on Vietnam, a country two-thirds the size of California, than in all of World War II. Thirty years (1945-1975) of warfare destruction, coupled with another twenty years of post-war U.S. trade and aid economic embargo, shattered Vietnam’s economy and society, leaving the country among the poorest in the world and its people scattered to different corners of the globe. Yet post-1975 public discussions of the Vietnam War in the United States often skip over this devastating history. This “skipping over” of the Vietnam War constitutes an organized and strategic forgetting of a war that “went wrong,” enabling “patriotic” Americans to push military intervention as key in America’s self-appointed role as liberators—protectors of democracy, liberty and equality, both at home and abroad.
— Yen Lê Espiritu, “Thirty Years AfterWARd: The Endings that are Not Over,” Amerasia Journal 31:2 (2005): xiii-xxiii.
How do you see the novel engaging with this history of “skipping over” the war in Vietnam? Do you think the novel is participating in this public forgetting? Working against it? What aspects of the novel help you come to your answers? Be specific and include examples and evidence for your interpretation from the text.
[Your answer should be approximately 250-400 words.]
2. Viet Thanh Nguyen, a writer and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity writes the following:
I knew the fathers and mothers of my father and mother only through their photographs, in which they never smiled and posed stiffly. Visiting the homes of other Vietnamese friends, I always paused to study the photographs of their relatives, invariably captured in black and white. These photographs, emblematic of a lost time, a lost place, and, in many cases, of lost people, were universal signs of our place in the world as refugees, found in every household as keepsakes of memory, hallowed signs of our haunting by the past. Photographs are the secular imprints of ghosts, the most visible sign of their aura, and the closest many in the world of refugees could come to living with those left behind. For many refugees, the clothes on their backs and a wallet full of photographs were all the things they carried with them on their flight. In the strange new land they found themselves, these photographs transubstantiated into symbols of the missing themselves, as in le thi diem thuy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For. The narrator’s mother keeps the only treasured photograph of her own mother and father safe in the attic. When their home is demolished to pave the way for gentrification and the family is evicted, the mother forgets to take the photograph with her in the family’s frantic attempt to rescue their belongings. Watching the destruction of her home, the mother calls out to her lost parents, “Ma/Ba.” The narrator, a child, listens to her mother’s cry and thinks of the world as “two butterfly wings rubbing against my ear. Listen . . . they are sitting in the attic, sitting like royalty. Shining in the dark, buried by a wrecking ball. Paper fragments floating across the surface of the sea. There is not a trace of blood anywhere except here, in my throat, where I am telling you all this” (le thi diem thuy 2004, 99).
— Viet Thanh Nguyen, “Speak of the Dead, Speak of Viet Nam: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Minority Discourse,” CR: The New Centennial Review 6.2 (2006) 7-37
How does this critical reflection on the importance of photography within refugee and immigrant communities add to your reading of the novel? Do you see other ways in which this theme is addressed in the novel? Be specific and include examples and evidence for your interpretation from the text.
[Your answer should be approximately 250-400 words.]
3. How does the novel revise or influence your own understanding of and relationship to the Vietnam War (or “The American War,” as it was known in Vietnam)?
[Your answer should be approximately 100-200 words.]
Here is the readings.
lê thi diem thúy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For, pages 1-95
PLEASE NOTE: If you have the Kindle version or another electronic version of the novel without page numbers, we are reading from the beginning of the novel and part way through the chapter titled “the gangster are we are all looking for” (the same as the book title), stopping before the paragraph that begins: “My first memory of my father’s face is framed by the coiling barbed wire of a military camp in South Vietnam. My mother’s voice crosses through the wire. She is whispering his name and with this utterance, caressing him.”
If you do not already have a copy, the novel can be accessed using the following links or logging in to UW Libraries. However, the online copy may not be available, as only three users can use it at once, so I strongly recommend securing your own copy. You will also need to be able to access the text during class meetings.
UPDATED UW Libraries link: https://orbiscascade-washington.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01ALLIANCE_UW/1juclfo/alma99162295860201452Links to an external site.
The license terms for this ebook allows 4 users at a time. An unlimited user ebook license for this title is not available for academic libraries to purchase.
We will also place a print copy of this book on Course Reserves for short-term checkout.
The Gangster We are All Looking For – https://archive.org/details/gangsterweareall00lcir (Links to an external site.)
READING PREP NOTES: The Gangster We Are All Looking For by Lê Thi Diem Thúy [pronounced LAY TEE YIM TWEE] is a very different kind of novel than Sula, but like Morrison’s novel, Lê’s text is full of rich, evocative, and complex symbolism and meaning that lies below the seemingly simple language and the child’s memory point-of-view that guides the narrative. The story is, in many ways, a migration narrative, the story of a girl and her family as they negotiate the massive upheaval in the aftermath of war in their homeland–and the difficult and incredible circumstances of moving to the country that has just carried out the largest bombing campaign in human history targeting your homeland. The novel is also a version of the familiar “coming of age” story we all know well, and we as readers witness formative, intimate, and powerful moments in the life of the young girl at the center of the text. And we also get access to her poetic, fragmentary, vulnerable, and often also beautiful and funny experiences of growing up through her re-membering of childhood moments.
But much of the resolution we expect from “coming of age” narratives is withheld from us, in part because of how much is not said in the course of the text. This has to do with how the novel engages memory and the challenge of memory in the face of war, trauma, loss, and dislocation. And in many ways this novel is haunted on every page by the experience of the war–the American War, as it has usually been called in Vietnam–which caused unfathomable human and ecological destruction, including the death of between 3 and 5 million people in Southeast Asia, most of them civilians. While the novel doesn’t often address the war directly, it is always present in different forms.
As you read, pay attention to the themes, motifs, and symbolsLinks to an external site. that appear again and again in the text. Here is a partial list I’ve developed with previous students:
Belonging / family / kinship / identity
Butterfly (and other creatures)
Home / nation / kinship / American(ness)
Water
Migration / war
Memory / colors (green, yellow, white, etc.)
Water (often combined with some of the above
part 2