‘I Was Certain I Saw My Future in Him’: Coming into Intergenerational Empathy and Escape in lê thi diem thuy’s <i>The Gangster We Are All Looking For</i>

Abstract

The 2003 novel by lê thi diem thuy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For, explores its unnamed narrator’s coming of age particularly through an exploration of her relationship with her father, both in terms of their actual interactions as well as her understanding of herself through her understanding of him, including the ways that she sees herself being or becoming him, both psychologically and physically. The primary means by which the narrator comes to understand herself and the world is through an imaginative empathy with those around her, most prominently her refugee father, which is depicted as a deeply embodied experience. Yet her empathy is also a burden that, while shaping her subjectivity, constrains her sense of self. Thus, the novel raises a question: how is it possible for the children of immigrants to form their own identities in the shadow of their parents’ suffering and sacrifice? This article argues that the novel stresses the necessity of working to understand one’s immigrant parents as well as the simultaneous potential necessity to distance oneself from them. In other words, the novel explores the generative possibilities of bodily distance as a means of achieving psychic closeness.