Although we talked a little bit in class about the scene in “The Gangster We Are All Looking For”, in which the young girl throws the paperweight butterfly and breaks the glass animal case, I thought it was worth discussing a little more. I couldn’t help but notice the possible symbolism of the animals, as they were arranged “lined up in pairs, like animals in a parade”. I may be looking to deeply into it, but This made me think of Noah’s Ark of the Christian Old Testament, in which two of every type of animal is saved from a flood in the boat of Noah. This symbolism seems to work well with the story, as the girl, her father, and the uncles were saved, by boat, from Vietnam, and brought to safety in the US. If this is an accurate assumption, I think we as readers can learn a lot from the reaction of the girl to the animals. She repeats often that she feels they have n soul, are content with their place on the shelf, and do not need or want further stimulation. This seems to be the view of Mel and others towards her and her family; that they should be grateful and comfortable with anything given to them.
On the contrary, the girl feels a strong connection to the butterfly that is “trapped” within the paperweight. I felt like this was a suggestion that the girl feels less like a beneficiary of charity, like Noah’s animals, than a trapped, contained butterfly who needs to escape or be freed. She often repeats that the butterfly is the only one with a soul, who seems to listen to her, and she can hear its struggle. Clearly the butterfly is actually dead, if it was ever a real butterfly at all, but the fact that she places these emotions upon it, and even hears it struggle to be free seems to indicate that she is placing her own feelings on the butterfly. She is the one who is struggling to leave Mel’s house, or fit in, or possibly return to Vietnam, and no one else seems to notice, care, or know how to help her, as her conversation with the uncles goes, “If there is no soul, how can the butterfly cry for help?” “But what does crying mean in this country? Your Ba cries in the garden every night and nothing comes of it”(27).
The analogy between the girl and the butterfly continues, when she attempts to free the butterfly from its trap. Because these parallels can be drawn between the girl’s situation and those she project onto the butterfly, I think we are safe in assuming that her desperation to free the butterfly comes from her desperation to escape her situation. As the novel continues, this seems to be proven true as she seems often to be running away later in the story.
Reading this scene over again, I had a feeling that the shattering of the case and glass animals was not exactly an accidental result of her attempt to free the butterfly. The calm, nonchalant way in which such a loud and frightening scene (think shattering glass, heavy objects hitting a wall, yelling adults) is described, she does not seem surprised when it breaks. Although it does not seem that the destruction of the animals was her primary intention, it was how she chose to “free the butterfly”. While the butterfly probably did not break out of the paperweight by being thrown against a glass cabinet, she herself was freed. As she describes it, “The result was Mel told Ba, the four uncles and me to pack our things and get out”(31). She and her family were freed from the people who were in her mind forcing them into strange American customs, treating her uncles poorly, and making her father cry each night. She knew that the animals were important to Mel and his mother, and therefore destroying them would be a form of getting back at them, in a child’s mind. While this is not described as a well thought out plan, it seems to be an unconscious, half imaginative situation, and yet the result is just what she had been hoping for and dreaming about.
-Megan