Chinatown by Thuan
An unfinished love story, humorous and haunting, of diasporic lives in Vietnam and France. The Métro shudders to a halt: an unattended bag has been found. For the narrator, a Vietnamese woman teaching in the Parisian suburbs, a fantastical interior monologue begins, looking back to her childhood in early ‘80s Hanoi, university studies in Leningrad, and the travails and ironies of life in France as an immigrant and single mother. But most of all she thinks of Chinese-Vietnamese Thụy, who she married in the aftermath of the Sino-Vietnamese war, much to her parents’ disapproval, and whom she has not seen now for eleven years. The mystery around his disappearance feeds her memories, dreams and speculations, in which the idea of Saigon’s Chinatown looms large. There’s even a novel-in-progress, titled I’m Yellow, whose protagonist’s attempts to escape his circumstances mirror the author-narrator’s own.
Thuận was born in 1967 in Hanoi. She studied at Pyatigorsk University (Russia) and at la Sorbonne in Paris. She is the author of ten novels and a recipient of the Writers’ Union Prize, the highest award in Vietnamese literature. 7 of her novels were translated and published in France. Chinatown, her debut novel in English, won a PEN Translates Award, the 2023 ALTA National Translation Award, is the Runner-Up for TA First Translation Prize 2023, and was shortlisted for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize. She currently lives in Paris. NGUYỄN AN LÝ lives in Hochiminh City. She has over 20 translations into Vietnamese, published under various names and in various genres, including authors such as Margaret Atwood, Donna Tartt, Kazuo Ishiguro, Richard Flanagan, J. L. Borges, and the poetry in The Lord of the Rings. As an editor, she has worked on translations from Nabokov, A. S. Byatt, Roland Barthes, Joseph Campbell, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Liu Cixin, among others. Chinatown by Thuận, her debut translation into English, won an English PEN Translates Award and the 2023 ALTA National Translation Award in Prose. She co-founds and co-edits the independent online Zzz Review.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781911284673 |
| ISBN 10 | 1911284673 |
| Title | Chinatown |
| Author | Thuan |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Tilted Axis Press |
| Year published | 2022-06-30 |
| Number of pages | 192 |
| Prizes | Short-listed for ALTA National Translation Award 2023, Short-listed for Republic of Consciousness Prize 2023 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |