Chinatown

An unfinished love story, humorous and haunting, of diasporic lives in Vietnam and France. The Mtro 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 Thy, 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 Saigons Chinatown looms large. Theres even a novel-in-progress, titled Im Yellow, whose protagonists attempts to escape his circumstances mirror the author-narrators own.