In The Gangster We Are All Looking For, a nameless first-person narrator recounts the life of a refugee living in Southern California after fleeing a Vietnamese re-education camp in Singapore. Mr. Russel, a retired Navy officer, sponsors their voyage but dies before the trip is made. He leaves his son to care for the immigrants, but our narrator's family works for the son, Melvin, paining houses as compensation for their stay. This includes 'Ba,' (like 'Pa'), the narrator's father.
Melvin inherits glass miniatures from his father, and he warns the immigrants not to touch them, but the narrator plays with them in secret. She is especially fond of a glass paperweight with a butterfly trapped in the glass, pretending the butterfly is actually alive and waiting to escape its prison. Then one day, she "frees" the butterfly by throwing the glass paperweight into the rest of the miniatures, destroying the entire collection.
In the following days, the narrator's mother arrives to the family in San Diego. They live in an apartment complex with palm trees and a pool, and her mother works as a seamstress. One time, her mother crashes their family car into the apartment complex's front gate, and the boys in the complex often jump from the second floor into the pool, and eventually, the landlord decides to drain the pool, dumping in cement and rocks. The narrator shows that her parents fight often, and they fight on the day the pool is ruined. In a play fort, the narrator meets a young boy who touches her breasts. She likes him.
An important motif in the plot is the introduction of three separate pictures of family members in Vietnam, and the surreal experiences and emotions they give to the narrator. After discussing one such picture of her grandparents, we learn that the titular "Gangster," is actually Ba. When Ma married Ba, he was a Buddhist thug.
As an immigrant, the first major move to America is followed by small moves, from one apartment, a red one, to a green one, and then another move because the landlord murders a woman. Ba is not handling these transitions well, and Ma has become naggy and unbearable because of his constant gambling and binge drinking. She shaves her head. When the neighbor children crowd around to see what the fuss is about, the narrator offers a dance to them instead. The family is evicted, causing them to move again, and in the process, they lose family pictures in the demolition of their old house.
Not only are the parents on the brink of complete breakdown, the daughter too is driven to great ends, and in Chapter 4, she runs away from home and makes her way to the East Coast, as far as she can get from San Diego. When she inevitably returns, her father is in trouble after digging a trench in the yard of one of his lawn-mowing clients.
The novel ends with a split narrative. In the first thread, the narrator's father is dodging debt collectors, and her mother works in a Vietnamese restaurant. The community is full of rumors that their daughter has become a successful novelist on the East Coast. The second thread is the story of her brother's body being pulled out of the South China Sea. Apparently, he slipped when jumping from one boat to another one. The narrator's grandfather brings the body back home, causing the community to reject the family. During this time, the narrator's father is fighting the Vietnam War, explaining his rough demeanor and alcoholism throughout the novel.
