What We All Long For

Carla is the other prominent member of the group, and her own subplot figures heavily into the narrative, including the way it ultimately resolves. Carla and her brother Jamal are the illegitimate children of an Italian woman, Angie, and a Black man, Derek. Derek rejected Angie and his children, as he already had another family, but after Angie died by suicide, Derek and his wife Nadine raised Carla and Jamal. Nevertheless, Carla always had a strained relationship with them—more so with Derek than Nadine—and much of Carla’s plotline consists of working up the will to convince Derek to post bail for her brother, who has been arrested for carjacking.

Carla lives across the hall from Tuyen and the two are best friends by Carla’s own admission. However, their relationship is sometimes tense due to Tuyen’s enduring crush and persistent advances on Carla, who identifies as straight and claims that she simply doesn’t have the ability to care for anyone like that, regardless. Carla is a writer and works as a bike courier; as a person, she is meticulously neat and oscillates between moments of close friendship and an intense need for space and distance. (Jackie describes her as “bipolar” (44) early in the book, but there is no indication that this is a true or accurate diagnosis.) Although she rejects her “adoptive” family, she loves her brother dearly and is haunted by her mother’s death. By the end of the novel, she has managed to come more to terms with her relationship with both of those people, even if it is an imperfect one. 

Oku is a young Black man; like the others, he has a tense relationship with his immigrant father, but unlike the others, he still lives fully under his father’s roof, having tried and failed to move out some time prior to the events of the novel. Oku is a poet and a graduate student of literature. At some point during the timeline of the novel, he chooses not to continue his studies for the time being, which ultimately seems to lead to him making new plans to move out.

Although all of the friends inhabit two distinct worlds, that of their parents and that of themselves, Oku additionally seems to inhabit a third world, that of a young Black man and the street-level, illicit associations that come with that. (Carla’s brother, Jamal, is a more fully realized version of this struggle.) While he claims at the start of the book that he has little association with street life, only appearing in order to buy marijuana, a minor conflict emerges in which he begins to question why he doesn’t take up his friend’s offer to join him in his illegal businesses. However, by the end of the novel he fully rejects this pressure and decides he is going to return to school.

Oku’s other primary conflict is, like Tuyen and Carla, his unrequited love for Jackie. He has had a crush on Jackie since high school, and they once had sex in a nightclub bathroom, but Jackie does not appear to reciprocate his feelings and remains in her relationship with Reiner. Part of Oku’s conflict is working out precisely what those feelings are. As the novel concludes, he finds himself in a seemingly satisfactory middle ground, a secret, purely sexual relationship with Jackie, whatever that might mean besides.

Jackie is a young Black woman and the fourth member of the group; she is the least developed character of the four, existing somewhere on the periphery of the friends. Her parents, free-spirited partiers, moved from Halifax when she was a child. However, the halcyon days of Black nightclub life dried up not long after they arrived, and as they aged and money became tight, tensions arose. The other members of the group see them as the “cool” parents; like the others, Jackie has a strained relationship with them, having experienced all the downsides of their lax parental style.

Jackie’s art is fashion, and she owns her own store full of quirky, hipster clothing items. She, like Oku, embodies a third world due to her relationship with her German boyfriend, Reiner, a musician. At the end of the novel, she retains her relationship with Reiner, even though she is also sleeping with Oku. As she is not as developed as the other characters, it isn’t clear what her central conflict is; nevertheless, she is always somewhere in the midst of the action.

Quy is the long-lost brother of Tuyen and Binh. Although he is not reunited with the family until the end of the book, he is the other central figure of the novel, and his story is told through a series of chapters. Quy’s chapters are the only ones narrated in the first person. As a result of this narrative shift as well as the content of those chapters, there is some question as to the reliability of his narrative, right up until the end of the book, in which it remains unclear if the Quy that has been narrating and has reunited with his family is in fact the Quy who was lost.

Nevertheless, Quy was orphaned as an extremely young boy. When his family fled Vietnam, he mistook another adult’s set of legs for his father’s and followed the wrong person onto the wrong boat. As a result, he ended up alone in the Pulau Bidong refugee camp, where he lived for roughly the next 10 years of his life. He learned to survive, observing the illicit, anarchic world of the camp, at first working as a smuggler for a woman with a cleft palate, then later leaving with a monk who dealt in black market goods. He and two others spent a long time traveling with the monk, but he eventually left the monk under dubious circumstances. He went to work for yet another monk, one with more overtly political aims; after managing to steal his laptop, including all of his scams and contacts, Quy made his way to Canada and, eventually, to Toronto, where he met Binh.

A key question of the novel is precisely who or what Quy is. The very structure of Quy’s chapters suggest that he is somehow outside of the rest of the novel rather than a part of it, and one interpretation, particularly in conjunction with the first chapter, is that Quy is in fact the narrator of his own imaginative novel. Even accepting things at more or less face value, is the question of his character: Is Quy duplicitous or simply complex? Is Quy a victim of his circumstances or a product of them? Or both? To what extent can the reader trust Quy? To what extent is his narration a façade meant to deal with an extremely harsh, unfair life? Quy’s chapters are filled with nods to various forms of these questions: he frequently reminds us that he isn’t to be trusted, while simultaneously suggesting that he didn’t want any of this, and that his amorality is a matter of circumstance rather than pure belief. 

Tuyen’s other brother, Binh, serves as a foil to Tuyen in many respects. He and Tuyen are the two Canadian-born children of the family, but they took to Western life in very different ways, with Tuyen embracing the artists’ life while Binh embraced business and free-market capitalism, including illicit forms of it. While he owns and operates an electronics store, he also has lucrative investments in a variety of illegal businesses behind the scenes. Nevertheless, there are hints of kinship tying them together, including a shared experience of being both an insider and an outsider. Like Tuyen, Binh feels keenly his inability to replace Quy, but unlike Tuyen, Binh spends far more time attempting to do so, even traveling to Thailand in order to track down Quy (and ultimately doing so, though much closer to home). 

Cam and Tuan, Tuyen and Binh’s parents, are Vietnamese refugees; however, there is some question later in the novel to what extent they were truly refugees, as neither was a political dissident or seemingly in any danger prior to their departure (which itself raises a greater level of complexity regarding their guilt over losing Quy, particularly if the initial risk wasn’t necessary). Both are highly educated and held professional positions in Vietnam: Tuan, Tuyen’s father, was an engineer, while Cam was a doctor. However, in Canada, they were forced to take up different lives, and Tuan eventually opened a restaurant which afforded the family a level of wealth and success. Both suffer intense guilt over the loss of Quy, and the novel ends without that guilt being fully resolved.

Ai and Lam are Cam and Tuan’s older daughters; after the loss of Quy, they were heavily restricted by their parents, and as a result apparently feel some resent toward their younger siblings, particularly Tuyen for living a free life that was denied them. However, they do not figure heavily into the novel, serving more as a foil for their two Canadian-born siblings. 

Jamal is Carla’s younger brother. Carla has always felt a responsibility for Jamal; however, Jamal is unable to stay out of trouble, having fallen in with local street culture. At the start of the novel, Jamal has just been arrested for carjacking, and much of the novel is concerned with Carla’s efforts to bail him out. Following the success of that, he immediately returns to carjacking.

Angie is Carla and Jamal’s mother, a woman of Italian descent. After their father rejected her with finality, she died by suicide, stepping off a balcony. Although she isn’t actually in the novel in the present, her presence runs throughout the novel, as Carla continues to struggle to let her go.

Derek is Carla and Jamal’s father. At the time that he met Angie, he already had a family with Nadine. While he considered leaving her for Angie when Carla was young, he eventually changed his mind and refused to acknowledge them, promising only child support. Even though Nadine initially disliked the idea of taking in Angie’s children, even after Angie’s family refused them, she quickly grew to love them, particularly Jamal, as her own. 

Fitz and Claire are Oku’s parents. Fitz is a hard man; he values manual labor and spends most mornings lecturing Oku on what things were like back home and what it means to be a real man. His one respite is on Sundays, when he drinks Scotch, cooks, listens to music, and dances. Even then, he generally drinks too much and grows somber, then angry. He is a bitter man, someone who strove for success and is angry that he was unable to achieve it. Claire is softer and tries to maintain the peace; she protects Oku while understanding her husband’s position. She is more perceptive than Fitz, as she recognizes that Oku has left school long before Fitz does.