160 pages
English language
Published Dec. 14, 2022 by New Directions Publishing Corporation.
"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 Lenin-grad 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-interspersed with extracts from Thuy's own novel-the narrator attempts to once and for all face the past and exorcise the passion that haunts her"--
Narrated in one long paragraph (intercut with two pieces written by the narrator), Chinatown is the extraordinary, dreamlike self-analysis and biography of a Vietnamese English teacher in France, exploring her entire life while stuck on a metro train. The narrative skips from era to era, country to country, circling her marriage and the Chinese-Vietnamese husband who vanished from her life a decade earlier. Really tremendous.
