The metro shudders to a halt: an unattended bag has been found, and
terrorism is suspected. For the narrator, a young Vietnamese woman
teaching English in the Parisian suburbs, time stops. Her son falls
asleep on her shoulder and a long interior monologue begins, looking
back over her life thus far.
From a constrained childhood in post-communist Hanoi, to a period of
study in '80's Russia, she tries to understand everything that has
brought her to this point. Through it all runs her passion for Thuy, a
writer who lives in Saigon's Chinatown, and who she has not seen for
eleven years.
Interspersed with extracts from Thuy's novel, the narrator's monologue
is an attempt, at once desperate, humorous, and self-deprecating, to fix
the past once and for all and exorcise the passion that haunts her.
Winner of an English PEN Award'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.
