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Chinatown
An unfinished love story, humorous and haunting, of diasporic lives in Vietnam and France.
The Métro shudders to a 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.
The Métro shudders to a 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.
178 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 30, 2022
3 people are currently reading
133 people want to read
About the author
N/A Thuận
1 bookThuận (Đoan Ánh Thuận) was born in 1967 in Hanoi. She studied at universities in Russia and France and now lives in Paris. Chinatown is her twelfth novel. She is a recipient of the Writers’ Union Prize, the highest award in Vietnamese literature.
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January 15, 2025
usually love any asian steam of consciousness but the writing style was just so boring for me
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