In the finest of fictions, many worlds converge. All the maps the writer has walked through, all the sights seen and tasted, all that was heard and spoken. The work of lauded Vietnamese author Thuận exists in this potent amalgam of experience, bringing the poetry of hidden meanings to the surface with her singular perspective. In her Anglophone debut, Chinatown, translated by Nguyễn An Lý and soon to be published by Tilted Axis, Thuận paints a thinking portrait from the Paris metro to the streets of Chợ Lớn, a love story of trespasses and reimagined borders—fictions residing in fictions, life nestled in life. In this following interview, the author speaks to Phương Anh about Chinatown’s unique structure, how her work in French translation has informed her writing, and the complex political relationships informing her narratives.
Phương Anh (PA): Based on your previous interviews, it seems that rhythm is very important to you. When I was reading your writing, I was easily swept away by its cadence—could you speak to your process and style?
Thuận (T): I wanted this book to have one single rhythm, cut into three steady parts with two short breaks entitled “I’m Yellow”; I did this to both challenge and encourage the reader’s patience. I think my novels’ rhythms should attack the reader, confront them, suck them in. And when I’m feeling out the rhythm, I like to think of myself as trying to compose a piece of music.
Also, I wanted to find words that are concise and clear, with no hidden meanings, few adjectives, and generally without many embellishments. I use short sentences, one following another, utilizing space so the words may gain more strength. And then I would repeat—like small waves that come in every now and again, disappearing into the rock and sand. That’s how I approached writing Chinatown. The cadence, for the most part, is created by repetition—of a word group, a sentence, or even a whole passage. It could also be an action, a saying, a name.
PA: I feel that you really have a meticulous and, one could say, impersonal approach towards writing. For instance, in an interview with BBC Vietnam, you said that you don’t write to confess. What did you mean by that exactly?
T: I didn’t want the novel to become a memoir, but rather a direct experience of consciousness, taken from the disordered and persistent thoughts of the main character. For many people, writing is about opening up about oneself. At twenty-six, after ten years being away from home, I began to write. But not for the purpose of talking about my life. My first thought was to serve a desire, a fantasy, a need to escape from myself, from my life.
Here, the need to write informs the responsibility of writing. In other words, a writer becomes professional only when they can express, defend, and prove their attitude towards reality. For me, writing is difficult. Writing long is even more difficult. With novels, the number of pages itself is already a challenge. Not to mention the structure, style, rhythm, characters. . . I think of writing a novel as a dangerous adventure—the most dangerous thing being not knowing where it’s going to go.
PA: Besides being an author, you are also a translator, and a ruthless one at that. When editing the French translation of Thư gửi Mina, you cut out almost one fourth of the text, feeling that there was too much excess. Could you tell me why you decided to do so?
T: Thư gửi Mina is a novel with thirteen chapters, composed of letters written to Mina—a girl from the main character’s time in Soviet Russia. When writing that particular novel, I tried to write longer, sort of drifting from one story to another. In Vietnamese, I guess the result wasn’t too bad. But when I was editing the French translation, the language of Descartes helped me to realize that there were too many words—that it was an overkill. After editing out around twenty thousand words in the French edition, I took out the Vietnamese one again and revised it. Hopefully, Thư gửi Mina will be re-published with a different spirit: short and succinct, strong and direct, following the economical literary art that I’m pursuing.
PA: You also said that translation helped you to see your work more clearly, which I find quite refreshing in a way, because people tend to focus on what is “lost in translation”.
T: Whenever I have doubts about a sentence I’ve just written, I double-check it by translating it into French and immediately, anything illogical or superfluous will come out. If translation takes one thing from us, it makes up for it in other ways.
PA: Reading your writings, I must say, the pleasure also lies in the references. You once said that you believe that a text should be representative of the writer’s literary background, and you seem to really like the idea of intertextuality, is that right?
T: Not a single piece of writing is completed in a vacuum. For example, when writing my novel B-52, I had to make a few nods towards great authors who have written about the war—War and Peace, All Quiet on Western Front, The Quiet American, Anne Frank’s diary, Pain. . . It was like—this idea, I will borrow it, but I will tell it in my own way! Ah, that idea, I will briefly touch upon it, because the reader already knows it well. Ah, that one is entirely my idea, only I could come up with that… Along those lines of thinking, a novel is never packaged neatly on paper or between covers, but carries its own strong literary background.
PA: Yes, and I personally could see that with your work—particularly French literature. For example, the theme of memory is very prominent. I feel that you are very much interested in the idea of memory in literature, a topic the French have shown great interest in, from Proust to Modiano.
T: If in Vietnamese there is only one past tense, then in French there are multiple: completed past, incomplete past, single past, composed past, the past that happened only once, the past that happened multiple times, the past that just happened, the past in the past, the past we thought happened but didn’t. . . The genius of In Search of Lost Time lies in its ability to use all of the past tenses in the French language. In my case, I am very much interested in investigating how I can bring that sensitivity towards time, particularly towards the past, into Vietnamese, the way I learnt it in French.
PA: Chinatown, your English debut, is a novel about many things, but I felt that at its core, it’s a love story—what do you think?
T: Chinatown is a star-crossed love story taking place during the border-war between Vietnam and China, between a woman from Hanoi and Thuỵ, her classmate who has Chinese heritage. The conflict between the two governments led to a deep division between the two peoples: someone with a Chinese surname, despite being born and raised in Vietnam, would be “asked” to leave the territory as soon as possible. x is amongst the families who decided to stay, and consequently, they had to endure the government’s suspicion and their community’s ostracization. After many years of studying in Leningrad, the main character returns to Hanoi and marries Thuỵ, but the marriage couldn’t escape disapproval—from both society and family. After a short while, they separate. Thuỵ gets on a train to Saigon’s Chinatown, and the main character goes to France with her son Vinh—they move far away, trying to forget that man with Chinese heritage.
PA: The short story, “I’m Yellow”, did you come up with it while writing Chinatown, or is this another short story you wrote first that you thought would be appropriate for the novel?
T: Part I of “I’m Yellow” is a short story that I wrote a long time ago, and part II was written for Chinatown. One of the purposes of the story is to show readers my conception of what literature is—the infinite possibilities of human imagination and fiction. In Chinatown, it is the main character who is writing “I’m Yellow”, and it’s an independent work that can be read and understood without guidance from the main text—Chinatown, the story of her life. However, I think “I’m Yellow” is an indispensable part of the main character. More than that, the story also shines light on parts that are obscured.
PA: Another thing I was intrigued by is the details on the relationship between Vietnam, Soviet Union, and China. In particular, the depiction of the main character’s parents’ Sinophobia.
T: During the Cold War and in the Socialist camp, Vietnam was seen as the youngest, and China and the Soviet Union were the older brothers. It was a complicated relationship, especially between Vietnam and China. The girl’s parents are just simple civilians, and due to the historical circumstances, they enjoyed material benefits from the Soviet Union, but stayed away from China to avoid political involvement.
PA: As someone who was once sent to the Soviet Union to study, how did that experience help or affect the way you view your writing and the attitudes towards the communist regime at that time?
T: After graduating from high school, I was one of the students selected by the government to study in Soviet Russia, and I attended Pyatigorsk Pedagogical University in Southern Russia for five years. But as for the reality of Russian people, I only gradually began to understand it when I left Russia for France. It seems it was only in France that I realized that I had just spent five years in the greatest stronghold of socialism. Compared to those who have not been to Russia, this can be considered a singular experience—especially those five years marked by the Perestroika reform, which put an end to the Cold War, which in turn led to the war in Vietnam. To this day, many of my friends regret studying in Russia, but I don’t share that feeling. Russia and Russians are still somewhere amidst my novels; I wanted to understand what, after seven decades of vigorous growth, led to the Soviet Union’s sudden disintegration from the inside out—as even students like me, who were at the heart of the dissolution, went through it almost obliviously. And I think that while searching for the truth about Russia and the Russian people in those years, many of my own image of Vietnam and the Vietnamese people was shattered.
PA: Another thing I notice about your novels is that the characters are always searching for an answer to a question, which adds a sense of mystery to your work. Do you think that when you write your last book, you will find the answer to life’s most mysterious question—as the main character does?
T: It is true that my characters are always driven by the desire to uncover secrets hidden somewhere in the midst of their seemingly flat lives. Most of the time, they are living in a state of skepticism, tormented by imagination, analysis, and prediction. Their brains are like a multi-layered fiddle, constantly sifting through the information they receive, but I doubt that they’ll find the answers to their questions. The truth is always more complicated than people think.
PA: Yes, and I also think that your novel also brings a level of complexity into the situation of Vietnamese people. Do you think Vietnamese writing is often simplified in its depiction?
T: To the French and foreign readers in general, the Vietnamese landscape is beautiful, Vietnamese cuisine is delicious, Vietnamese women are gentle, Vietnamese men are brave. . . But I want to remove those clichés by writing about something completely different. My characters and stories are often considered too complicated, following neither moral nor cultural standards. People also complain that my writing is difficult to read—that if only Chinatown was divided into paragraphs, chapters, if the timelines were not jumbled up together, or if I didn’t joke around. . . But like everywhere else, the Vietnamese society of today—one with nearly one hundred million people—also has to deal with problems such as unemployment, corruption, prostitution, sense of alienation, and loneliness. Not to mention the characteristic oppression of the communist regime and the hard-to-heal wounds left by successive wars. All of this has made Vietnam a rich material and a complex subject.
PA: Most of your characters are migrants, from Vinh, to the kids in the class, to the hairdresser. In Chinatown, you also touched upon the plight of people of Chinese descent in Vietnam, who, in the words of a critic in Le Monde, are the “pariahs” of Vietnamese society. Would it be accurate to say that Chinatown is largely about exile/migration?
T: When I finished writing Chinatown, I suddenly realized that my main character was a Vietnamese woman with a Chinese husband, who went to France to work as an English teacher with a Russian accent, in high schools on the outskirts of Paris where most students are born of parents from North Africa. Her students adored McDonald’s, hated the US and the war in Iraq, and her son dreamed of having three nationalities and parachuting into Baghdad with the PRC army. Such was the contemporary image of global migration. But few in the West know that centuries ago, many Chinese people moved to live in neighboring countries, including Vietnam, and the Vietnam-China border war in the late 70s turned them into “pariahs” of Vietnamese society.
PA: Linking this theme to the title, do you see Chợ Lớn as a symbol of migrants and exiles in Chinatown? What do you think are the implications of Chinatown as a global phenomenon?
T: Chợ Lớn is the Chinatown of Vietnam and perhaps one of the first Chinatowns of Asia. Thanks to Marguerite Duras, Chợ Lớn has entered into the history of world literature, on those beautiful pages in The Lover with rows of two-story houses and tall buildings, the smell of caramel, roasted peanuts, and the smell of Chinese soup, grilled meat, herbs, jasmine, dust, gasoline, charcoal fire. . . Rejected by Hanoi, the character Thuỵ boarded the train into Chợ Lớn to take refuge in Saigon’s overseas Chinese community. In naming the novel Chinatown, I wanted it to represent exile in the broadest sense of the word.
PA: You once said: “I used to think that being bilingual was simply mastering two languages, but then I wondered why I couldn’t find a way to make them complement each other.” What do you hope the English translation will add to Chinatown?
T: When I read the English translation, I was fascinated by its gentle rhythm. I felt lulled by the endless whispers. Perhaps it is an imprint from the quiet and subtle temperament of the translator, and I think it renders the form of the inner monologue of Chinatown even more charming.
Born under bombs the US dropped on the North of Vietnam, Thuận grew up first in Hanoi, then Saigon, where she studied Vietnamese literature at school and read Hugo, Balzac and Flaubert at home. Soviet Russia took her in as an eighteen-year-old for five years of college education, but it was only at la Sorbonne that she discovered Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Mikhail Bakhtin. Writing ensnared her the moment she arrived in Paris, in the form of short stories which were all discarded a few years later when she threw herself into writing novels. She has just completed her tenth novel, B-52. Six of her novels have been translated into French and were published by Editions du Seuil and Riveneuve Editions.
Phương Anh is a Vietnamese emerging translator, writer, and editor at youth and BIPOC run magazine GENCONTROLZ. Her work has been featured on Asymptote, Interpret Magazine, Yuzu Press and Agapanthus. Currently, she is pursuing a BA in Language and Culture at University College London.
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