63 pages • 2 hours read
Le Thi Diem ThuyThe Gangster We Are All Looking For
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “the bones of birds”
The Girl encounters someone from her old neighborhood in Linda Vista and pretends not to know him, even when he says her name and calls her a liar. She says that her father—whom she now refers to as her father instead of Ba—taught her how to move forward even when the body is broken. Throughout the Girl’s adolescence, her father fights imaginary enemies while drunk in the alley outside her window. When a neighbor yells at him, her father threatens to kill all the residents with a single shot. The Girl imagines the bullet piercing and pulling all of them close together, “suspended against the blue sky like a string of fish Ba hoists high from one end” (101).
One chilly fall night when she is 16, the Girl runs away from home while barefoot. In the spring, she encounters the aforementioned man who recognizes her. However, she isn’t ready to return to her parents’ turbulent home, so she keeps running. She wonders what season it is when she wakes up in a one-room apartment “thousands of miles away from the streets where [she] grew up” (102). Across the street from her apartment, the sun shines on a red brick building. She hears her father’s voice calling from within it. She describes a black-and-white photograph of him looking warily toward the camera. The Girl discusses the numerous rumors about the roles her father may have occupied in the past: soldier; heroin addict; lady’s man; a runaway from home; a member of a South Vietnamese army unit trained by Americans. His friends perish in the war, but somehow, he survives and makes his way to this life.
She thinks of her father in different scenarios: wearing a fedora befitting a gangster; pointing a gun toward an unknown figure in the dark; running away from his own father; and passed out in a cold sweat. She returns to a memory from her childhood in Vietnam, where her smiling father heads off somewhere—likely to war—and she fixates on a swinging branch of coconut tree that appears to wave and sigh at her like a person. Her earliest memories are filled with images of her father leaving. People tell her she resembles him in appearance and personality, including his temper and his charm. Because of the similarities between father and daughter, her mother will closely study the Girl’s face, “as though floating just beneath [the Girl's] own gaze was the reflection of [her] father, hundreds of dark miles away” (105).
The Girl takes us back to the night her father carries her to the boat that will take her out of Vietnam. Her father is unable to go back for her mother and realizes that her voice must have been among those calling for help as they leave on the boat. This memory haunts him years after he reunites with his family. Her father works as a house painter, a welder, and then as a gardener in America. The Girl checks out books on plants for her father, and they learn about varieties of palm trees. The climate in southern California is similar to Vietnam and so similar trees like eucalyptus grow in both locations. He keeps his client’s lawns green but does not interact much with them. He carries home roses from his work and jokingly announces that he has fruits for sale. She watches her father stare deeply at spaces on walls behind her: “[H]is eyes moving like an arrow through my hair, pinning me to my place” (107). They speak in terse conversations punctuated with silence, platitudes about the weather, and questions about whether she has eaten already. The Girl goes to her room and leaves him sitting in the dark of the kitchen. When her mother returns from work, he accounts for the darkness by saying:“I lost track of the time” (108).
She returns to the night that she and her father leave Vietnam. She waits in the boat for him. He arrives and kisses her hair to comfort her even though she does not cry. The first night in the refugee camp in Singapore, she hears someone crying and realizes that the crying person is her father. She views a cloud crossing the moon and says that time has come to a stop, but then it continues “inexplicably, incredibly” (111). The next page shifts from the first-person narrative storytelling to a slightly satirical news announcement about a Vietnamese man and a girl—likely his daughter—roaming aimlessly around a grocery store and observing random objects without purchasing anything. They then leave the store. The chapter shifts back to the first-person point of view to describe how the Girl and her father walk sleeplessly around the neighborhood observing window displays during those first two years without Ma in America. They’re particularly impressed by the nicely-dressed, headless mannequins in a clothing boutique. They go to a bakery where the pastries are French, but the owner is Mexican. He listens to English tapes and practices speaking the language by saying “Hello” (112) to a bag of flour. They go to the grocery store and ride the bus to the beach, watching the empty city at 3 a.m.
Following Ma’s arrival to America and their move to Linda Vista, her father meets his closest friend, who is also a Vietnamese man. They drink beer and talk about their youthful past in Vietnam and about the war, particularly how its end felt like “waking from a long dream or a long nightmare” (113). They talk about other things in the past, such as the scent of the first rain after a period of drought or a particular fruit like dragon fruit. They also agree that the color red—possibly a representation of the bloodshed of the war—is in the past.
In the next section of the chapter, her father spells out his name—Minh–in English as he walks around the house. But the Girl notes that “before he could spell out his whole name, the letter preceding the one to appear would often be gone” (114), and he searches for the letters like a blind man unsure of the correct route. Without realizing it, her father digs a trench around a palm tree in a client’s garden. He also walks home drunk from a friend’s home. He orders himself to “Stand up straight!”(116)like a soldier. He throws items in a rage and brandishes knives before suddenly becoming still. The Girl observes her father so closely because she sees him as foreshadowing her own future. The Girl runs away, kicking down windows and doors to “get to the street, at any cost” (117). She sleeps on strangers’ lawns and rooftops. Her father sees the Girl watching her through a window and catches her by the head, asking her what she saw. The Girl tries to repress memories of everything painful, but she can’t shake the memory of her brother, “whose body lay just beyond reach, forming the shape of a distant shore” (118).
Prior to the Girl leaving home, her father gets her from a shelter where she is staying. In a session with counselors, her father apologizes not just “for what his hands had done” but what “his hands had not been able to do” (118). The counselors frown at him and the Girl thinks they have no place to judge her father, so she leaves the shelter with him. The Girl calls Ma to let her know that she is moving to the East Coast for college. Ma would like her to stay in San Diego. Ma asks if the Girl is hungry—what she says “in lieu of ‘I love you’” (119). Ba visits the Girl in her dreams. In one dream, they share a room. She pretends to be asleep, but she can tell that he is leaving forever. He sports a blue trench coat and a fedora. He disappears through a door without needing to open it. In what appears to be reality, the Girl returns to pick a fight with her father, only to find that his hands are covered in dirt and profusely swollen—presumably due to one of his rages. This sight pains the Girl. Years later, her father calls the Girl on the phone and asks for help in English followed by the word “Ba” in Vietnamese. Although she is shaken by his tearful pleas, the Girl does not know how to ease his pain. She says that people like her father “crumble into their own shadows” (122).
The Girl cycles through her memories of her past. These include visiting the Mexican bakery and the house on Westinghouse Street in Linda Vista; waiting among the homeless to apply for immigration documents; and her father dancing in a canyon as the scent of eucalyptus wafts overhead. The Girl recalls a party that her father took her to in Florida Canyon. During the party, she grows bored and walks outside, where she sees her drunken father swaying through the window. He laughs as his dance moves pick up pace. His laughter turns to sobs. The Girl thinks of the bones of birds and a “prized pebble in in [her] palm” (124). She makes her hand into a fist and presses it to her body.
Chapter 4 Analysis
In this chapter, the Girl moves from childhood to teenage years and eventually to adulthood, abandoning any pretense of childhood innocence as she seeks to escape the intergenerational trauma of her family. But they always find a way back to her, such as when her father appears in her dreams or when he unexpectedly calls her asking for help. In previous chapters, physical distance and vast tracts of sea could not prevent the Girl and her parents from remembering the everyday memories of Vietnam, the trauma of the war, and her brother’s death, which come back to haunt them. Likewise, despite traveling across the country, the Girl cannot escape the yoke of her family. She realizes that bonds don’t cease just because you live in separate places.
Like in previous chapters, names continue to haunt the Girl in “the bones of birds.”She keeps herself at bay from her own name, refusing to acknowledge the painful memories associated with it, even when a resident of her old neighborhood calls: “I let that name fall all around me, never once sticking to me. […] I kept moving as the lilting syllables of my name fell around me like licks of flame that extinguished on contact, never catching” (100). It’s a notable stylistic and symbolic literary technique on the part of the author to leave the reader in the dark about the Girl’s real name, and the reason for this will be made clear in the author’s note. The previous sentence also contains a metaphor for fire. These fiery metaphors continue even after the Girl runs away from home, when she describes the turbulent situation in her home as akin to a “house that was one fire” (103).
It’s also telling that the Girl runs away while barefoot in a sort of direct refusal to her mother’s request in a previous chapter that she put on shoes after playing outside. The Girl demarcates the passage of time by seasons. In previous chapters, she focuses on the heat of the summer. Here, she references the cold autumn night and the blooming jacarandas that indicate spring has come. And then she runs through the seasons like a blur to indicate a number of years have passed: “I ran past the summer and into another fall, another spring, another summer, and I kept running” (102). Similar to repetition of phrases like “I remember” in previous chapters, the Girl repeats in this chapter the phrase “I fly” (123) to illustrate that she is metaphorically—if not literally—flying over the memories of her family’s past. “I fly over the coastline of our town in Vietnam […] I fly over Westinghouse Street and see the pink condominiums with their fenced-in swimming pools built after they kicked us out of our house” (123).
Ba’s trauma, which is possibly an undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) due to his status as a Vietnam War veteran, becomes abundantly clear in this chapter. It is one of the primary reasons that compels the Girl to leave her parents’ house. A part of Ba is still stuck in the past as a soldier in Vietnam. The Girl observes: “I listened as he tackled the air, wrestled invisible enemies to the ground, punched his own shadow” (100). His trauma also stems from his abandonment of his wife on the beach in Vietnam, which we understand when the Girls explains: “[E]ven after our family was reunited, my father would remember those voices as a seawall between Vietnam and America or as a kind of floating net, each voice linked to the next by a knot of grief” (105).
Ba’s habit of staring at strange places off in the distance, “as though watching storm clouds gather on the horizon” (107) may also be a sign of PTSD or behavior from his days as a soldier that he is unable to relinquish. The same could be said for how he orders himself around like a soldier while drunk. The after effects of the war also manifest in the way that he instinctually digs a trench—a relic of the war—around a palm tree. They manifest in his habitual drunkenness—a way to numb the pain—and his violent outbursts. Despite her father’s assertions to his friend that the war is in the past, it is evident that it lives on his mind and actions every day. He floats in an out of consciousness of reality; Girl compares him to a train whistle saying: “I’m here and gone, here and gone!” (124). Despite his rages, the way the Girl describes him makes him seem brittle and frail—like the birds of bones, as referenced in the chapter’s title.
This chapter, more so than any other, underscores how similar the Girl is to her father—like father, like daughter. He is a runaway trying to escape his past and his family; he is “fast and light on his feet” (103) like the Girl. He combines wariness with defiance. He passes on to her his methods of coping with emotional pain, such as moving forward by ignoring the root cause of one’s trauma. These comparisons between father and daughter start in childhood, when women in the village in Vietnam tell her: “You have his eyes, his nose, his dark skin, his silence” (104). And the Girl herself closely examines her father, “certain [she] saw [her] future in him” (116), suggesting the inevitability that we will inherit our parents’ traits—including the less-than-pleasant ones.
Yet the Girl also asserts that their ways of coping with trauma differ and thus establishes that she is her own person. Whereas her father retreats inward and is unable to change his circumstances, the Girl forces a change in her situation: she runs away from anyone she could grow close to, “shattering to the bone whatever dared come too near to [her]” (117). But she and her father are still alike. Like him, she tries to forget painful memories of the past like the refugee camp; being new immigrants in America; and “the bruises that blossomed on the people” (118) who suffer from her father’s rages. This sense of distance from her past also manifests in the language shift from the personal “Ba” to the impersonal “my father” used in this chapter.
Despite the distance between them, they do momentarily bond together to defend themselves against those who would critique them, such as when the Girl leaves the judgmental counselors and holds her father’s hand, “running to the car as though [they] were escaping together again” (119). Ba and the Girl are perpetually linked by their pain, even though the Girl is at a loss as to how help her father, which pains her. Her mother is less of a presence in this chapter, but her love for her daughter manifests despite the distance—both physical and mental—between them when she asks her daughter whether she is hungry—her way of showing love. We also begin to see a growing physical and emotional distance between her parents, as her mother dismissively says that she’ll pass on her daughter’s telephone message to her husband whenever he returns from wherever he has escaped to this time.
This chapter also makes clear the separation between members of different socioeconomic and ethnic groups in America. Although her father performs work for upper-class California residents, there is no interaction between him and his clients. It is purely a transactional relationship: “So long as he kept the grass green, there was no reason for them to meet” (106).The challenges of the immigrant experience continue to play a strong role in this chapter, as her father tries with difficulty to spell out his name in English. Their experience as immigrants to America also brings occasional moments of lighthearted fun, such as when the Girl and her father delight in observing the wide array of items in a stationery store. However, the headless mannequins subtly indicate the class divisions within America by their “crisp clothes” and the Girl’s observations that they would be the kind of humans with “straight, white teeth and no bones, only muscles” (111). These are the things that money can buy in America. Another immigrant’s experience of grappling with assimilation and making it in America is evident through the example of the Mexican bakery owner, who sells French pastries and practices learning English on cassette tapes while he works. But there are limits to even the power of language, as when the Girl says of helping her father: “I could say nothing—in any language—to make him stop” (122).
Darkness also acts as a recurring motif in this chapter. It first appears when her father sits in the darkness letting the day pass by as he’s lost in his thoughts. It reappears again when the Girl describes the darkness as they set out from Vietnam on the boat. The darkness serves as a rather literal symbol of the emotional turmoil that has been cast on members of the family by the trauma induced by the war. The darkness appears a third time when the Girl realizes her father is crying and a cloud covers the moon for a moment, and she says that “time stopped” (109) before continuing. There is no going back from this moment when the trauma of the war—and the separation her family will endure—first becomes apparent to the Girl. However, the fact that she mentions that time continues on is significant. The short statement indicates that despite whatever darkness befalls her, she will continue to move forward.
