Chinatown

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 Gorbache...