Chinatown
Thuận
Tilted Axis Press / New Directions: 2022
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At the turn of the millennium, Ien Ang, a cultural studies scholar, posed an interesting question: ‘Can one say no to Chineseness?’ In 2005, Thuận, a Vietnamese-born writer, as if in reply, concluded through her novel Chinatown that one cannot. The author went on to suggest that a better question should be: what can an outsider with no Chinese background or upbringing say about Chineseness?

Thuận (full name Đoàn Ánh Thuận) was born in 1967 in Hanoi. She has been living in France for the past three decades, after obtaining her bachelor degree in the former Soviet Union and master’s degrees from universities in Paris in the early 1990s. Since her first appearance on the literary scene with the novel Made in Vietnam (2002), Thuận has established herself as one of the most prolific and exciting writers in Vietnamese and with a following both in Vietnam and overseas. To date she has written ten works of fiction and is also a prolific translator of French literature into Vietnamese. Chinatown is by far her most distinctive work.

• Tags: Ally Le, Issue 27, Thuận, Vietnam