DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Chinatown

Thuận author Nguyễn An Lý translator

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Tilted Axis Press

Published:30th Jun '22

Should be back in stock very soon

Chinatown cover

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

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

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.

  • Short-listed for ALTA National Translation Award 2023
  • Short-listed for Republic of Consciousness Prize 2023

ISBN: 9781911284673

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

192 pages