The Gangster We Are All Looking For

The Girl lists the plant life that grows in her neighborhood: palm and eucalyptus trees and white jasmine. Other girls make garlands out of the jasmine and wear them as the white flowers turn yellow with decay, but the jasmine’s fragrant scent remains. She describes the overwhelming heat of the sun during the day, which distorts various sensations. These sensations include the sound of children skipping rope, which reminds her of a broom cleaning a courtyard in another country. The reader can infer this to be Vietnam. This noise mingles with the sounds of a couple fighting. The scent of a ripe mango mingles with other odors: sweat, burning incense, clean clothes, and “apples and oranges quartered and offered, without any fuss, to both the dead and the living” (37). As day transitions to evening, the Girl—who speaks directly to the reader in the second person using the pronoun “you”—looks from the second story of her house to the swimming pool below as the memories of that day and all previous days return to her “like a school of fish” that “glide and flicker” (37) across the swimming pool.

The Girl returns to speaking in the first person through the pronouns “we” and “I.” She says the swimming pool is located in the courtyard next to the red apartment—the first home in which she, Ba, and Ma all live together in America. Ba finds the red apartment after Mel asks him and the Girl to depart his home. Ma joins them some time later. Despite not knowing how to drive, Ma grabs her pocketbook, takes Ba’s car keys one night, and hops into the Cadillac with her daughter. She crashes the car into the gate outside the red apartment. When Ba sees them, the mother defends herself, saying the “car was as big as a boat” (39). Ba returns the car to a family friend—an uncle from the previous chapter—who had originally gifted the car for Ma as a “Welcome to America” (40) present. Not knowing who broke the gates, the red apartment’s landlord develops a heightened animosity towards his tenants. The landlord spots an empty rice bag in a house on the same street. He recalls that a fire had destroyed the house, which had once been beautiful. He notes that the children in his building have taken to occupying the empty house. The landlord observes the nearby Church of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, which he compares to a castle with its looming towers. Somewhere in the red apartment, children cry and women speak “in a language the landlord didn’t understand” (42). He clears some leaves from the pool and goes to fix the washing machine.

The Girl describes her life with Ma and Ba in their one-bedroom apartment. Ma works as a seamstress from home, and Ba as a factory welder. Neither is content with their jobs. They all sleep in one room. A table with a lamp separates Ma and Ba’s bed from the Girl’s. The lamp bears a figure of a Chinese man holding a fishing pole. The Girl talks about boys in her apartment building who leap from the second floor of the building into the pool in the courtyard. Ma forbids the Girl to venture near the pool, saying that her daughter is “as small as a mouse” (44) and the pool is deep. Ma also issues warnings about the speed of cars, the dangers of sewing needles, and the sexual impulses of boys. But the Girl explains: “I wasn’t scared. I was curious” (44). She wonders what it would be like to jump as the boys do. She describes the boys’ playful antics and laughter upon diving. While her parents sleep, the Girl looks out the window and imagines fish, geckos, sand clouds, and horses. She wonders what it’s like to ride a horse.

The Girl and Ma go to the Chinese movie theater on the weekends. They watch movies with warriors who fight with swords and leap into the air. She impresses her mother by reading the violent subtitles in English. The Girl points her fingers like the warriors in the movie. Her mother cautions her, saying that her fingers will be fixed into that position if she’s not careful and “you’ll never be able to hold your chopsticks properly” (47). She compares her daughter’s chicken pox scars to diamonds and urges her to marry someone who appreciates them. The daughter says she does not want to marry and instead would like to fly like the warriors in the film. The mother says that those people are just being “pulled along by invisible strings” though perhaps they once flew “a long time ago” (48).

The Jehovah’s Witnesses come to the apartment to preach their religion. Ba tells them that they are Buddhists and shuts the door, even though Ma is a Catholic. The neighborhood children find the idyllic images of happy people in the Jehovah’s Witnesses brochures hard to believe. The children play in the castle-like structure of the Church of the Jehovah’s Witnesses by pretending to be the religious people in the brochures. The also wage fake wars and hurl cones from eucalyptus trees at one another.

Although the parents forbid their daughter from hanging out by the pool, Ma enjoys its presence because “it was nice to open the door and have some water” (51). During the evening hours, adults in the building sit on the terrace and chat about daily affairs while children—not including the Girl—play in the pool. The landlord arrives to install a new washing machine in the building when he catches a few boys jumping into the pool from a balcony. Afterward, a construction crew arrives, draining the pool of water and filling it with rocks. They plant a baby palm tree in the middle of the courtyard. Ba and Ma fight over the pool being drained; she thinks that what has replaced the water is ugly. Meanwhile, the Girl recalls vivid memories that she associates with the pool: “But what I remembered most were the boys, flying. I remembered their bodies arcing through the air and plunging down. I remembered how their hands parted the water and how as they disappeared, the last thing I would see were the pale soles of their feet” (55).

The Girl and her friend find the empty box that carried the new washing machine. They place it against a eucalyptus tree in the backyard of the abandoned house, and it becomes a new hangout spot known as “The Room.”The parents call the abandoned home “the kids’ house” (56). The Girl describes a variety of stained and destroyed furnishings in the house. She also spots photos of a couple, including a pale woman that sports red hair and looks unhealthy, although the Girl believes “her skin was probably soft to the touch” (56).

The children jump on a mattress in the house, pretending it can transport them “across oceans and into outer space” (57).Afterward, they buy candy and bike to a nearby playground. The children identify the scent of jasmine as they bike home. The Girl enters the Room alongside a boy. The boy puts his hand on her chest, and she responds by saying “Hey” (58). She touches his arm and senses goosebumps forming. The voice of a mother—not her own—calling someone’s name jolts the Girl out of the box, and she runs home with her sandals in her hand. Ma tells the Girl to wash her feet. The Girl thinks of the boy and places her fingers to her throat, imagining them as two sets of lips “feeling for a pulse” (59). At the Chinese movie theater, Ma runs into a man. Ma smiles at the man and tucks her hair behind her ear. After the man leaves, Ma explains to the Girl that he is a friend from Vietnam. The Girl asks if Ma knew the man when she was “young like me” and Ma replies, no, “a little older” (60). The Girl enters what she now calls the “kissing box” (60) with the same boy. Someone interrupts them and they leave.

The Girl witnesses Ma attempting to take off Ba’s shoes on the bed while he is drunk. Ba pulls Ma to him in a loving embrace and she laughs at him playfully. The Girl enjoys watching her fingers make shapes in the dark: a fist, a bird’s mouth, scissors, a page; a door that creaks as she closes it; running feet; and “a dive into deep water” (62). She describes the parties that a nearby uncle hosts, in which women cook, children play, and men drink. The family heads home from the party, and the car moves erratically at the curves in a road above eucalyptus trees. When the boy in the kissing room places his hand on her chest, she sees “[her] father’s car sliding down the soft wall of the canyon” (63). She stops the boy and says “Hey” (63) as she did once before. She takes his hand and brings it to rest on the features of her face. She puts her lips to his palm and notes the sweet smell of his sweat. Noting the now-filled swimming pool, the Girl asks Ma what happens when someone sinks into water and does not return. Ma responds that she does not know. The Girl traces the lines on her palms and imagines they are trenches absent of people or rivers with uncertain direction. She sometimes feels no lines and imagines her palms as a desert, separated from the sky by only open space. She desires someone who would fall into this open space of her palms.

The Girl notes the features of a roller-coaster ride called the “Super-Loop” which stops at the top of the loop and momentarily leaves its passengers hanging upside down. She observes the people on the ground below as seeming strange and the ground itself looking like a picture—not something real. She describes her parents, who “jump around the house like two firecrackers” (66) during their chaotic fights. The girl places the blame for their fights on the sweltering heat and the absence of the pool. Ma grows upset when Ba is so drunk that he cannot kiss her. When her parents fight, the Girl sinks into the bathtub and pretends she is swimming in the ocean so that she can drown out their arguments. The parents try to appease their daughter after their fights with offers of candy and oranges.

The Girl notes that her mother sported long hair when she had just come to the U.S., but she cuts her hair that summer to appear more like a modern woman. Her mother doesn’t want to be a seamstress any more. Ma sews bags of “houses, clouds, suns, trees and flowers” (68) that will be placed onto baby blankets in a factory. The Girl turns to Ba’s work as a welder of space heaters. Ma wonders how the skinny space heaters can keep people warm and ignores Ba’s explanations. Ba would prefer to be a gardener; he says that he could have “grown [them] a jungle in the courtyard” (69) in place of the palm tree.

The Girl and a friend lie in one of the towers of the Church of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. She touches her breasts, which seem small to her and merely tickle her. Her friend is indignant and describes how her breasts hurt her. The friend says that the Girl resembles a boy—a brother of the Girl. She asks the Girl: “Is it true that you had a—” (71), but the Girl does not let her finish.

One day, Ma asks the Girl to purchase ice from the store for a party. The man running the grocery store says, “Hi there” (72), and the Girl repeats back the same phrase, comparing herself to a parrot. The Girl buys the ice and carries it home. She crosses the street and yells at a bum who refuses to cross the street. She sees the name RAMONE etched into the sidewalk along with the outlines of two palm prints. The Girl suddenly has the feeling that her brother is walking behind her. She wants to ask him questions, but says that “something kept [her] from going to him” (74). The feeling of her brother turns from warm to cold and becomes frightening. She runs home. The Girl tells her mother that she wanted to go to her brother, but her mother cuts her off and tells her to “Stop!” (76). When the father lifts the bag of ice from her arms, she sees that it has made her shirt wet and she can see the outline of her breasts, which now appear bigger, like “two fists full of sand” (76).The chapter concludes with the Girl weeping “into the desert of [her] palms” (77).