The Gangster We Are All Looking For

The author, lê thi diem thúy, states that her given formal name is Trang, and the formal name of older sister was Thúy. Their nicknames were Big Girl and Little Girl. The author departed Vietnam by boat with her father, who incorrectly wrote the wrong birthdate and name (Thúy) for his daughter on their identifying paperwork when they were picked up by a Navy ship. Her mother corrected the birth date but wanted the author to keep the formal name of her sister, Thúy. This is because the author’s older sister Thúy drowned in a refugee camp in Malaysia. The mother felt that her father’s mistake was fortuitous because it allowed “a part of [her] older sister to come to this country with [them]” (160). The author says that she decided to publish using her full name in Vietnamese and in lowercase—not common in America or Vietnam—because she “had finally managed to break the name down, rebuild it and reclaim it as [her] own” (160).