What We All Long For

What We All Long For, written by Dionne Brand and published in 2005, tells the overlapping stories of four friends in their early- to mid-20s as they navigate Toronto as queer people, people of color, and children of immigrants.

Tuyen is a queer woman and the daughter of Vietnamese immigrant refugees. When her parents fled Vietnam, they were separated from their son, Quy, and they continue to search for him to this day. As a result, Tuyen and her brother Binh grow up trying, but never succeeding, to fill that hole. Tuyen is an artist who specializes in alternative art installations. When Binh decides to try to track down Quy himself, Tuyen disagrees strongly. Much of her story is about her fights with Binh over this and her attempts to reconcile her relationship with him and her parents, as well as her deep, but unrequited love for her friend, Carla.

Carla is the daughter of a black man and an Italian woman; though she considers Tuyen to be her best friend, she identifies as straight, and therefore pushes back against her advances. Carla’s mother died by suicide when she was only 5, after which her father reluctantly took her and her baby brother Jamal in, leading Carla to care very much for her brother. Jamal is constantly in trouble with the law, however, and her story is about her attempts to find a way to bail him out of jail on a carjacking charge. Despite her best efforts, she ultimately concedes that she will have to convince their father, Derek, to bail him out once more.

Oku is a young black poet; at the start of the novel he is ostensibly pursuing a master’s degree in English literature, but during the period of the novel, he decides to drop out. He and his father don’t get along, though he has taken from his father his love of jazz. He, too, has a crush on the fourth member of the group, Jackie, a young black woman who owns a “post-bourgeois” boutique. His crush is also unrequited, as Jackie is in a relationship with a German boyfriend, Reiner. By the end of the novel, he and Jackie are sleeping together, and he has come clean to his father about dropping out. However, he also decides that he will return to school to complete his degree.

Interspersed throughout the novel is the story of Quy, ostensibly (though not definitively) the boy Tuyen’s parents lost so many years ago. After getting separated from them, Quy ends up at Pulau Bidong, a completely different refugee camp. He spends the next eight or so years there, living a hard life as an orphan, taking part in illicit activities for the various “gang” factions who run the black market there. He eventually leaves the camp with a monk, Luc Toc, but with Luc Toc he simply experiences a different kind of servitude and learns how to navigate the Southeast Asian criminal underworld. He eventually escapes to Canada with a stolen laptop with all sorts of illegal activities and contacts, which he uses to get in touch with Binh.

Binh, Tuyen, and Quy experience an uneasy reunion—Binh is thrilled that he gets to be the good son; however, Tuyen isn’t certain that Quy is trustworthy, and Quy himself tells us that we should be wary of him, even as he accepts that he might enjoy this life. At the same time, Jamal has fallen back into his carjacking ways. While Quy waits in Binh’s BMW near their parents’ house, waiting to surprise and finally meet them, Jamal and a friend of his carjack the BMW, badly beating Quy and stealing the car. The novel concludes with Quy lying on the side of the road as his family runs toward him.