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Image of Chinatown

Chinatown

Thuan, Nguyen An Ly

From Shelf: Women in Translation Celebration!

An unfinished love story, humorous and haunting, of diasporic lives in Vietnam and France. Interspersed with extracts from I'm Yellow, the narrator's book-length monologue is an attempt, at once desperate, ironic, and self-deprecating, to come to terms with the passions that haunts her.

The metro shudders to a halt: an unattended bag has been found, and terrorism is suspected. For the narrator, a young Vietnamese woman teaching English in the Parisian suburbs, time stops. Her son falls asleep on her shoulder and a long interior monologue begins, looking back over her life thus far.

From a constrained childhood in post-communist Hanoi, to a period of study in '80's Russia, she tries to understand everything that has brought her to this point. Through it all runs her passion for Thuy, a writer who lives in Saigon's Chinatown, and who she has not seen for eleven years.

Interspersed with extracts from Thuy's novel, the narrator's monologue is an attempt, at once desperate, humorous, and self-deprecating, to fix the past once and for all and exorcise the passion that haunts her.Winner of an English PEN Award'Chinatown is a fever dream, a hallucination, a loop in time and life that Thuan masterfully deploys to capture the disorienting and debilitating effects of migration, racism, and a broken heart in both Vietnam and France. I was completely immersed in this spellbinding novel' - Viet Thanh Nguyen.

Format:
Paperback / softback
Pages:
192
Publisher:
Tilted Axis Press
ISBN:
9781911284673
Published Date:
30/6/2022
Dimensions:
198mm x 129mm
Category:
Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

RRP: £9.99

Format: Paperback / softback

ISBN: 9781911284673

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