Tom Pepinsky

Category: Teaching

  • 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 (4): Tash Aw, We, The Survivors

    This is the fourth 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
    2. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (2): Gina Apostol, Insurrecto
    3. Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (3): Ayu Utami, Saman

    Tash Aw, We, The Survivors

    The problem with writing a review of Tash Aw‘s recent novel We, The Survivors is that I am biased, due to the plain fact that I find the subject matter to be intrinsically interesting. It covers so much in such a tightly written book: Kuala Lumpur, inequality amidst modernization, ethnicity and language, the mechanics of illicit economies, migration and citizenship. It is the truest book I have read so far this semester. Every character, every situation, every place, I can picture it in my mind. That the novel describes a wholly realistic tragedy and the hard lives surrounding it makes its realism particularly meaningful for people know Malaysia. I suspect that if you don’t know Malaysia at all, you will still find something to love about this book.

    SPOILERS FROM THE JUMP: This is a story of a man named Ah Hock, who grew up hard in the Kuala Lumpur exurbs, and who murders a Bangladeshi man who trades in the illegal migrant workers that are so important to making contemporary Malaysia’s economy work. This introduction to the book is stark and sudden, but that is the core of the plot, and Aw beautifully captures the starkness of modern life for poor Malaysians living in and around KL. As a reader, you learn that Ah Hock is a convicted murderer early on, but you learn the story of the crime—and of Ah Hock—over the course of the novel.

    The themes that Aw covers are central to modern Malaysian society and politics. One central theme is poverty: Ah Hock grows up in a broken home with a hardworking mother who fights to put food on the table. She and Ah Hock work a small plot of land in their village in the Klang Valley to make it productive enough to feed them, and to bring some farmed fish to market. Ah Hock spends some time in KL as well, selling pills and a bit of meth with Ah Keong, whom he knows from back in the village. Whereas Ah Hock is modest, Ah Keong is boastful: Ah Hock doesn’t take well to city life, but Ah Keong styles himself a gangster businessman, and he is quick to anger and to use physical violence to get his way.* Ah Hock works other, more legitimate jobs—at an outdoor seafood restaurant, on a fish farm—and he even marries a striving young woman named Jenny with her own dreams of wealth and prosperity.

    But Ah Hock never gets ahead. His mother dies young of a preventable cancer. His marriage with Jenny is unhappy (she finds herself pulled into an Amway-like scam) and they drift apart. Ah Hock works tirelessly, to little avail. Ah Keong is ultimately a destructive force in his life, bringing him opportunity but also danger. In the end, it is Ah Keong’s scheming to find Ah Hock some illegal immigrants to support Ah Hock’s work crew that leads to the murder that drives the plot.

    And yet what jumped out to me throughout the novel was Ah Hock’s insistence that he had a choice. This creates an interesting tension. On the one hand, the book describes social systems that are hard constraints. Poverty is poverty. The powerful will take what they can and the weak will suffer. The jungle and the sea will take back the land. And yet at key moments Ah Hock speculates—in first person, as the book is written—about his choices. What he might of done, the offramps he might have taken. Near the novel’s dramatic climax, it is therefore very poignant to read this passage:

    Another central theme in the book is the complex interaction of race, ethnicity, citizenship, and class. In the standard schematic of peninsular Malaysian ethnicity, there are Malays, Chinese, Indians, and others. Malays were historically marginalized during the period of early capitalist development under colonialism, leading to a ranked ethnic system at independence in which the average material prosperity of the Malay community lagged behind that of Indians and especially Chinese. That’s the story.**

    In We, The Survivors, the main characters are Chinese, and they are poor. They turn to petty crime to get ahead. They sell and take drugs, they work dirty and dangerous jobs outside, and they are exploited by a business class that is both Malay and Chinese. Their labor makes KL work. It thus inverts the standard narrative.

    But there is another layer to this story, which is post-independence immigration. From the very first time I set foot in Malaysia, I remember the open secret of illegal labor migration. I saw it in the dark corners of Bukit Bintang, in the lorries on the federal highway, in the mamak stalls in Shah Alam, in the palm oil plantations of Sabah. These laborers come to Malaysia to find work and to escape oppression: they are Bangladeshi, Nepali, Rohingya, Indonesian.*** The book describes so plainly how this illicit economy works. Everything is completely realistic and believable.

    There are also, at various points, descriptions of Black Africans living in Malaysia. This one stuck with me:

    Again, this rings completely true to me. I can imagine it with no trouble at all.

    As much as this is a story about poverty and inequality, it is also a story about migration and citizenship. Ah Hock’s father migrates to Singapore and disappears. Illegal migrant labor fuels the economy. Much depends on the ability to get papers, which establish a legal right to work, but which also establish a person as a legal and legible rights-bearing person. They can command higher wages and can call the police (even if, as the Nigerians demonstrate, there is no guarantee that a racialized Other will be protected). Those without papers are vulnerable, and so they are cheap.

    The ordinariness with which characters treat the desperate lives of illegal workers is striking. They are simply expendable, and this comes up explicitly. A Malaysian audience might remark on the additional fact that many of the migrants are Muslims, and the absence of pan-religious solidarity in the face of the boundaries of citizenship and the exigencies of capitalist development. In the end, Ah Hock’s murder of the Bangladeshi fixer brings this home for us.

    There is much more to enjoy in this book. Without spoiling the whole thing, I will mention that an important minor character is a young Malaysian PhD candidate writing a dissertation abroad, who has returned home to do her field research—which includes interviewing Ah Hock. She embodies everything cosmopolitan and modern: she doesn’t eat carbs (so no rice or biscuits, LOL), she finds the grocery store impossibly dirty, she is paralyzed by the injustice she sees, she is embarrassed for Ah Hock when he doesn’t know that she is in a same sex relationship, and so forth. She is a great foil for Ah Hock, and for any Western reader.

    But in the end, We, The Survivors is just a well-written novel. Here is a book by an author who knows what he is doing, and it’s plain from the very first page that you are in for a difficult but rewarding account of modern Malaysia.

    NOTES

    * I couldn’t help but remember Jason (Ah Loong) from Sepet, the poor yet earnest Chinese boy from Ipoh caught up in a web of petty crime to make ends meet.

    ** Reality is more complicated than that. Someday I will finish a book that describes that reality…

    *** I cannot count the number of times a Malay acquaintance back in the 2000s told me about urban crime in KL, only to clarify that the problem wasn’t Malaysians, it was Indonesians. Decolonize that.