The Gangster We Are All Looking For

by Le Thi Diem Thuy

  We live in the country of California, the province of San Diego, the village of Linda Vista. We live in old Navy Housing bungalows built in the 1940s. Since the 1980s, these bungalows house Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian refugees from the Vietnam War. When we moved in, we had to sign a form promising not to put fish bones in the garbage disposal.

  We live in a yellow house on Westinghouse Street. Our house is one story, made of wood and plaster. Between our house and another one-story house are six two-story houses. Facing our row of houses, across a field of brown dirt, sits another row of yellow houses, same as ours, watching us like a sad twin. Linda Vista is full of houses like ours, painted in peeling shades of olive green, baby blue, and sun-baked yellow.

  There’s new Navy Housing on Linda Vista Road, the long street that takes you out of here. We see the Navy people watering their lawns, their children riding pink tricycles up and down the culs-de-sac. We see them in Victory Supermarket, buying groceries with cash. In Kelley Park they have picnics and shoot each other with water guns. At school their kids are Most Popular, Most Beautiful, Most Likely to Succeed. Though there are more Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian kids at the school, in the yearbook we are not the most of anything. They call us Yang because one year a bunch of Laotian kids with the last name Yang came to our school. The Navy Housing kids started calling all the refugee kids “Yang.”

  Yang. Yang. Yang.

  Ma says living next to Anh’s family reminds her of Vietnam because the blue tarp suspended above Anh’s backyard is the bright blue of the South China Sea. Ma says, isn’t it funny how sky and sea follow you from place to place as if they too were traveling.

  Thinking of my older brother, who was still in Vietnam, I ask Ma, “If the sky and the sea can follow us here, why can’t people?”

  Ma ignores my question and says even Anh reminds her of Vietnam, the way she sets out for market each morning.

  Ba becomes a gardener. Overnight. He buys a truck full of equipment and a box of business cards from Uncle Twelve, who is moving to Texas to become a fisherman. The business cards read “Tom’s Professional Gardening Service” and have a small green picture embossed on them, a man pushing a lawn mower. The man has his back to you, so no one holding the card can tell it’s not Ba, no one who doesn’t already know. He says I can be his secretary because I speak the best English. If you call us on the business phone, you will hear me say: “Hello, you have reached Tom’s Professional Gardening Service. We are not here right now, but if you leave us a message, we will get back to you as soon as possible. Thank you.”

  It is hot and dusty where we live. Some people think it’s dirty but they don’t know much about us. They haven’t seen our gardens full of lemongrass, mint, cilantro, and basil. Driving by with their windows rolled up, they’ve only seen the pigeons pecking at day-old rice and the skinny cats and dogs sitting in the skinny shade of skinny trees. Have they seen the berries that we pick, that turn our lips and fingertips red? How about the small staircase Ba built from our bedroom window to the backyard so I would have a shortcut to the clothesline? How about the Great Wall of China that snakes like a river from the top of the steep hill off Crandall Drive to the slightly curving bottom? Who has seen this?

  It was so different at the Green Apartment. We had to close the gate behind us every time we came in. It clanged heavily, and I imagined a host of eyes, upstairs and down, staring at me from behind slightly parted curtains. There were four palm trees planted at the four corners of the courtyard and a central staircase that was narrow at the top and broad at the bottom. The steps were covered in fake grass, like the set of an old Hollywood movie, the kind that stars an aging beauty who wakes up to find something is terribly wrong.

  We moved out of the Green Apartment after we turned on the TV one night and heard that our manager and his brother had hacked a woman to pieces and dumped the parts of her body into the Pacific Ocean in ten-gallon garbage bags that washed up onshore. Ma said she didn’t want to live in a place haunted by a murdered lady. So we moved to Linda Vista, where she said there were a lot of Vietnamese people like us, people whose only sin was a little bit of gambling and sucking on fish bones and laughing hard and arguing loudly.

  Ma shaved her head in Linda Vista because she got mad at Ba for gambling away her money and getting drunk every week during Monday Night Football. Ba gave her a blue baseball cap to wear until her hair grew back and she wore it backward, like a real badass.

  After that, some people in Linda Vista said that Ma was crazy and Ba was crazy for staying with her. But what do some people know?

  When the photograph came, Ma and Ba got into a fight. Ba threw the fish tank out the front door and Ma broke all the dishes. They said they never should’ve got together.

  Ma’s sister sent her the photograph from Vietnam. It came in a stiff envelope. There was nothing else inside, as if anything more would be pointless. Ma held the photograph in her hands. She started to cry. “Child,” she sobbed, over and over again. She wasn’t talking about me. She was talking about herself.

  Ba said, “Don’t cry. Your parents have forgiven you.”

  Ma kept crying anyway and told him not to touch her with his gangster hands. Ba clenched his hands into tight fists and punched the walls.

  “What hands?! What hands?!” he yelled. “Let me see the gangster! Let me see his hands!” I see his hands punch hands punch hands punch blood.

  Ma is in the kitchen. She has torn the screen off the window. She is punctuating the pavement with dishes, plates, cups, rice bowls. She sends them out like birds gliding through the sky with nowhere in particular to go. Until they crash. Then she exhales “Huh!” in satisfaction.

  I am in the hallway gulping air. I breathe in the breaking and the bleeding. When Ba plunges his hands into the fish tank, I detect the subtle tint of blood in water. When he throws the fish tank out the front door, yelling, “Let me see the gangster!” I am drinking up the spilt water and swallowing whole the beautiful tropical fish, their brilliant colors gliding across my tongue, before they can hit the ground, to cover themselves in dirt until only the whites of their eyes remain, blinking at the sun.

  All the hands are in my throat, cutting themselves on broken dishes, and the fish swim in circles; they can’t see for all the blood.

  Ba jumps in his truck and drives away.

  When I grow up I am going to be the gangster we are all looking for.

  The neighborhood kids are standing outside our house, staring in through the windows and the open door. Even Anh, the chicken egg girl. I’m sure their gossiping mothers have sent them to spy on us. I run out front and dance like a crazy lady, dance like a fish, wiggle my head and whip my body around. At first they laugh but then they stop, not knowing what to think. Then I stop to stare them down, each one of them.

  “What’re you looking at?” I ask.

  “Lookin’ at you,” one boy says, half giggling.

  “Well,” I say, with my hand on my hip, my head cocked to one side, “I’m looking at you too,” and I give him my evil one-eyed look, focusing all my energy into my left eye. I stare at him hard as if my eye is a bullet and he can be dead.

  I turn my back on them and walk into the house.

  Ma is sitting in the window frame. The curve of her back is inside the bedroom while the rest of her body hangs outside, on the first of the steps Ba built from the bedroom to the garden. Without turning to look at me, she says, “Let me lift you into the attic.”

  “Why?”

  “We have to move your grandparents in.”

  I don’t really know what she is talking about, but I say O.K. anyway.

  We have never needed the attic for anything. In fact, we have never gone up there. When we moved my grandparents in, Ma simply lifted me up and I pushed open the attic door with one hand while, with the other, I slipped the stiff envelope with the photograph of my grandparents into the crawl space above. I pushed the envelope the length of my arm and down to my finger
tips. I pushed it so far it was beyond reach. Ma said that was all right; they had come to live with us, and sometimes you don’t need to see or touch people to know they’re there.

  Ba came home drunk that night and asked to borrow my blanket. I heard him climbing the tree in the backyard. It took him a long time. He kept missing the wooden blocks that run up the tree like a ladder. Ba had put them in himself when he built the steps going from the bedroom window into the garden. If you stood on the very top block, your whole body would be hidden by tree branches. Ba put those blocks in for me, so I could win at hide-and-go-seek.

  When Ba had finally made it onto the roof, he lay down over my room and I could hear him rolling across my ceiling. Rolling and crying. I was scared he would roll off the edge and kill himself, so I went to wake Ma.

  She was already awake. She said it would be a good thing if he rolled off. But later I heard someone climb the tree, and all night two bodies rolled across my ceiling. Slowly and firmly they pressed against my sleep, the Catholic schoolgirl and the Buddhist gangster, two dogs chasing each other’s tails. They have been running like this for so long, they have become one dog, one tail.

  Without any hair and looking like a man, my mother is still my mother, though sometimes I can’t see her even when I look and look and look so long all the colors of the world begin to swim and bob around me. Her hands always bring me up, her big peasant hands with the flat, wide nails, wide like her nose and just as expressive. I will know her by her hands and by her walk, at once slow and urgent, the walk of a woman going to market with her goods bound securely to her side. Even walking empty-handed, my mother’s gait suggests invisible bundles whose contents no one but she can reveal. And if I never see her again, I will know my mother by the smell of the sea salt and the prints of my own bare feet crossing sand, running to and away from, to and away from, family.

  When the eviction notice came, we didn’t believe it so we threw it away. It said we had a month to get out. The houses on our block had a new owner who wanted to tear everything down and build better housing for the community. It said we were priority tenants for the new complex, but we couldn’t afford to pay the new rent so it didn’t matter. The notice also said that if we didn’t get out in time, all our possessions would be confiscated in accordance with some section of a law book or manual we were supposed to have known about but had never seen. We couldn’t believe the eviction notice so we threw it away.

  The fence is tall, silver, and see-through. Chain-link, it rattles when you shake it and wobbles when you lean against it. It circles our block like a bad dream. It is not funny like the clothesline whose flying shirts and empty pants suggest human birds and vanishing acts. This fence presses sharply against your brain. We three stand still as posts. Looking at it, then at one another—this side and that—out of the corners of our eyes. What are we thinking?

  At night we come back with three uncles. Ba cuts a hole in the fence and we step through. Quiet, we break into our own house through the back window. Quiet, we steal back everything that is ours. We fill ten-gallon garbage bags with clothes, pots and pans, flip-flops, the porcelain figure of Mary, the wooden Buddha and the Chinese fisherman lamp. In the arc of our flashlights we find our favorite hairbrushes behind bedposts. When we are done, we clamber, breathless. Though it’s quiet, we can hear police cars coming to get us.

  We tumble out the window like people tumbling across continents. We are time traveling, weighed down by heavy furniture and bags of precious junk. We find ourselves leaning against Ba’s yellow truck. Ma calls his name, her voice reaching like a hand feeling for a tree trunk in darkness.

  In the car, Ma starts to cry. “What about the sea?” she asks. “What about the garden?” Ba says we can come back in the morning and dig up the stalks of lemongrass and fold the sea into a blue square. Ma is sobbing. She is beating the dashboard with her fists. “I want to know,” she says, “I want to know, I want to know … who is doing this to us?” Hiccupping she says, “I want to know, why—why there’s always a fence. Why there’s always someone on the outside wanting someone … something on the inside and between them … this … sharp fence. Why are we always leaving like this?”

  Everyone is quiet when Ma screams.

  “Take me back!” she says. “I can’t go with you. I’ve forgotten my mother and father. I can’t believe … Anh Minh, we’ve left them to die. Take me back.”

  Ma wants Ba to stop the car, but Ba doesn’t know why. The three uncles, sitting in a row in the bed of the truck, think Ma is crazy. They yell in through the rear window, “My, are you going to walk back to Vietnam?”

  “Yeah, are you going to walk home to your parents’ house?”

  In the silence another shakes his head and reaches into his shirt pocket for his cigarettes.

  Ba puts his foot on the gas pedal. Our car jerks forward, and then plunges down the Crandall Drive hill. Ma says, “I need air, water …” I roll the window down. She puts her head in her hands. She keeps crying, “Child.” Outside, I see the Great Wall of China. In the glare of the streetlamps, it is just a long strip of cardboard.

  In the morning, the world is flat. Westinghouse Street is lying down like a jagged brushstroke of sun-burnt yellow. There is a big sign within the fence that reads

  COMING SOON:

  CONDOMINIUMS

  TOWN HOUSES

  FAMILY HOMES

  Below these words is a copy of a watercolor drawing of a large pink complex.

  • • •

  We stand on the edge of the chain-link fence, sniffing the air for the scent of lemongrass, scanning this flat world for our blue sea. A wrecking ball dances madly through our house. Everything has burst wide open and sunk down low. Then I hear her calling them. She is whispering, “Ma/Ba, Ma/Ba.” The whole world is 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.

  the bones of birds

  After I had left Linda Vista, I was on the street when I ran into someone from home. I crossed the street when this man called me, called my name. I let that name fall all around me, never once sticking to me, even when he yelled, “You liar! I know it’s you.” I kept moving as the lilting syllables of my own name fell around me like licks of flame that extinguished on contact, never catching.

  It was my father who taught me how to do this, how to keep moving even when a bone in the leg was broken or a muscle in the chest was torn. Growing up, there were nights when I would hear him staggering in the alley outside my bedroom window. I listened as he tackled the air, wrestled invisible enemies to the ground, punched his own shadow. Drunkenly, he would yell, “I’m not scared! Come out and fight me. I’m here!”

  Some nights, he was so long and loud out there, the old woman upstairs would open her window and yell down, “We don’t care! Let us sleep!” My father mumbled in response a threat to kill us all with one shot. I lay in bed and pictured the lonely bullet threading its way through the entire apartment building, lifting each of us out of bed and drawing us closer in our sleep. I imagined our waking the next morning to find ourselves each pierced at the very center, our bodies pulled tightly together and suspended against the blue sky, like a string of fish Ba hoists high from one end.

  In the fall of the year I turned sixteen, I jumped out my bedroom window and ran away. The night’s black roads wound like long stretches of river. Streetlamps stood to either side and hung their heads as I ran past. Cars crouched in driveways. Garbage cans lined the edge of the sidewalks, ready for the morning pickup. Other than the sudden shriek of two cats fighting in an alley, the night was calm. I ran until I could feel my heart pounding in my throat. Then I stood in the middle of the street and listened to my breath. When I got cold, I drew my arms back through t
he sleeves of my T-shirt and wrapped them around myself for warmth. I was barefoot, empty-handed, small and light as a leaf. The streets ribboned out in all directions. I lifted one foot and then the other, ready to run down all of them.

  It was spring when the man saw me; the jacarandas bloomed, blanketing the sidewalks with small purple flowers. I felt that I had to continue running, at least through the summer. I hadn’t yet found a way to return to where my parents waited, in that house that was on fire. As it turned out, I ran past the summer and into another fall, another spring, another summer, and I kept on running.

  What season was it when I woke, in that one-room apartment, thousands of miles away from the streets where I’d grown up? It was early morning and the sun was rising. I lay in bed and listened as, four stories below me, the garbage collectors dragged the trash cans to the curb. I watched, through an open window, as the shadows of tree branches flickered across the face of the redbrick building across the street. When the sun shined directly on the bricks, they seemed to jump from the building and hang together in the air, like a red sheet, hovering. I closed my eyes and imagined running through the sheet but as I approached, the sheet became a wall of red and from somewhere deep inside it, I heard the sound of my father’s voice calling.

  • • •

  I have a black-and-white photograph of him at sixteen, in which he wears a hat of canvas camouflage cocked to one side. His expression is wary. His arms are crossed in front of him, bare and luminous, one hand balled into a fist. In this picture, what reveals him most is the will to give nothing away.

  The rumors about him are mysterious and mundane. Before he was my father, he was a skinny kid in the South Vietnamese army. He was a heroin addict. He was a gangster. He sold American cigarettes on the black market. He cruised girls. He ran away from home. He was part of a select unit trained by the Americans. He jumped out of airplanes and disappeared for weeks into the jungles and hill towns. His friends fell around him, first during the war and then after the war, but somehow he alone managed to crawl here, on his hands and knees, to this life.