Micah E.F. Martin
Both of Le thi diem thuy’s parents function as effective countermemory against the idea of the immigrant victim. Their ties to Vietnamese culture and their memories of a lost homeland and families not seen in decades form a part of their mosaic personalities, but neither parent is “simply” an immigrant. The layered, sometimes reserved and sometimes blatant portrayal of Anh and his wife serves to emphatically define the Vietnamese family not in their traditional victims’ roles but as three-dimensional and complex individuals. Le thi diem thuy says quite clearly through the understated recounting of her own experience with childhood and adolescence in America that the immigrant experience is not solely one of flight from oppression or fearful attempts at adaptation. Mundane concerns, as anywhere, remain a powerful factor in the lives of any family and in Gangster they are brought to the forefront and wielded skillfully to paint a picture of a family’s domestic life that incorporates immigrant roots but is not defined solely by them.
Rebecca Meekins
In Le Thi Diem Thuy’s “The Gangster We Are All Looking For”, I feel this concept of countermemory is best expressed in the narrator’s father’s character. His rage, anger, and description of “gangster”, paint the portrait of a man who feels victimized. His memories of being in Viet Nam and his life there haunts him, as he takes the role of a victim, just as Nguyen talks about in her description of countermemory. He is unaware of the harm that he inflicts on his family, and it is a fact that is forgotten in the memories of the war. “In this theatre of collective memory, the harm Asian Americans inflict upon each other, or upon others becomes secondary, even forgotten” (Nguyen, 15). Spending all his time playing the victim, her father is never able to face the consequences of his actions and see outside of the “imagined community” that he has created for himself about his history and his culture’s history. This anger and role is then passed on to his daughter, as she desires to be a gangster, more specifically “the gangster we are all looking for”, just as her father is.
Tin-Yan Chan
The narrator’s mother counters the image of war when she says, “war is a bird with a broken wing flying over the country side, trailing blood and burying crops in sorrow. If something grows in spite of this, it is both a curse and miracle…war has no beginning and no end. It crosses oceans like a splintered boat filled with people singing a sad song” (Le, 87). This is her interpretation of the war. She says it as a metaphor. She does not mention people killing each other or the political climate in Vietnam, rather she takes a poetic approach in telling her daughter about the war.
Mary Martin
The memories of these three refugees are countered as they integrate themselves into their American life. Gangster’s cases of countermemory exemplify both the positive and negative results. The nation of Ma’s identity becomes only “over there” (151) and the “hard life” (151) is simplified in both her mind and her daughter’s. The narrator arguably benefits from countermemory of which the ocean imagery still serves also as the crux. However, it is now driven by her brother’s death, the acceptance of which brings her closer to him (148). Countermemory proves its range of purpose and serves as a detriment or tool of reconciliation of those affected.
Alexa Ebert
I think that the gangster we are looking for is a reference to somebody who is strong, sticks to their morals, doesn’t let other people push them around, and speaks out against society no mater what the consequences are. When the narrator looks at her father’s photograph at age sixteen, she notes “what reveals him most is the will to give nothing away.” Despite his friends dying, he “managed to crawl here, on his hands and knees to this life.”(103) No matter what happened or what he went through, he kept persisting through life, but he also “crumbled into his own shadow” because he felt like he couldn’t change his life, which is what the narrator describes she won’t do. “He made himself so small, so that in the world there was very little of him left.” (122) The narrator exclaims she isn’t going to do that, and says she will be “the gangster we are all looking for.”
My Response
After carefully reading other people’s reflection papers, I have grasped a better understanding of the concept of “countermemory” in relation to Le’s narrative story of her immigrant life. Countermemory is a way of choosing specific memories of nations or groups and taking those memories and piecing together an “imagined community”. After suffering and struggling, Le’s family finally made it through the pacific ocean arriving the land of “freedom” and immigrants from all over the world. In Le’s tone of narration, her family seems to live a stereotypical immigrant life, moving homes around and adapting to new American life. Things always seem more colorful, richer, and different in young Le’s eyes since she simply reports what she observes, not making nay comments on her thinking. Even so, in the description of her mom and dad, words are charged with urgent and unsettling emotion. It is Viet Nam that haunts or tangles with Le’s parents (maybe Le too because of her brother). The memories of Viet Nam and the memories in Viet Nam always bring Le’s parents back to sorrow, which they cannot cope with. Instead, especially Le’s dad Anh chose to avoid the encounter and left what happened in Vietnam in Vietnam.
Besides the interesting concept “countermemory”, there are some pieces of memory that invoke discussions about Americans’ ambivalent attitudes towards new immigrants, especially the minority immigrants. The story Le told about the “glass butterfly” reveals this relationship. I also agree with Rebecca’s point that the concept of countermemory is best expressed in Le’s father’s character. “He is unaware of the harm that he inflicts on his family, and it is a fact that is forgotten in the memories of the war” (Meekins).
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