Tom Pepinsky

Category: Asia

  • Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (5): Thuận, Chinatown

    This is the fifth in a series of short reviews on modern Southeast Asian fiction. There will be spoilers. As always I’m pleased to have had the chance to develop these thoughts as part of a course, so credit is due to my student as well.

    Previous reviews:

    1. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (1): Rachel Heng, The Great Reclamation
    2. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (2): Gina Apostol, Insurrecto
    3. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (3): Ayu Utami, Saman
    4. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (4): Tash Aw, We, The Survivors

    Thuận, Chinatown

    When you pick up this slim and dense little book, you might infer that the basic theme would have something to do with overseas Chinese. Perhaps upon seeing the diacritics in the author’s name, you might infer that it is about a Chinese community in Vietnam, or Vietnamese of Chinese descent in some other country, like the US.

    You would be right, but Chinatown is so much more than that. Thuận has written a novel that reads, in the words of my student, “like a fever dream.”* It is about identity, about place, about connections across distance, about memory and loss and sadness.

    To understand why it reads like a fever dream, start with the literal structure of the novel. Chinatown is written as a single, 170 page-long paragraph. There are no indents, there are no chapters. I normally enjoy any kind of art in which the form represents the content, and here, the sentence-after-sentence-after-sentence with no breaks definitely forces you to read breathlessly, hurriedly, as if you’re in the middle of one long fever dream.

    So it works—form represents content—but it is a tough read! You have to put the book down to catch your breath, because you cannot read it all in one go, but there’s no natural breakpoint in the book. Picking it up after a day or so you find yourself thrust right back into the fever dream. It is disorienting, which is obviously the point.

    The content is more than just some fever dream, though. Chinatown is the daydream thoughts of an unnamed Narrator, a middle-aged Vietnamese woman living in Paris, where she teaches English. She finds herself stuck on the Métro one afternoon after an abandoned bag is discovered at a station, so everyone has to wait for the police to come and destroy it.** As she waits, the thinks about her son Vĩnh, who is the same height now as her long-lost lover and husband Thụy, Vĩnh’s father, whom she hasn’t seen in twelve years.

    The book is 170 dense pages of Narrator’s rumination on her longing for Thụy, how she waits for him, how she wonders where he is, how her life has progressed in parallel with his, from Hanoi to Leningrad and back to Hanoi and then to Paris. Narrator has been moderately successful in her life, doing well in school and winning a scholarship to study in the Soviet Union, from which an opportunity to live and work in France subsequently followed. But she was unlucky to fall in love with Thụy, who is (was?) a Vietnamese of Chinese descent.***

    I’ll pause here with a long aside. Hanoi, Leningrad, Paris… Chinatown is a special book because it is one of the most prominent novels about modern Vietnam that is available in English and which is not about the United States at all. I think the US war (*ahem*, the Second Indochina War) might be mentioned once or twice in passing, but only obliquely, and not as a plot point. The relevant war in Chinatown is the Third Indochina War, part of which included a short conflict between China and Vietnam. You might imagine that a Vietnamese of Chinese descent like Thụy would have a tough time in northern Vietnam under such conditions, and you’d be correct.

    Chinatown is thus unlike the outstanding new English-language fiction on Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora by such authors as Viet Thanh Nguyen and Ocean Vuong, in which “Vietnam” is mostly the south, and there is a massive historical break at 1975. After that break, “Vietnam” is not just in Vietnam itself, it is also in Westminster, CA and Hartford, CT—to say nothing of Paris or Hong Kong. In Chinatown, though, “Vietnam” is the north, centered around Hanoi and Thụy’s hometown of Yên Khê, also in the north, in Nghệ An province. Chinatown reminds us that Vietnam’s history continued after the war with the Americans. Vietnam’s transnational history and diasporic linkages have an entirely non-American history too.

    That said, I am an American reading about Vietnam. And, I am just barely old enough to be a member of the generation of Americans who have some passive knowledge of Vietnam through pop culture and the general milieu of the late 1970s and early 1980s: words and phrases like Tet, Cholon, Tan Son Nhat, Hamburger Hill, Rolling Thunder, Da Nang, Khe Sanh, Viet Cong each vaguely connote something having to do with Vietnam, even if you don’t know what exactly they refer to.**** There is no Khe Sanh in Chinatown, no mention of Hamburger Hill. Rather, the only possibly familiar term to an American of my age that shows up in Chinatown is Cholon, or in Vietnamese, Chợ Lớn, the Chinese quarter of Ho Chi Minh City whose name translates literally to “Big Market.” Click the link in the previous sentence to be reminded about why Americans talked about “Cholon.”

    Narrator thinks about Chợ Lớn because that is where Thụy goes after struggling to make a life with her in Hanoi. Thụy’s family name is Ấu, which is a distinctively Chinese name, even thoughnearly all ethnic Vietnamese names have Sinitic origins. Narrator’s parents do not acknowledge Thụy, although they do acknowledge their grandson Vĩnh. Whereas Narrator ha a chance to further her education in the Soviet Union, Thụy faces constraints on his education and career options given his ancestry in the time and place where he lives. Moving to Chợ Lớn is a way to start a new, but it is also a way to leave his marriage with Narrator.

    Throughout the book, Narrator recounts her time together with Thụy, but also her life abroad and apart from him. That Chợ Lớn is a “Chinatown” is not immediately obvious unless you are familiar with Vietnam, but it becomes clear as the novel progresses. Because Vĩnh has Chinese grandparents, Narrator also daydreams of his future as a representative of a Chinese company. Vĩnh, for his part, wonders why his mother never followed his father to Chợ Lớn, which Vĩnh calls “the most important Chinatown in all of Asia.”

    The parallels between Thụy’s unknown life in Chợ Lớn and Narrator’s life in Paris are rather subtle, but she does remark that from the Parisian perspective, she and Vĩnh and every other Southeast Asian is basically Chinese. Vĩnh takes Chinese lessons (not Vietnamese lessons), Narrator has her hair done by a Chinese woman, she notes the Chinese shops across Paris with their waving prosperity cats, and so forth. As we read,

    Narrator has gone to Paris, but for her, it is a Chinatown too.

    It’s hard to summarize a fever dream, so there are many more details to this story. What I take away is how tangled the diasporic webs of identity and place can be, across borders, within borders, across oceans, and within families.

    NOTES

    * From our experience, I would not recommend reading this after having received your seasonal flu and/or COVID shots.

    ** The book was first written in 2004, so this makes a lot of sense.

    *** I recommend googling Viet Hoa, which is Vietnamese for “Sino-Vietnamese,” to discover how many places of business around the world, from Minnetonka to Perth, have that name. Even the big Asian store in my home town of Harrisburg, PA is Hoa Dong [đông = east].

    **** I propose that one way to demarcate the difference between Generation X and anyone who comes after is whether or not you generally know what Bruce Springsteen is talking about when he sings, in “Born in the U.S.A.,” that he had a “brother at Khe Sanh.” This generational distinction jumps out at me every time I hear Courtney Barnett‘s “Depreston,” which is about buying a house at an estate sale in the Australian suburbs in the late 2010s, and includes these lines:

    Then I see the hand rail in the shower
    A collection of those canisters for coffee, tea, and flour
    And a photo of a young man in a van in Vietnam

    Time marches on. When I was in college, I took a course on the history of the Vietnam War that had an enrollment of 200 students, almost none of them heritage students. This would be impossible today. But again, time marches on. If you’ve read this far, I give you permission to laugh at the observation that in Australian English, man, van, Vietnam, and Khe Sanh all rhyme (see, for example, Cold Chisel’s “Khe Sanh“). And actually, the Australian pronunciation of Vietnam is closer to the original Vietnamese than the American English is!

  • Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (2): Gina Apostol, Insurrecto

    This is the second in a series of short reviews on modern Southeast Asian fiction. There will be spoilers. As always I’m pleased to have had the chance to develop these thoughts as part of a course, so credit is due to my student as well.

    Previous review:

    1. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (1): Rachel Heng, The Great Reclamation

    Gina Apostol, Insurrecto

    This is one of those books that you read about before you read. Gina Apostol is a giant of modern Philippine literature, and Insurrecto is a heck of a book.

    The early chapters, much like the reviews, hinted at just how many layers of meaning would be revealed throughout the course of the book, but upon encountering this passage I knew that Apostol was going to be throwing heaters with every pitch:

    This is wickedly funny stuff. There are levels.

    Rather than try to summarize Insurrecto‘s plot, or to explain what the book is about, let me instead just describe some of what’s “in” it. (It will be for you, the reader, to read and organize all of this for yourself.) At one level, it is the story of two contemporary women, one American and the other Filipino, who are writing—and not exactly collaboratively—a screenplay about a massacre of Philippine villagers by American occupying soldiers in 1901. They have different interpretations, different points of emphasis. The American, Chiara, is writing a screenplay based on a movie her father, Ludo Brasi, had made about the same massacre, in the 1970s. The Filipino, Magsalin, lives in New York but is enlisted by Chiara to help with her script. They travel to Samar, the location of the massacre, Ludo’s film, and Magsalin’s home region. This happens in the contemporary period, under the brutal Duterte administration.

    Questions of authenticity abound, and also questions of perspective, all intertwined. We read various scripts not as scripts, but as descriptions of the events, which are themselves invoking the broader questions of authenticity and perspective, as in a passage where an American photographer in 1901 describes the veracity of the images his camera takes to a Filipino counterpart who describes his own eyes as perfectly capable of capturing what the camera captures. Or discussions of a beach town as a trompe-l’œil, like a film set to conjure what a beach town is supposed to feel like, but nevertheless with real people, real flowers, real guns.

    So, as you can see, levels. Instead of reading my opinions you should just wade right in, splash around, and enjoy the whole thing. There will be bits that you get, and there will be bits that you miss (like me), and there will be bits that make you think differently, and then you’ll immediately second-guess those—and then, you’ll wonder whether or not you actually do get those bits that you thought you got. As Viet Thanh Nguyen writes in his back-cover endorsement, the book is “meta-fictional, meta-cinematic, even meta-meta.”

    One thing I found especially enjoyable about the book was the writing, how Apostol uses language and dialogue to conjure a sense of whimsy and humor in the context of a lot of heavy themes. Take this exchange:

    “the plate like petals, a corolla of carbs” is just excellent—the book is full of such expressions. But the dialogue here makes the whole thing even better. You can pay attention to no other part of the book and still really enjoy all the exchanges like this. You can even enjoy Apostol’s witty dialogue at otherwise difficult passages:

    Here again are those themes of authenticity and perspective. What’s real? Who decides? But also, LOL, “that’s the wrong texture. Meth is fine and bright.”*

    It’s not all heavy. You can also enjoy the parts that discuss how the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi speak Tagalog. You can enjoy knowing that Chiara is obviously Sophia Coppola, and Ludo is Francis Ford Coppola, and that Apocalypse Now was filmed in the Philippines: a story about Vietnam that’s a retelling of a story about Africa was filmed in the Philippines.** You can even enjoy the parts that describe young American soldiers who are as naive as can be—sometimes attempting to be principled, oftentimes not, but never heroes. That said, there are no heroes in Insurrecto. No character is entirely sympathetic, no character is pure. Casiana Nacionales, the insurrectionist after whom the book is titled, is the only exception.***

    I take two things away from Insurrecto. Not themes exactly, but rather impressions.

    One is interconnectedness. No specific passage in the book does this, but I am left with the impression that we are to understand the massacre of 1901, the history of the Philippines, and our efforts describe it and narrate it to others, as being connected far beyond the islands themselves. There is no way to describe the Philippines on its own, from an aperspectival perspective. References to Magellan, to the similarities between lechon and porchetta, to American soldiers communicating with the village chief in a basic Spanish learned in Cuba… and of course, the fact of travel, of living abroad, of working across distance, both real and virtual, which is a constant theme for every character. Even the proliferation of terms and phrases in Tagalog and Waray, this reminds the reader that there is always translation of some form, and that we make our way through our connected worlds with, at most, an imperfect and incomplete view of those connections and how they made the world we inhabit.

    The other is honesty, about perspective, about history, about our ability to comprehend. The camera never captures reality, the script never records it, but our eyes don’t either. I truly appreciate how thoroughly Apostol establishes this point: we are never “inside” the history, we are always outside it. We have roles in history****, not places in it. Magsalin tells Chiara, who cries out for justice for two victims of Duterte’s drug war,

    do you think you will exact it in the middle of the road in a town where no one knows you, a woman in short shorts and bloody platform sandals, with even your continuity in question, do you think that is your role right now, to be the avenger in a time that does not give a fuck?

    Magsalin is speaking to us, yes, but I believe that she is also speaking to herself. Look how she breaks that fourth wall, right there without even making a big deal about it. Roles, not places.

    NOTES

    * One example of where I’m not sure if I get it, or if the levels are too subtle for me, is Chiara’s description of crack as meth. Crack is a cocaine product; meth is called crank. Is that another level? I am pleased to learn, however, that shabu means the same thing in Tagalog as it does in Indonesian. (For the of completeness, let me also note that shabu-shabu is something else entirely.)

    ** And if you click here and fast-forward to 2:45, you can hear 5-year old Sofia Coppola sing the Philippine national anthem. Hand to God.

    *** Read Apostol herself on this point, she might not agree with my view. I do agree that she is the character that we need to “side with,” because—indeed—“atrocity happens, this war happened.” That, if nothing else, pins the novel down as being more than just a literary exercise.

    **** Obligatory reference to how history comes from the same root as story goes here.