Chinatown

by Thuân, Nguyen An Lý (Translator)

Overview

An exquisite and intense journey through the labyrinths of Hanoi, Leningrad, and Paris—through dreams, memory, and loss

WINNER OF THE 2023 NATIONAL TRANSLATION AWARD IN PROSE

An abandoned package is discovered in the Paris Metro: the subway workers suspect it’s a terrorist bomb. A Vietnamese woman sitting nearby, her son asleep on her shoulder, waits and begins to reflect on her life, from her constrained childhood in communist Hanoi, to a long period of study in Leningrad during the Gorbachev period, and finally to the Parisian suburbs where she now teaches English. Through everything runs her passion for Thuy, the father of her son, a writer who lives in Saigon’s Chinatown, and who, with the shadow of the China-Vietnam border war falling darkly between them, she has not seen for eleven years.

Through her breathless, vertiginous, and deeply moving monologue from beside the subway tracks, the narrator attempts to once and for all face the past and exorcize the passion that haunts her.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811231886
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	06/21/2022
Pages:	184
Sales rank:	651,400
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

THUAN (Doan Anh Thuan) was born in 1967 in Hanoi. Chinatown is her twelfth novel and her first to be translated into English. She is a recipient of the Writers’ Union Prize, the highest award in Vietnamese literature.

Nguyen An Lý lives in Vietnam and co-edits the online, independent, open-access Zzz Review. Her translations, mostly from English into Vietnamese, include works by authors such as Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, George Orwell, and Amos Oz.

Editorial Reviews

★ 05/16/2022

Thuận, in her English-language debut, delivers a powerful examination of a woman’s remembering and forgetting. In 2004, an unnamed Vietnamese woman and her son are stuck on a train in Paris while the police investigate an abandoned duffel bag, which they assume contains a bomb. With her son asleep, the woman attempts to understand “the mystery to end all mysteries”: why her husband, Thụ y, left her almost 12 years earlier. In a gripping monologue, the woman recalls her childhood in Communist Hà Nộ i with her Sinophobic parents who hated Thụy for being half-Chinese; her five years spent studying English in Soviet Russia; and her move to Paris, where she abandoned her postgraduate degree and began teaching English. Comprised of a single, breathless paragraph interrupted only by the occasional excerpt from I’m Yellow, her novel in progress about a man who leaves his family, Thuận’s tightly coiled narrative paints a portrait of a woman desperately trying to make sense of her past (“You must forget in order to live,” she claims). As the woman’s thoughts spin round and round, Thuận draws the reader ever closer to the question at the core of the novel: Is it actually possible to forget in order to live? This heralds a remarkable new voice. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"A virtuosic stream-of-consciousness mapping of the afterlives of diaspora."

The New Yorker

"Surprising and brilliant...an astonishing work of sharp wit and profound tragedy that refuses to be flattened into a single representation."

Times Literary Supplement - Lamorna Ash

"Chinatown is a breathless work of fiction that whirls through dreams and memory and places like Hanoi, Leningrad, and Paris, where the narrator (a Vietnamese immigrant) lives with her son. The book is drenched with intense longing and it has a Marguerite Durasian nouveau roman, no-nonsense kind of vibe. It made me dizzy and lovesick at once."

Spike Art Magazine - Shane Anderson

"[A] delightfully prickly and defiantly inscrutable act of resistance: against simple narratives, against our aversion to what we don’t understand, and against anything soullessly practical."

Astra Magazine - Chelsea Leu

"Thuân recreates the rich texture of the past as it exists for those severed from their origins, a layering of memories, historical eras, and personal milestones that shifts and melds."

Washington Independent - Alice Stephens

"Novels about the immigrant experience aren’t renowned for mirth—too often they are drearily po-faced or blandly sentimental; so Chinatown’s sardonic facetiousness is refreshing."

Tribune Magazine

"Simultaneously expansive and airtight."

Words Without Borders - Thúy Ðinh

"Chinatown is a fever dream, a hallucination, a loop in time and life that Thuan masterfully deploys to capture the disorienting and debilitating effects of migration, racism, and a broken heart in both Viet Nam and France. I was completely immersed in this spellbinding novel."

Viet Thanh Nguyen

"Like Duras, Thuân is an intensely poetic writer. She relies so heavily on repetition that Chinatown's text often seems to have refrains, like a ghazal or villanelle would. In many writers' hands, this strategy could be deadening, but Thuân excels at creating momentum through language, and Nguyen An Lý translates that momentum beautifully. Chinatown exerts a near-tidal pull on the reader."

NPR - Lily Meyer

"The premise of Chinatown promises claustrophobia: a Vietnamese woman trapped in the Paris metro by a suspect package, possibly a bomb. Thuân’s novel, brought to us by Nguyễn An Lý’s sweeping, melodic phrasing, is anything but sedentary: who knew reverie could be this fast-moving, this suspenseful? Below the surface, waiting, feeling the uneasy gaze of her fellow Parisians, our narrator travels back through her memories—of her son, of Hanoi, of his absent, longed-for father—and, in so doing, gifts us constraint’s solace: that memories might bring one back to a sense of self, against all the odds."

jury of the 2023 National Translation Award in Prose

2022-04-13
A Vietnamese novelist contemplates the complexities of her life, culture, and lost marriage while waiting on a stalled Paris Métro train.

At the heart of this novel is a single mother unable to let go of the memory of her former husband, Thụy, and her conviction that their marriage back in Vietnam was doomed from the start due to the clash between their cultural backgrounds. The book takes place in 2004. When an abandoned duffel bag is discovered on the Métro, the novelist and her 12-year-old son—heading to a table tennis match—are caught in an indefinite delay as they wait for the authorities to arrive and investigate the potential terrorist threat. With the possibility of their lives being in danger creating a tension with the interminable limbo of waiting for the police, she recalls falling in love with Thụy when they were teenagers in the 1970s, in the run-up to the Sino-Vietnamese War, despite the fact that he was from an ethnically Chinese family in Saigon. When Thụy leaves her and their baby, she immigrates to Paris and works as an English teacher, eventually meeting another man whom she identifies only as “the guy,” seeks connections to Thụy through Parisian Chinese culture and people, and continues to resist her parents’ pleas to finish her abandoned dissertation and marry her beau. The novel’s form mimics both the narrator's situation of being suspended in a liminal state of waiting and the natural circuitous path of a person's thoughts, with sentences being repeated and scenes frequently circling back to the same places. Unfortunately, the book’s style comes at the cost of real poignancy, as the reader tends to be lulled into a state of disconnected boredom.

An ambitious experimental novel that succeeds in form and subject but is sometimes tedious to read.

Kirkus Reviews