56 pages • 1 hour read
What We All Long For
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Chapter 16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary
It’s the middle of the World Cup, and Korea is playing Italy in Japan. In each of the respective neighborhoods, fans gather to watch the match. When Korea wins, “the Italians declared days of mourning,” while “[t]he Koreans have erupted in a street party too sweet to mean anything less than world domination” (203).
Despite the rain, Tuyen takes her camera to photograph the revelry across the city. The jubilance reminds her of the day a year prior when she and Oku had driven to Quebec to demonstrate against globalization. In the demonstrations, the two were separated and Oku was arrested, an act of transgression caught on camera by Tuyen.
As she is snapping photographs, she realizes that she is taking a series of photographs of Binh. Binh is in a heated discussion with a man Tuyen doesn’t recognize, whose gestures are “both sinister and affectionate” (208). When the man turns around, she is surprised to see that he has “the face of a boy, a baby, innocent and expectant. There was something wrong about it” (208).
Tuyen hurries to leave before Binh catches her; she hears someone calling her as she rushes away, but turns around to find Oku, instead. The pair meet Carla and head to a bar on Bloor Street. As they drink, they play a game called Word in which they each have to riff on a subject of their choice. Oku riffs on the diversity of the city and the changes it’s undergoing; Tuyen riffs on the way “[e]very generation of Americans gets to fuck over Marilyn Monroe” (211)by making white culture a repetition of her. Carla riffs on her mother’s attempts to “step across the border of who she was” (212), which causes the table to fall silent: “Carla had said it all, not just about her mother but about all of them. Trying to step across the borders of who they were. But they were not merely trying. They were, in fact, borderless” (213). They leave the bar, with Tuyen returning to develop her film.
“Quy” Summary
In Bangkok, Quy grew wary of the monk’s attention; the monk apparently believed he saw several other lives in Quy, but Quy wasn’t aware of this, and didn’t believe it anyway. The four of them settled in a small room behind a store. The monk aimed to have patrons, “but he wasn’t as charming as he thought, and in Bangkok there were many monks ahead of him” (216). The three of them served the monk in numerous ways beyond their illicit business dealings: he slept with the female, the other “male cleaned and fed him,” and Quy procured his opium and “submitted to his teaching” (216). Quy claims that he didn’t wear the disguise of a monk, but rather was a monk, as he “renounced the world […] it’s all self-deception, anyway” (218).
One day, the monk took Quy into his confidence, telling him that he would be returning to Ho Chi Minh City and that Quy was free. Quy responded by telling him “that the ugly man, Kien, was fucking his woman”(219), after which Quy went out. When he returned, the room was wrecked, and Kien was dead, the monk having killed him. The monk was driven mad with guilt, worried about the reincarnations he had lost. Nevertheless, they disposed of the body and continued on with their business. The woman never returned, and Quy began making plans to leave.
Chapter 16 Analysis
The World Cup provides an opportunity for the city both to come together and remain factionalized to an extent, as various people of various nationalities cheer for their own teams while celebrating in a jovial spirit. Tuyen, for example, roots for Korea despite not being Korean, choosing to identify with another Asian country as Vietnam was not in the Cup (of course, Tuyen spent much of her childhood rejecting Vietnam, which makes this all the more interesting) Even Carla seems elated to see Korea win their match against Italy, and she continues singing songs of solidarity once they depart the bar. Tuyen’s travels photographing the city capture this interesting intersection of peoples, existing within the borders of the city, simultaneously separated by the borders of their neighborhoods and nationalities while freely crossing those borders, as well. As the narrator states, the three are “borderless” (213), and this is reflected in the Cup.
The man captured in the photograph talking to Binh will turn out, of course, to be Quy—hence the shorter distance between “Quy” chapters, most likely. This raises a question of time and place in the novel. Time has been fluid throughout the text, and the perspective shifts not only across people but across time, moving fluidly between the past and the present while hinting at the future, or even sometimes outright claiming it: “Next door the Lebanese Shawarma place, which had been a doughnut shop, and had once been an ice cream store, and would in another incarnation be a sushi bar” (212). The way his arrival is foreshadowed is interesting, as well, as it reinforces the duality of Quy. His gestures are at once “sinister and affectionate,” and even his physical appearance is both that of a full-grown man as well as that of a young boy, “a baby, innocent and expectant” (208).
It’s unclear why Quy decides to tell the monk that Kien is having sex with the woman; earlier it is made clear that the woman will not have sex with him, which Quy reinforces by calling him “the ugly man” (219), so the reader knows that Quy is lying in order to get a rise out of the monk. However, he does this in response to the monk essentially setting Quy free. One might be tempted to claim that it is a calculation on Quy’s part—push the monk into doing something he regrets so that he can “get what he wants” from him before departing—but Quy in his narration claims to have been genuinely confused by the outcome, his telling Kien to wake up and questioning him reminiscent of his lack of comprehension when the other boy died back at Pulau Bidong. He appears to be acting entirely on instinct, then attributing that instinct to calculation after the fact. It seems most likely that despite his protestations, Quy had come to rely on, and even to some extent love and appreciate, the monk, and he felt rejected when the monk set him free. But then the question still remains: why?
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