The year is 2004. Vietnam is now one, but reverberations of the preceding wars—and its chasms—remain. It is in this year that Thuận opens Elevator in Sài Gòn, her second book translated into English from Vietnamese by Nguyễn An Lý.
I have been looking forward to Thuận’s follow up in English since encountering her Anglophone debut Chinatown, also translated by Nguyễn. A story about a lost love told with hysterical abandon, Chinatown is also about empires and postcolonial afterlives. Elevator covers similar territory and travels between the past and present of Sài Gòn, Hà Nội and Paris.
Ostensibly, Elevator is a detective novel but, in true Thuận fashion, it unravels at every turn. Upon finding a mysterious name, Polotsky, in her recently-deceased mother’s belongings, the narrator sets on a journey to learn more about her mother’s past. She consults the Parisian phone book for the number of Mr Polotsky, meticulously calling each of them—either to no answer, or, in one case, to encounter an interlocutor accusing the narrator of stealing contested territories in the South China Sea (with the narrator wryly concluding that her accent must sound Asian). Other sleuthing attempts lead to similar results.
The prose moves languidly—unlike the breakneck speed of Chinatown—and is punctuated by absurdist scenes not uncommon in a Beckett play. A Vietnamese restaurant owner in Paris is described to have “an especially slap-inviting face” as he waxes lyrical about his culinary offerings to a group of diasporic Vietnamese. In an earlier scene in Vietnam, the narrator’s blond-haired, blue-eyed son asks innocently at the sight of any unfamiliar food, “What is a bitter god, can I eat that?” Later on, a housekeeper calls the son Little Nickson and implores him to eat nem (a fermented meat sausage) and not bomb the North further.
By the second half of the book, I find myself drawn into the pacing of a detective novel, almost speeding up to the end, wanting to learn the truth. This is where the conventions of the detective novel start to break down further, with the truth appearing just as hazy as the narrator’s memories of her mother. To say more would be to go into spoilers but in the narrator’s words, “coincidences were, it turned out, not that hard to come by.”
However, I do yearn for the emotional intensity of Chinatown—a feat achieved by telling a woman’s longing through a single, vertigo-inducing, 184-page-long paragraph. The narrator in Elevator remains distant throughout her detective journey, which lends a certain hollowness to the catharsis of the ending. At the same time, I could not help but reflect on my own biases as a reader, primarily in the need for closure. In both Chinatown and Elevator, Thuận has challenged my expectations as a reader by steering clear of totalizing truths and gestures, respectively, on both the narrative and novelistic level. Specificities instead reign in Thuận’s narratives, with a character being described as having “a Hanoian voice of the kind that could now rarely be heard, and only in Sài Gòn or in Paris, a Hanoian voice that belongs to a Hanoian who has been away from Hà Nội for at least half a century.”
Translator Nguyễn has also expressed, in a similar vein, her commitment against textual tourism in her translations, as a move towards what Martinican writer Éduoard Glissant describes as the right for opacity. In a diaCRITICS interview about Chinatown, Nguyễn says, “Thuận, who identifies as a “Vietnamese-Vietnamese” author writing in Vietnamese, doesn’t write to explain her heritage, or stake a claim for her rights, or conduct a journey to find her roots, to a (mostly) white audience. She is already a master of her world, addressing her peers.”
A master of her world indeed. In Elevator, Thuận rebels against the detective novel genre, and the way history is rendered in comically broad strokes, with easy villains and heroes. “More and more, my mother’s life resembled a treasure trove of questions that led to nowhere,” the narrator says at some point. But the dead do not speak. Nor will Elevator answer any question – or offer any satisfying closure, the way history often does.
References
diaCRITICS. “Against Textual Tourism: An Interview with Translator Nguyễn An Lý (Part One).” Accessed December 13, 2024. https://dvan.org/2022/09/against-textual-tourism-an-interview-with-translator-nguyen-an-ly-part-one/.
Thuận. Chinatown. New Directions Publishing, 2022.
Thuận. Elevator in Sài Gòn. New Directions Publishing, 2024.
Si-Min Chong is a writer and translator from Singapore. She makes work about vessels: women, trees, and snakes. Based in Singapore and O’ahu, Hawai’i, she holds an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University.
MĀNOA 
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