The combination of Ashley’s post and my paper got me thinking about the relationship between the mother and father in the gangster we are all looking for. While in class during my presentation I alluded to the idea that these two had a relationship not unlike the behavior of the sea, with constant movement and the occasional storm. But when I got to thinking about it, these two people don’t seem to have ever had a real grace period in their relationship. When they first begin a relationship in Vietnam, the narrator’s mother is forced to sneak around with him, and then is disowned by her parents when she decides to marry the guy. After they are married, the narrator’s father is sent off to a re-education camp—basically prison, and her mother is left to care for a son and daughter without him, and then must deal with the loss of her son on her own. (Granted, there were people around trying to comfort her, but mostly they tell her horrifying stories about “bad water” thus resulting in her refusal to ever let her daughter go swimming once they are in the United States.) Once the two are reunited and decide to flee Vietnam, they are again separated while one goes to the U.S. and one is forced to stay behind. Basically, what I’m trying to say is: these two characters never seem to have had a serene experience in their marriage. They seem to be constantly separated before the narrator’s mother comes to join her family in the United States. It is at this point that the fighting seems to begin. It’s possible that their frustration from constant separation is also at fault for the tension that is only increasingly built by the stresses of working menial jobs in the U.S. and having to constantly deal with the haunting memories of their pasts.

I also wanted to point out something about the narrator. While the narrator of the novel is a child, with a perspective of innocence and a cloudy way of recounting events, the narrator is also omniscient. I find this situation to be an interesting hybrid of ideas. It makes me wonder—just how does she know? How does she know about her parents courtship? How is she able to relate scenes of her father sitting alone in his house and driving his truck to stare down the ocean in the middle of the night? It gives an almost ghostly quality to the narrative, or maybe an element of the supernatural. Perhaps the author never intended this, but I still can’t help but recognize the result.