Author(s): Thuận / Thuan (translated by Nguyen An Ly)

Novel | Vietnam | France | Translated fiction | Tilted Axis | 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize

An unfinished love story, humorous and haunting, of diasporic lives in Vietnam and France.

The Métro shudders to a halt: an unattended bag has been found. For the narrator, a Vietnamese woman teaching in the Parisian suburbs, a fantastical interior monologue begins, looking back to her childhood in early ‘80s Hanoi, university studies in Leningrad, and the travails and ironies of life in France as an immigrant and single mother. 

But most of all she thinks of Chinese-Vietnamese Thụy, who she married in the aftermath of the Sino-Vietnamese war, much to her parents’ disapproval, and whom she has not seen now for eleven years. The mystery around his disappearance feeds her memories, dreams and speculations, in which the idea of Saigon’s Chinatown looms large. There’s even a novel-in-progress, titled I’m Yellow, whose protagonist’s attempts to escape his circumstances mirror the author-narrator’s own. 

Interspersed with extracts from I’m Yellow, the narrator's book-length monologue is an attempt, at once desperate, ironic, and self-deprecating, to come to terms with the passions that haunts her.

“Chinatown exerts a near-tidal pull on the reader. I swallowed it down in one gulp.” — Lily Meyer, NPR

“[An] astonishing work of sharp wit and profound tragedy that refuses to be flattened into a single representation.” — Lamorna Ash, Times Literary Supplement

“[A] virtuosic stream-of-consciousness mapping of the afterlives of diaspora” — The New Yorker

“Chinatown is a fever dream, a hallucination, a loop in time and life that Thuân masterfully deploys to capture the disorienting and debilitating effects of migration, racism, and a broken heart in both Vietnam and France. I was completely immersed in this spellbinding novel.” — Viet Thanh Nguyen

“Crackling and humming with an astonishing verbal electricity, as irresistibly propulsive as a runaway train, Thuân's Chinatown is a witty, ranting marvel.” - Ka Bradley