Chinatown

The Chinatown Chợ Lớn Lover
Review of the Tilted Axis Press paperback edition (2022) translated by Nguyễn An Lý from the Vietnamese language original "Chinatown" (2005)

He said, you can spin whatever yarn you like but don’t skimp on the paragraph breaks, your readers need to catch their breath, and don’t forget a chapter break every few pages so they can practice counting to ten. I chortled, I hadn’t expected my readers to have such exacting demands.

I'll admit that when I first received Chinatown in the summer of 2022 I did not have the appetite for its 'one-long-paragraph' format which I often find tiresome to read. When it was longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2023 I decided to give it another look. I was show more especially encouraged by reviews from GR Friends Jola and David.

This time I was completely taken by it and found it to be smooth reading after all. There were in fact some respites to the 'one-long-paragraph' format when the protagonist inserts two extended excerpts from her fictional book 'I'm Yellow' into her stream of consciousness. Those excerpts follow a more conventional paragraph style (following the friend's advice from the above quote).

Thuận (the one-name penname of writer Đoàn Ánh Thuận) novel imagines her protagonist stuck on a Parisian subway train with her young son Vinh while the police hold up the system due to a suspicious package. This extended pause causes her to cast her memory back to her early life in Vietnam, her love for her Chinese husband Thuy (disapproved on by her Vietnamese parents), her years studying in Moscow University and her eventual life in Paris with her son.

The text is very hallucinatory as it draws parallels to Thuận's own real-life & to the story of Marguerite Duras and the Chinese lover of her youth as told in the books The Lover (1984) and The North China Lover (1991) and to the fictional book 'I'm Yellow' inside the book. It is also very taken with repetition in a manner that may remind you of the works of Gertrude Stein. I enjoyed it immensely for all of these aspects and for its humour. Likely many cultural references went over my head, but the translation flowed smoothly and the occasional Vietnamese food and placename references were easy to look up.

I note (although I only examined the Kindle eBook edition) that the North American edition from New Directions is missing the Translator's Afterword which is included in the UK Tilted Axis edition. That is a real disservice to North American readers.

See image at https://blogcuathuan.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/cropped-sach8.jpg
A collage of a selected number of book covers by the author Thuận. Image sourced from her blog at Thuận’s Blog.

I read Chinatown through the Republic of Consciousness Book of the Month subscription and due to its nomination in the longlist for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2023.
Other Reviews

From NPR Books in Translation Three Tales Touching on French Colonialism by Lily Meyer at NPR July 19, 2022 (Note: The reviewer is under the impression the book was translated from French, rather than Vietnamese).

Trivia and Links
The author’s own Vietnamese language blog posts two very interesting reviews of Chinatown for which I’ve linked to English translations as Text Games and Interactions and I’m Yellow: Textual Pleasure. show less

Told largely in stream-of-consciousness style, a Vietnamese woman living in Paris with her young son reflects on the course of her life from Vietnam to St Petersburg to Vietnam to Paris. Education, marriage, a child, and bad political timing has left her missing everything she really wants despite having a decent job (she hates) in a free country (as an unnaturalizable immigrant without her husband).

I found this book very very slow to read and somewhat difficult to follow. I found it sad and just painful how all the best intentions and hard work can come up against politics and history to cause failure of the intended dreams, even if a modicum of success is achieved.

This strikes me as more of a formal, academic writing exercise than anything else. A “can I write this way” exercise. One often using elements I either would obviously know nothing about, like the in-jokes of 1990-era Vietnam, or generally dislike, such as dreams and flights of frivolous fancy. I saw some things to admire, mostly in the effect generated by its looping repeated short sentences, but without a better story to serve it was a pretty dull reading experience I have to say.

2.5 if I could give half starts on this app. Why can’t we give half stars.

Two passages from Chinatown:

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I don’t want the whole school to explode in a collective fit of stress, so when they have their break I stay in the classroom, when they have lunch in the cafeteria I sit in the staff room chewing my sandwich. I never go to the cafeteria to announce that this blouse or these shoes I’m wearing were bought in Auchan in last July’s sales, to debate the merits of gas heaters vs. oil or electric, to ask which IT-savvy colleague can help unfreeze my home computer, presumably a victim of the peculiar virus that has infected twenty thousand Parisian computers, as was announced on television yesterday. And I never pay five euros a term for the right to put my own mug in the staff room, so that whenever I’m show more thirsty I can add a spoonful of coffee and two sugar blocks, pour on some boiled water and drink, all the while complaining that someone has used my mug by mistake and demanding the culprit be brought to justice, then put on the wall a sheet of paper with neatly printed big letters: one should only drink from one’s own mug. The next day a new line is guaranteed to appear on the sheet, no less big and no less neat: what an interesting suggestion.

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A year later in Paris, I could introduce myself as a writer only to receive pitying looks and comments that if pen and paper saves me a visit to the shrink’s couch, more power to me. Every September the book market would be flooded with five thousand debut novels out of nowhere, as soon as you stepped into FNAC you would be assaulted with a zillion authors and two zillion book titles, the reader feeling baffled would soon give up and come back home to their cozy stack of DVD’s, where a mere hour and twenty minutes bestowed several Oscars’ worth of entertainment. A year later in France, I could put a manuscript in an envelope and with bated breath send it off to some publishing house only to get a response months later, if I was lucky, that my manuscript had been read, and found not so bad, but had not been judged to belong to any genre, whether thriller or romance or sci-fi, and therefore no one could figure out who would read it or in what circumstance. Ten years later in Paris, I’ve come to know that I was but one of twenty thousand writers of the same generation, living in the same city, embarking on the same search for a publisher, the same quest for our own unique voice, preferably a voice louder than the rest. Ten years later in Paris, I’ve come to know that other authors had great artistic traditions to back them up, whereas those from Vietnam, Laos, or Cambodia were only seen as representatives of the numerous wounds of war and poverty.

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