CHINATOWN

A Vietnamese novelist contemplates the complexities of her life, culture, and lost marriage while waiting on a stalled Paris Métro train.

At the heart of this novel is a single mother unable to let go of the memory of her former husband, Thụy, and her conviction that their marriage back in Vietnam was doomed from the start due to the clash between their cultural backgrounds. The book takes place in 2004. When an abandoned duffel bag is discovered on the Métro, the novelist and her 12-year-old son—heading to a table tennis match—are caught in an indefinite delay as they wait for the authorities to arrive and investigate the potential terrorist threat. With the possibility of their lives being in danger creating a tension with the interminable limbo of waiting for the police, she recalls falling in love with Thụy when they were teenagers in the 1970s, in the run-up to the Sino-Vietnamese War, despite the fact that he was from an ethnically Chinese family in Saigon. When Thụy leaves her and their baby, she immigrates to Paris and works as an English teacher, eventually meeting another man whom she identifies only as “the guy,” seeks connections to Thụy through Parisian Chinese culture and people, and continues to resist her parents’ pleas to finish her abandoned dissertation and marry her beau. The novel’s form mimics both the narrator's situation of being suspended in a liminal state of waiting and the natural circuitous path of a person's thoughts, with sentences being repeated and scenes frequently circling back to the same places. Unfortunately, the book’s style comes at the cost of real poignancy, as the reader tends to be lulled into a state of disconnected boredom.

An ambitious experimental novel that succeeds in form and subject but is sometimes tedious to read.