What We All Long For

Chapter 3 shifts to Carla’s perspective as she wakes up late, several days after Chapter 2, following a visit to Mimico Correctional Institute where her brother Jamal is being held: “There had been a numbing sluggishness to the prison […] a dangerousness that was both routine and petrifying. That same sluggishness was in Jamal’s appearance at the visiting booth” (28). Following her visit, she had worked off her anger and frustration by racing through the city on her bicycle, hardly stopping for traffic: “If she could stop, she would have, but she was light and light moves” (29).

Jamal, 18, is involved with a rough crowd, and part of Carla’s frustration comes from the way she feels he lets them “handle” him and how he feigns toughness even to her: “All their conversations in the last few years were conversations of deliberate misunderstanding” (31). Jamal was looking for Carla to get him out of prison, as she had done previously; however, the charges are more serious this time, and Carla knows that she will reluctantly have to go to their father, whom neither likes.

For six months prior to his arrest, Carla hadn’t seen Jamal, convincing “herself that if she didn’t see him, if she didn’t hear from him, if he didn’t call her, then things were fine” (33). Whenever he ended up in trouble, “[h]e told her convoluted stories about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. […] It was hopeless trying to sift through to the real story with Jamal” (34). However, she also knows that “while it was true that the police were motherfuckers, Jamal was also troubled and she knew this, he was her brother” (34). 

Even though she considers Tuyen to be her best friend, “[s]he didn’t want to tell Tuyen about [Jamal] right then. […] They shared everything, but it was long understood that some things, for both of them, were unknowable, unshareable” (38). Already late, she decides to call out of her job as a bike courier, then leaves to spend the day drifting along College Street.

Chapter 4 shifts back to the perspective of Tuyen, who had been watching for Carla, shortly after Carla left to wander and drift: “She knew that lately she’d been too intense with Carla. She couldn’t help herself” (43).

Later, Oku and Jackie come over to Tuyen’s apartment for coffee. Tuyen asks Oku what he knows about Jamal, as their paths sometimes cross. However, Oku deflects at first saying that Jamal and his younger friends are too hardcore for him, then saying that talking to Jamal would do no good because it’s “a man thing” to be incarcerated, a “[r]ite of passage in this culture […] Rite of passage for a young black man” (46).

Like Tuyen and Carla, Oku has had a crush on Jackie since high school and had only become friends with Tuyen and Carla in order to get close to her. However, Jackie is with a German boyfriend named Reiner. Like the others, Oku has a strained relationship with his parents, with whom he still lives.

The tenor of the conversation changes abruptly, devolving into a fight, and Jackie’s parting words, criticizing Tuyen for being angry with them because of her unrequited love for Carla, continue to sting her after Oku and Jackie leave. “Carla had made it clear to Tuyen that she was straight, but Tuyen could not quite believe her” (50), believing that Carla would eventually come around, latching onto a few moments of closeness as evidence. As a result, Tuyen was constantly maintaining a balance, pushing closer when there is an opening and pulling back once she’s pushed too much. 

Tuyen’s family is “newly rich. They have a giant house in Richmond Hill,” a suburb outside the city, “where rich immigrants live in giant houses” (54). Her family was angry with her when she moved to the apartment on College Street because “that was where they had lived when they first arrived from Vietnam” (55). For Tuyen, “the house in Richmond Hill […] [is] artificial” (55).

After Jackie and Oku leave, Tuyen goes to her parents’ house, “intending to borrow some money from her mother” (57). Although she had hoped to avoid her father, he was uncharacteristically home rather than at the restaurant. As expected, he briefly criticizes her for leaving, but Tuyen knows “this was her father’s way of welcoming her and saying that he loved her. Love for him meant a kind of gruff duty and care” (57). In their bantering, Tuyen accidentally reminds him of Quy, so he leaves, wounded.

Tuyen tries to convince herself that her father had understood that she didn’t mean anything by her comment, then makes her way to her mother’s room. Her mother is sleeping—both she and Tuyen’s father suffer from insomnia. There is a photo of Quy on the night table, and Tuyen feels a pang of jealousy and resentment toward him. She briefly considers searching for more of her mother’s letters inquiring about Quy but changes her mind and returns to the kitchen.

After leaving Tuyen’s, Jackie is searching for a cigarette when Oku catches up to her. Oku is desperate to overcome a dig he made about Reiner, concerned that Jackie feels more distant. Oku struggles perpetually to tell Jackie how he feels, and wonders if he does truly love her or if it was just “some fumbling sex between them, once” (70). Since that night, like Tuyen’s art installations, Oku’s “obtuse” (71)poetry frequently figures Jackie into it, but if she gets it, she doesn’t show it and continues to seem uninterested in him. When he sees her, he apologizes for calling her boyfriend, Reiner, a “Nazi boy” (72). Jackie is uninterested in his apologies. She criticizes his feigned innocence, then steps onto a passing streetcar and disappears.

“Quy” Summary

Quy tells the reader that he understands that “[o]ther tragedies have overshadowed [his]” (74). He explains how “life at Pulau Bidong wasn’t always unpleasant,” as he “discovered small things about [himself], small pleasures” (74). He tells a story of a boy he met, with whom he would play on a rotten boat. One day the boy fell and was severely injured by the rotten wood on the boat; Quy believed the boy was lying, so he left him there. When he returned much later, the boy had died: “Then a bee flew out of his ear and stung me on the mouth” (75). Quy still believed that the boy was playing a trick on him and left him once again; it wasn’t until years later that Quy figured out that “the fall had practically killed him and that [he’d] done the rest” (76).

Quy used to swim at the camp, and one day a woman with a cleft palate told him that he was a good swimmer, and that she had a job for him: in exchange for food and tar for his head lice, he had to swim out to a boat and bring back a plastic bag for her. Quy explains that there were no real authorities in charge of the camp—the people who were in charge were people like the woman and the other gangs. Through the woman, Quy met a monk who used to tell him stories. Quy believed that “the monk could look right into [his] soul and see who [he] was” (78).