The Gangster We Are All Looking For

The Girl lists the plant life that grows in her neighborhood: palm and eucalyptus trees and white jasmine. Other girls make garlands out of the jasmine and wear them as the white flowers turn yellow with decay, but the jasmine’s fragrant scent remains. She describes the overwhelming heat of the sun during the day, which distorts various sensations. These sensations include the sound of children skipping rope, which reminds her of a broom cleaning a courtyard in another country. The reader can infer this to be Vietnam. This noise mingles with the sounds of a couple fighting. The scent of a ripe mango mingles with other odors: sweat, burning incense, clean clothes, and “apples and oranges quartered and offered, without any fuss, to both the dead and the living” (37). As day transitions to evening, the Girl—who speaks directly to the reader in the second person using the pronoun “you”—looks from the second story of her house to the swimming pool below as the memories of that day and all previous days return to her “like a school of fish” that “glide and flicker” (37) across the swimming pool.

The Girl returns to speaking in the first person through the pronouns “we” and “I.