Chinatown
By: Thuận ; translated from the Vietnamese by Nguyễn An Lý
Contributors: Nguyễn An Lý, translator
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published: 2022
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 160
ISBN-13: 9780811231886; 9780811231893
Copyright date: 2022
Subjects: Vietnamese; Fiction; Man-woman relationships; Memory; Mothers; Foreign countries
Work titles: Chinatown
Description: "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"--
Notes: "A New Directions paperbook original"