56 pages • 1 hour read
What We All Long For
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Chapters 23-25Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 23 Summary
Tuyen goes to Binh’s store to confront him about the man in the photograph. As usual, she had planned on having a calm conversation, but those plans went out the window as soon as she enters. Binh is angry at the photos and accuses Tuyen of spying on him, and they fight until they reach an impasse. Finally, Binh admits that he has found Quy. Tuyen questions it and asks how he is certain it’s the right person. Binh points out that there are records of people, and Quy was easier to find for him because, unlike their mother, he knows English well.
As it turns out, Quy is at the store; he has agreed to come into Binh’s business. Despite what should have been relief, “instead, there was a sense of foreboding” (296)that she couldn’t quite figure out. When she turns around, Quy is there, but she finds that his smile is “giving the face a ferocious look” (296). She feels “an ineffable dread toward the man” (297) and scrutinizes him: “This man had a contained tightness, a light presence; this man she was sure could harm you coolly, arbitrarily. But what had she expected? Why shouldn’t he be such a man? […] Of course it was her brother Quy. Of course it wasn’t. What difference would it make?” (297).
Outside, the noise of crowds rises as Korea almost scores a goal against Germany in the Cup. Tuyen and Binh agree to meet back again around five in the afternoon to go to their parents’ house to reunite Quy with them. Still, she is concerned: “In the end that is what she meant, she realized, that is what she wanted. [Her parents] deserved kindness, and Tuyen doubted whether this ghost could deliver it” (300).
Chapter 24 Summary
As they drive to Richmond Hill to their parents’ house, with Tuyen in the back seat, they try to figure out the best way to tell their parents. The two are tense; even as they agree that they should go in and prepare them first, they fight over the agreement: “Binh was in control, but his control always felt chaotic to her” (305). When they argue over where to park, Quy stops them, acceding to Tuyen’s request that they park away from the house and he wait in the car initially. As they walk to the house, Tuyen reflects on her family:
She felt comforted by their commonality, the same commonality that had made her so uneasy most of her life […] Yet, here was their specialness now carried between them to the door of the house, the recognitive gaze of an exception cherished through all this time. Wasn’t that what her art was all about in the end? (307).
“Quy” Summary
As Quy sits in the car, he considers who he is and where he’s come from. He considers how war criminals frequently go on to live other, quieter lives, allowed to move on. He recounts how, after reaching the “spa” he found on the monk’s laptop, he discovers a wealthy man named Vu Binh is looking for his long-lost brother Quy:
Well, see for yourself. I already put two and two together. I appear […] I arrive; he’s convinced. I’m convinced. He turns out to be my brother. Isn’t my name Quy? Wasn’t I lost so he could come to me in his expensive shoes, in his silk shirt, his mouth slow and vulgar on his mother tongue, with his silver Beamer? (310).
He waits in the car and thinks of how, one day, he’ll tell his story.
Chapter 25 Summary
Carla races through the city to work off her anxiety. She returns to the coffee shop at which her mother used to work, and where her mother met Derek; she has a coffee and raises it to her. She knows she can’t “hold the baby any more” (315), aware that Derek would not have leant his car to Jamal, as Jamal claimed. She, the narrator tells us, will go on to live her life now.
After Jamal leaves Carla’s, he meets a friend on Weston Road. They drive to Richmond Hill looking for a car to steal, where they see Quy in Binh’s BMW. When they yell at him through the window, “the man [Quy] seems insulted and stunned—how could he have been caught in this way?” (317). They attack Quy; at first Quy fights back until he realizes they want the car, so they take the car and speed away, leaving Quy beaten on the side of the road. Quy marvels at how much he survived only to get surprised like this in Toronto as his family comes running out to him.
Chapters 23-25 Analysis
The book continues to play with the idea that Quy is not our Quy; however, his indignance in his chapter here suggests that he is actually Binh’s brother, only disaffected by the actual thought of finding his family. To him it’s a transaction, and he’ll eventually take what he sees as what’s owed to him for the life they lived and for what he lost. Before this can happen, though—before he is even able to be reunited with Tuan and Cam—a similar ruthlessness appears in Jamal and his friend, who decide to jack a random rich person’s car just after being released from jail.
It’s possible these events are designed so that the reader reflects: Does it reinforce the ruthlessness and self-interest of Quy’s worldview? Does it suggest that society makes us unable to see danger and therefore makes us complacent? Does it reinforce the random cruelty of the world? Are we watching Quy get punished for attempting to insert himself into a life that isn’t his? Regardless, in keeping with satisfactory—but not happy—endings, the reader gets a concluding chapter in which the long-awaited reunion both doesn’t happen and is precluded by violence.
Language as a form of power is reinforced through these chapters. Much of what kept Cam from finding Quy previously was the simple fact that her English is weak. Regardless of who this Quy is, Binh was able to follow the paper trail and at least find some leads because he is fluent in English. Once they reunite, Quy’s weak English keeps him something of an outsider, and it is partially on linguistic terms that Tuyen questions him. Finally, as Jamal and his friend are beating Quy, Quy realizes that they just want the car and tries to tell them to take it. Unable to express this in English, the boys don’t understand him and continue to beat him.
Ultimately, this is a novel of desire through to the end. The characters can move toward a “happy ending,” but they can’t, and perhaps shouldn’t, reach them.
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