Chinatown
Thuan [Thuân], Nguyen An Ly (translation)Winner, 2023 National Translation Award in Prose
An exquisite & intense journey through the labyrinths of Hanoi, Leningrad, & Paris—through dreams, memory, & loss
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 & 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, & 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, & 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, & deeply moving monologue from beside the subway tracks, the narrator attempts to once & for all face the past & exorcize the passion that haunts her.
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Thuân (Đoan Ánh Thuân) was born in 1967 in Hanoi. She studied at universities in Russia & France & now lives in Paris. Chinatown is her twelfth novel. She is a recipient of the Writers’ Union Prize, the highest award in Vietnamese literature.
Nguyễn An Lý lives in Hochiminh City, translates books mostly from English to Vietnamese & co-edits the online open-acess Zzz Review. She has over 20 translations published under various names & in various genres, including authors such as Margaret Atwood, George Orwell, Kazuo Ishiguro, Borges, & the poetry in The Lord of the Rings. As an editor, she has worked with translations from Nabokov, A. S. Byatt, Barthes, Joseph Campbell, Viet Thanh Nguyen & Liu Cixin, among others.