Chinatown

Shortlisted, 2025 Chommanard International Women's Literary Award

Runner-up, 2024 TA First Translation Prize

Winner, 2023 ALTA National Translation Award

Longlisted, 2023 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation

Shortlisted, 2023 Republic of Consciousness Award

Winner, English PEN Translates Award

An unfinished love story, humorous and haunting, of diasporic lives in Vietnam and France.The Metro 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 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.