The Gangster We Are All Looking For by Le Thi Diem Thuy and Drown by Junot Diaz are two riveting literary masterpieces that tackle the common theme of immigrants struggling to survive in America. Both books strike a chord with every refugee or settler in a foreign land who, at some point in their lives, nurture hope of achieving a sense of belonging or acceptance in the land where they have chosen to dwell and earn a living. However, in the process, they become alienated, dislocated and experience untold hardships and shattered dreams. Searching for the American dream is a recurrent theme in world literature. These two authors adopt their own impressively unique styles of presenting this theme alongside the maturation of main characters which makes them remarkable.
Both literary pieces have striking similarities hinged on how the main character gradually comes to terms with inner turmoil, angsts, and establishing an identity. The characters are presented as young and vulnerable and influenced by major forces such as family, peers, environment, and culture upon entering the brink of adulthood.
Another similarity between the books is their effective use of first-person point of view. Each title also mirrors what the corresponding main character is all fired up to do. In The Gangster We Are All Looking For, the young girl aspires to be a gangster despite domestic squabbles and her father’s weakness. On the other hand, Drown derives its name from overwhelming events that brothers in the story find themselves in as they cross over into adulthood.
In The Gangster We Are All Looking For,” Le Thi Diem Thuy seamlessly weaves the story and travails of a young girl who arrives in California with her father, whom she endearingly calls Ba, along with other Vietnamese companions. Eventually, her mother joins them, adding a pivotal part to the story. Together, they trudge along to the fast rhythm and beat of hectic working-class life in America.
“Drown” by Junot Diaz likewise presents the struggles and miseries of a fractured family still clinging to each other and nurturing hopes of finding their place in their chosen country of work and residence. The main protagonists are two young boys caught amidst childhood frolics and the throes of adolescence. They are thrust into a whirlwind of adult concerns and preoccupations as they navigate through a seedy neighborhood in the United States while facing stark realities of poverty under the supervision of their worn-out working-class mother and shadowy absentee father.
Each book indirectly critiques certain societal structures through the characters’ dialogues and observations. For instance, racial undertones are evident in The Gangster We Are All Looking For when the central character notes how all Asians in her American school are lumped together and called by one name, Yang (Thuy, 2004, p. 89). She also casually observes that young American students are often declared Most Popular,” “Most Beautiful,” or “Most Likely to Succeed,” while Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian kids at the school are not recognized as such in the yearbook (Thuy, 2004, p. 89). When the Vietnamese girl’s father asks what crying means in America and laments his family’s difficult living conditions (Thuy, 2004, p.27), he highlights their struggles as immigrants.
In both literary pieces, the hand-to-mouth existence is depicted through mothers who work tirelessly to make ends meet. The girl in The Gangster We Are All Looking For” expresses her frustration with her father’s inability to hold a steady job and her mother’s lack of fair pay (Thuy, 2004, p. 133). The reader is then presented with a heartbreaking story of a Vietnamese family who immigrated across continents only to realize that life is not necessarily better on the other side of the ocean.
In a similar fashion, the young male lead in Drawn notes how his mother works ten to twelve-hour shifts in a chocolate factory for almost no money at all (Diaz, 1996, p. 72). He also relates how his distant father lost his job but gained a new one that didn’t pay enough (Diaz, 1996, p. 173). When the boy’s father falls ill with a bad back, he laments how they demoted him to the rotating shift he’d been on during the first days of the job” (Diaz, 1996, p. 204).
Junot Diaz lucidly presents the vicious cycle of poverty as seen through the eyes of a boy and his immediate family who must deal with thankless professions and the sordid reality that nothing comes easy to struggling poor people – especially when they are in alien territory. He paints a gloomy work life scenario for immigrants in the US based on his own experiences.
In terms of plot, the immigrant experience is expressed in two totally different writing styles. While Le Thi Diem Thuy presents her story in a fluid, almost poetic way with a cadence that flows from one chapter to another and literary devices such as flashbacks to juxtapose cultures and family relations in two distinct countries, Junot Diaz expounds on story fragments with eloquent storytelling ease. In both cases, readers are able to easily follow and get into the character’s frame of thought and reference because they seem to leap out from the pages of the book, reminding us of somebody we know or have heard about.
Both literary pieces make rich use of figurative language, such as similes, metaphors, allusions, and symbolism. Both books begin with vivid imagery. In Drown, Diaz uses similes and personification to describe the immediate environment where the young protagonists live before expressing forceful dialogue about how the main characters feel about their surroundings:
It is a small house located just outside Ocoa. Rosebushes surround the yard, blazing like compass points, while mango trees spread out deep blankets of shade where we could rest and play dominos. However, the campo was nothing like our barrio in Santo Domingo. There was nothing to do or see. Rafa, who was older and expected more, woke up every morning feeling dissatisfied and irritable. He stood on the patio wearing his shorts, looking out over the mountains at the mists that gathered like water and at the brucal trees that blazed like fires on the mountain. This,” he said, “is shit.” “Worse than shit,” I replied (Diaz, 1996, p. 173).
Le Thi Diem Thuy has a lyrical style of describing everything from inanimate objects to people. Her book begins with spatial descriptions and metaphors that provide remarkable detail, almost as if watching a movie. For example, her young female lead narrates:
We entered the revolving doors of airports and boarded plane after plane. Holding on to one another, we moved through clouds, ghost vapors, and time zones. We also moved through a light rain and climbed into a car together. We were carried through unfamiliar brightly lit streets and delivered to the sidewalk in front of a darkened house. After climbing five uneven steps together in what had become pouring rain (Thuy, 2004, p. 4), we entered its door.
From the start, Le Thi Diem Thuy expresses through her character the sense of foreboding that very often accompanies the immigrant experience. While America appears as a land of promise for foreign guests, as shown by the use of the word bright,” the phrase “a darkened house” expresses the qualms of Vietnamese characters making their way to new territory. As the story progresses and the Vietnamese girl grows up, more literary devices are expertly utilized, with special focus on her kin – notably her father, grandfather, and a brother who drowned but remains very much alive in her memory. Even in its culmination, The Gangster We Are All Looking uses rich symbolism, personification and metaphors to depict nature as representations of people emerging from a long torturous search for the American dream – battered yet renewed with fresh hope. This is especially gleaned from one of the author’s most eloquent lines at novel’s conclusion: “The fish made their way toward us, turning their backs and baring their bellies to the new moon… it seemed that more they writhed; brighter they became” (Thuy 2004 p. 158).
Just as articulate in his own way, Junot Diaz employs modern conversational English and a sprinkling of Spanish words to enliven his stories. He easily lures readers, as seen in his poignant introduction to one of the stories in Drown titled Aguantando.” In this story, Diaz captures the reader’s attention while presenting the social circumstances of the main characters and setting the stage for the ensuing action. He writes:
I lived without a father for the first nine years of my life. He was working in the States, and the only way I knew him was through photographs that my mom kept in a plastic sandwich bag under her bed (Diaz, 1996, p. 189).
One quickly notes how Junot Diaz is flexible in shifting from storytelling ease to the use of blunt language that other writers may not be able to pull off with such amazing ease. He deviates from accepted norms of English grammar and style, yet still regales his audiences. For example, he lets the narrator describe vignettes of childhood: Me and Beto used to steal like mad” (Diaz, 1996, p. 97) or “When I caught Papi’s eye, he was like, No way. Don’t do it” (Diaz, 1996, p.29). Contemporary profanities are also utilized for added impact and blend well into the character and nature of the stories.
Indeed, Junot Diaz masterfully captures the moments of loneliness, pain, and rage experienced by immigrants eking out a living in a foreign land. Having experienced these feelings firsthand himself, Diaz’s writing resonates with authenticity. Hailing from Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, his background greatly influenced and set the tone for his first bestselling novel Drown. The events following his migration to the US with his mother at six years old after the demise of dictator Rafael Trujillo encapsulate this experience.
They reunited with Díaz’s father, who was working as a forklift driver in New Jersey, and settled into a working-class part of town. Díaz was a triple threat: he had a different color with a strange accent and a nerdy love of books. It was lucky that he was also tough enough to beat up anyone who got too rough. He lost himself in science fiction novels and horror books by Stephen King. Later, at Rutgers University, he took a creative writing class and decided that writing was what he wanted to do. He went on to earn his M.F.A. at Cornell University where he wrote most of his first book (Junot Diaz,” par. 3).
Given this cultural background, I am inclined to better understand the complexities of the personalities, sentiments, and outlooks of the characters woven into his stories.
Junot Diaz may have unintentionally created caricatures of himself with his lead characters. It is widely known that he lived near one of the largest landfills in the country, a mountain of garbage on fire and covered with birds (Solomita, 2003). The Drown author’s personality shines through glimpses of his main character, especially in how he was forced to let go of his innocence as he grew older (Solomita, 2003). Diaz’s traumatic family background also played a role in shaping him and found its way into his writings. His father had three families which caused Diaz’s family to sink further into poverty when they were eventually abandoned during his early teens (Jaggi, 2008).
As far as Lê Thi Diem Thuy is concerned, The Gangster We Are All Looking For” is actually her memoir. She was born in Phan Thiet, South Vietnam in 1972 during one of the fiercest wars in history. In 1978, she settled with her father in the US. Her life story can be summarized as follows:
She grew up in Linda Vista, San Diego, and her childhood there became the basis of her first book, The Gangster We Are All Looking For. She is an author and a performance artist who has been awarded a fellowship by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. (California Stories,” 2007)
Knowing this, one can appreciate coming across a gem of a book like The Gangster We Are All Looking For. It elegantly recounts the life that Lê Thi Diem Thuy has known with vivid details and rich imagery.
From describing their arrival in America and the various jobs her father took on, such as a house painter, welder, or gardener (Thuy, 2004, p. 105), to recalling her life and family back in Vietnam and even his drunken rages – Lê Thi Diem Thuy writes with poetic ease. Her elegant writing style reveals the courage and determination that she and her family had to muster to survive in America. Given the Asian cultural context, one can understand just how challenging it must have been for Le Thi Diem Thuy’s family to adapt to American life. As such, one develops a deeper appreciation for the literary masterpiece she has created.
When Le Thi Diem Thuy describes the Vietnamese girl running like a dog unleashed” (Thuy, 2004, p. 158) into the light at the end of her novel – she is effectively describing her own awakening. The use of flowing water at both ends of the novel symbolizes herself and her country.
Works Cited.
California Stories Uncovered is a collection of stories published in 2007 by The California Council for the Humanities. The anthology features various authors and can be accessed through their website, which was last visited on October 20th, 2008: http://www.calhum.org/programs/uncvrd_anthology_author_bios.htm.
Drown by Junot Diaz was published in 1996 by The Berkley Publishing Group in New York.
Jaggi, Maya. “Junot Diaz: a truly all-American writer” The Independent. 29 Feb. 2008. 20
Oct. 2008
Junot Diaz. 20 Oct. 2008
Solomita, Olga. “Swimming Lessons: Junot Diaz, Author of ‘Drown,’ Visits Cambridge Harvard Summer Academy Students.” Harvard University Gazette. 21 Aug. 2003. Retrieved on 20 Oct. 2008 from http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2003/08.21/03-junot.html.
Thuy, Le Thi Diem. The Gangster We Are All Looking For.” London: Pan Macmillan Ltd., 2004.
