The gangster we are all looking for
By: Lê Thi Diem Thúy.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf; distributed by Random House
Published: 2003
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 160
Subjects: Vietnamese American families -- Fiction; Vietnamese American children -- Fiction; Vietnamese Americans -- Fiction; Refugees -- Fiction; Girls -- Fiction; San Diego (Calif.) -- Fiction
Genres: Fiction.
Description: In 1978 six refugees-a girl, her father, and four "uncles"--Are pulled from the sea to begin a new life in San Diego. In the child's imagination, the world of itchy dresses and run-down apartments is transmuted into an unearthly realm: she sees everything intensely, hears the distress calls of inanimate objects and waits for her mother to join her. But life loses none of its strangeness when the family is reunited. as the girl grows, her matter-of-fact innocence eddies increasingly around opaque and ghostly traumas: the cataclysm that engulfed her homeland, the memory of a brother who drowned and, most inescapable, her father's hopeless rage for a father's order.