Chinatown by Thuan

WINNER OF THE 2023 NATIONAL TRANSLATION AWARD IN PROSE

An abandoned package is discovered in the Paris Metro: the subway workers suspect it's a terrorist bomb. A Vietnamese woman sitting nearby, her son asleep on her shoulder, waits and begins to reflect on her life, from her constrained childhood in communist Hanoi, to a long period of study in Leningrad during the Gorbachev period, and finally to the Parisian suburbs where she now teaches English. Through everything runs her passion for Thuy, the father of her son, a writer who lives in Saigon's Chinatown, and who, with the shadow of the China-Vietnam border war falling darkly between them, she has not seen for eleven years.

Through her breathless, vertiginous, and deeply moving monologue from beside the subway tracks, the narrator attempts to once and for all face the past and exorcize the passion that haunts her.

Author: Thuan
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published: 06/21/2022
Pages: 184
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.40lbs
Size: 7.80h x 5.10w x 0.50d
ISBN: 9780811231886

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 05/01/2022
Publishers Weekly 05/16/2022