Chinatown

May 1, 2022
A Vietnamese novelist contemplates the complexities of her life, culture, and lost marriage while waiting on a stalled Paris M�tro train. 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 M�tro, 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. When Thụy leaves her and their baby, she immigrates to Paris and works as an English teacher, eventually meeting another man whom she identifies only as "the guy," seeks connections to Thụy through Parisian Chinese culture and people, and continues to resist her parents' pleas to finish her abandoned dissertation and marry her beau. 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.

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Starred review from May 16, 2022
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. In a gripping monologue, the woman recalls her childhood in Communist Hà Nộ
i with her Sinophobic parents who hated Thụy for being half-Chinese; her five years spent studying English in Soviet Russia; and her move to Paris, where she abandoned her postgraduate degree and began teaching English. Comprised of a single, breathless paragraph interrupted only by the occasional excerpt from I’m Yellow, her novel in progress about a man who leaves his family, Thuận’s tightly coiled narrative paints a portrait of a woman desperately trying to make sense of her past (“You must forget in order to live,” she claims). 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.