Reading What We All Long For really hit home for me as a daughter of immigrants, myself. Some of the feelings and things that happened to these characters within the novel, I can completely relate to. Others — not so much. Overall, Brand makes incredibly real characters. These characters are flawed, nuanced, vulgar, and a little predictable. In essence: THEY ARE HUMAN. Disliking a character in this novel is totally and completely okay. In fact, that’s exactly what Brand is going for. I absolutely hated how much Oku pined for Jackie. I wanted to tell him to suck it up, move on, and get his life together. I largely disliked him for this, but, again, Brand is simply making this character a real person, one you can hate as much as you want but also believe.
As for making these characters angry, Brand was spot on for making these characters believable. To be quite honest, everyone is angry about something. We’ve all experienced injustice or something that truly disappointed us. Brand is expressing this through her characters perfectly. Thematically, she is showing to her readers the anger felt by her characters for the injustices they have experienced. What must be understood, however, is that this same anger is experienced between second-generation immigrants as well as well-established Canadians.
This same anger in her characters is expressed through the assumed embarrassment towards the immigrants parents that are secondary characters in the novel. This embarrassment, however, I think would be better described as perhaps pity, however. I myself have felt embarrassed about my parents not quite knowing about proper American social cues and disregarding American culture — something that is incredibly important to my self-confidence and social ego. Upon closer inspection, however, I realize that my true feelings are not embarrassment, but rather pity. I feel sorry for my parents that the do not understand the proper American ways. At the same time, though, why should I feel sorry? They accept and embrace their original and quite frankly do not feel the need to adopt another one. They are absolutely content with who and what they are. For that reason, I should feel neither pity nor embarrassment/shame. Tuyen and the other characters, I believe, are actually experiencing this same type of reaction to their parents. They simply feel sorry for them that they don’t quite fit in. This same pity may reflect upon themselves as they, then, also believe that they don’t fit in themselves.
In essence, what I took from What We All Long For is that we must accept who we are ancestrally, who are parents are culturally, and move on from it. We can embrace our new culture as much as we want, but we must never forget about the influence and power of our original one. We should not understand that everyone is flawed and has some anger towards life, but in the end all that we have is who we are in as an essence of a person. If someone chooses to define this essence through race/immigration, so be it. In the end, you decide who you are.