Doan Anh Thuân

Thuận is a Vietnamese author based in Paris.

She has published eleven novels to date and writes in both Vietnamese and French.

Her novel « Chinatown », translated by Nguyễn An Lý, was named one of The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2023 and won the 2023 ALTA National Translation Award.

Her novel « Elevator in Saigon » won a 2024 English PEN Translates Award.

Her most recent novel, B-52 ou celle qui aimait Tolstoï, was selected as a 2025 Goncourt favorite.

Her work has been translated into English, French, Russian, Hebrew, Swedish, and Norwegian.

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CHINATOWN

Country: Vietnam

Publisner Name: Tilted Axis Press (London) and New Directions (New York)

Original Language: Vietnamese

The Métro 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 Thụy, 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.

Interspersed with extracts from I’m Yellow, the narrator's book-length monologue is an attempt, at once desperate, ironic, and self-deprecating, to come to terms with the passions that haunts her.