Is it any wonder that the main sensory experience of reading Chinatown is a sort of claustrophobic discomfort?...I would sit down with the novel and, after an hour or so, find myself yawning furiously or falling into a trance indistinguishable from the half-sleep one enters on an extremely long bus ride...But that feels like the point: the narrator’s life is about as confined and isolated and marginal as you can get...She’s sardonic about the racism of her fellow teachers, whose distaste for her 'stress-inducing face' keeps her out of sight when she’s at work...I mentioned above that the narrator is unnamed, but in fact everyone she knows in France calls her Madame Âu — Thụy’s last name, and an ethnically Chinese one...Yet she doesn’t have any real connection to the Chinese French community in the thirteenth arrondissement: 'I can hardly run to them, grasp their hands and say, my husband is also ethnically Chinese'...She can’t afford to live in the neighborhood, anyway — instead, she commutes there by bus from Belleville to buy roast pigeon for Vĩnh...In one of her dreams she yells, “bù shì yuènán rén” ('I’m not Vietnamese' in Mandarin); in another, “bù shì zhōngguó rén” ('I’m not Chinese')...The narrator is doubly marginal, disconnected from any kind of community, having rejected her own nationality for her husband, only for him to reject her...Then, of course, there’s the fact that during the course of the book itself she’s immobile, literally trapped in a train car that’s neither departed nor arrived...Chinatown’s first and last sentences are rigid bookends that state the time on the narrator’s watch: the novel takes place over precisely two hours...Chinatown is sad, yes, but it’s also 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...It insists that we make space for the things that don’t make sense, most of all our absurd dreams and longings.
Thuận deftly balances her complex content with a wryly confiding style. Making its English debut via Nguyễn An Lý’s incantatory translation, Chinatown’s generic title is deceptive, its compact length trapping layers of tensions to illustrate how political struggles in the public realm mirror emotional struggles in personal relationships. Subversive yet casually framed like a run-on conversation between friends, Thuận’s novel explores various iterations of Chinatown to convey exile, alienation, oppression, and artistic freedom ... This novel-within-a-novel structure embodies the ambiguous push-pull between oppression and freedom: Thuận’s protagonist roams ceaselessly yet neurotically in her imagination even as the main action is confined in both time and space.
In cubist prose, Thuận returns to the same sentences and phrases in imitation of the way the mind perseverates, loops back on itself, and returns to seminal memories again and again ... Author Thuận, who lives in France, 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 ... Translator Nguyễn An Lý seamlessly recreates the complicated flow of the narrator’s thoughts, nimbly incorporating the subtle changes in tense and viewpoint that are crucial to the interior monologue. Deftly navigating the cacophony of cultures — from untranslated Vietnamese and Mandarin words, Iron Curtain-era historical references, memories of Soviet Russia, and present-day Paris with its multicultural manifestations of France’s colonial past — Nguyễn never breaks the fragile thread of coherency ... a dense meditation on history, colonialism, ethnic identity, novel writing, love, and belonging. The lack of white space on the page and the associative chain of ideas that build one upon the other make for challenging reading, especially as the narrator builds to a hallucinatory climax. Those who persist to the end will be rewarded with a powerful take on the immigrant’s tale that interrogates the intricate veil of history through which we endow our lives with meaning.
Thuận 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 Thuận excels at creating momentum through language, and Nguyen An Lý translates that momentum beautifully. Chinatown exerts a near-tidal pull on the reader. I swallowed it down in one gulp.
There are no paragraph or chapter breaks in Chinatown, except for two ruptures in which the narrator inserts extracts from a short story she is writing, I’m Yellow: a first-person narrative about a man running away from his awful wife and their daughter. These sections are surprising and brilliant: each aspect of the narrator’s story is in them, except turned inside out so as to become something other. The rest of the narrative passes from recollection to recollection, with seamless fluidity ... an astonishing work of sharp wit and profound tragedy that refuses to be flattened into a single representation.
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...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.
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...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.