Book Salon: Chinatown

This time, we will read Chinatown by Thuận, winner of an English Pen Award.

About the book (publisher's description):

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.

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.

Chinatown is a fever dream, a hallucination, a loop in time and life that Thuân 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

Reviews: Asian Review of Books, Asymptote, Astra, Saigoneer

This event is for Asia Society Members only. How to become a member?

Attendance is free. We appreciate if you let us know that you'll be attending in the Book Salon WhatsApp group chat or via mail to sjung@asiasociety.org.

About Asia Society Book Salon

In the Asia Society Switzerland Book Salon, we open a direct window into Asian lives. Histories, discourses, and cultures make up the textures of novels. Together we read and discuss fiction from or about Asia in an informal setting to intentionally change our perspectives as a practice in curiosity, openness, and empathy. We meet four times a year – in person in Zurich, if possible. For more information about upcoming meetings and books to read, please join the WhatsApp group or contact us at switzerland@asiasociety.org.