After the captivating English debut of Chinatown, which won the 2023 National Translation Award for prose, Vietnamese novelist Thuận and translator Nguyễn An Lý now introduce the Anglophone world to Thang máy sài gòn, or Elevator in Sài Gòn. First published in 2013, with the author’s satirical remarks censored in Vietnam (including references to North Korea and the late Chairman Kim Il Sung’s funeral), Elevator in Sài Gòn is a personal and political story of immense loss.
The novel, set in 2004, begins with compelling mysteries — a mother falls to her death down an elevator shaft in Sài Gòn, a daughter discovers a photograph from 1954 of a French man in her mother’s secret notebook after the funeral. But tracking the daughter’s aimless investigation of this French man “Paul Polotsky” becomes drudgery as she submerges the reader into the confusion and aporia of her mother’s past, which is obscured by the political realities of being a North Vietnamese woman who lived through the end of French colonialism, the partition at the 17th parallel, the American War, and reunification under the present Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Elevator in Sài Gòn is neither lengthy nor dense, yet it proves to be a challenging psychological read.
We enter the novel learning that the narrator’s mother has died from absurd circumstances: at two in the morning, the mother calls the elevator from the top floor, and she steps through — only to fall through the dark shaft all the way to the ground floor. “I had a hunch that upon finding my mother’s body, a wreck in a pool of blood, my brother had been no less impressed to find her face still intact,” the narrator states morbidly. While the rest of her mother’s wrecked body required three days for the funeral workers to repair, the narrator believes that her mother
“had tried her best to keep her face upward, and wrap her arms around her head to protect her face, at the price of a more drawn-out death, the terrible pain of which her brain would have tasted for several minutes before the end.”
Certainly it was a conscientious way for her to die. “Can you imagine if her face had been wrecked as her body?” the narrator persists, listing out how her brother’s careful orchestration of the perfect funeral would have been undone if, say, all the makeup artists gave up, or they had to use a wooden coffin rather than a glass one.
The narrator’s meandering observations in this first chapter are comically irreverent toward death and funerals, as Thuận acquaints the reader with an aloof narrator and her restless mind. The way the narrator’s thoughts endlessly wander is reminiscent of Chinatown’s narrator, who is also a Vietnamese single mother living in Paris as a teacher, but Elevator in Sài Gòn’s morbid and absurdist start foreshadows a darker story. As the narrator unravels more of her mother’s personal history, the absurdist elements in Elevator in Sài Gòn underscore how psychic violence pervades the mother’s life. The narrator emphasizes her mother’s determination to endure terrible pain in order to save her face — of course nothing is more important than saving face, literally and metaphorically, even when you are about to die.
Through the mother’s personal history, Thuận calls attention to how certain truths and unknowns can inflict lifelong psychic pain, like debilitating shame, fear, and suffering.
There is nothing to prove or disprove that her mother was in love with Paul Polotsky, the nephew of a higher-up in the French intelligence service who was at Hỏa Lò during her mother’s imprisonment. Thuận never says that a Vietnamese woman’s love affair with the colonizer is dangerous. There is only the political climate, the great lengths she went to hide it, and the facts: that her mother was released from Hỏa Lò after the third day; that she secretly asked Mr. Điền, a neighbor she barely knew, to look for her old friend Paul Polotsky when he arrived in Paris; that she hid a photograph of Polotsky in the front cover of a notebook sewed into her pillowcase that was not discovered until after her death; that whatever she refused to disclose about her time in Hỏa Lò cost her a future with her husband and family. The narrator recalls this ambiguous anxiety after witnessing her father’s fight with her mother:
“The ten-year-old me, who’d just filled in my first ever Personal History form, had enough sense to deduce that if my mother didn’t answer, that danger, that nebulous unknown in her history, would follow her for the rest of her life.”
In an interview with Electric Literature, Thuận discusses how “the communist regime’s success is largely due to the people’s monitoring and denunciation of each other.” Elevator in Sài Gòn satirizes the socialist state and points to the Personal History form as one of the government’s methods of surveillance and control. Presenting a rock-solid personal history (one that has not and will not be swayed by Western imperialism) at the government’s request is a matter of life or death, whether one fails or thrives in Vietnam.
The reader is forced to experience the anxiety and frustration emitted by the “nebulous unknown” in the mother’s history as the novel continues. The more the narrator does to track down Polotsky, the more confusing and uncomfortably aimless the plot becomes. Scenes of the narrator trailing Polotsky, his mistress, and his wife in Paris alternate with chapters of eating at Vietnamese restaurants with her students, accompanying her brother as interpreter when he does business in Paris, listening to unsolicited stories from a door lady, thinking about her former lover Kai, or vividly imagining her mother’s own search for Paul Polotsky in 1977 during her fellowship in France.
These scenes of mundanity showcase Thuận’s strength in writing about Paris and Vietnam from the perspective of the marginalized, rather than a starry-eyed tourist. But I admit that the aporetic plot distracted me from appreciating both Thuận’s strange descriptions of local places and people and her experiments with genre. It was agonizing to read about the narrator’s painstaking process of calling every Paul Polotsky in the local phonebook, which she does willingly because “when you’re an immigrant you learn not to give up too soon.” As a spoof of detective thrillers, Elevator in Sài Gòn’s plot can offer refreshing surprises, but the novel’s diminished emotional tone feels counter to Thuận’s literary playfulness. People related to her mother’s past appear simply to volunteer their stories rather than the narrator having to seek them out, but both listener and storyteller seem tired and apathetic rather than comforted by confiding in each other. Moreover, unlike in thrillers, the people she spies on are not running away from her, making for ridiculously mundane scenes. At one point, Thuận comically confects thrill for a “Hollywood-style chase” where her Laotian taxi driver becomes deeply invested in playing “this detective game” with the North African taxi driver who picked up the narrator’s target, Polotsky’s wife Victoria. Whatever thrill (or confusion) has built up after the taxis repeatedly chase and halt through Parisian traffic is quickly dampened when Victoria arrives at a bar to wait for someone, and the narrator falls asleep with the thought of needing to pick up her son at the kindergarten before six.
It was also challenging to sympathize with a narrator who reacts so distantly to other characters’ stories, even to the story of Bill, who longs to find the father he never met. He meets up with the narrator in a coffee shop when he finds out that they are both searching for Paul Polotsky:
“For the whole duration of Bill’s story, I felt like I was listening to a foreign language tape. But then I told myself it was precisely this monotonous, sleep-inducing voice that prevented his interlocutor from shedding tears for him. The thought crossed my mind that perhaps last night Bill had locked himself in his room, telling and retelling this story a dozen times, at first sobbing and sniveling as he spoke, then sneering and swearing, and then finally reaching a stone-faced fluency.”
The novel does not seem to be concerned with the emotional catharsis of telling stories. Rather, the monotonous way that characters admit to the feelings and personal histories they’ve buried speaks to a normalized apathetic reaction to expected tragedy and hopelessness. The reader is passively pulled along by the narrator’s detachment and the plot’s anticlimactic ebbs and flows of action.
When the reader loses their grip on an unraveling plot, what holds Elevator in Sài Gòn together as a literary work is its intricate web of characters. Compared to the mother and her daughter, the motives and fates of other characters are clearer, their emotional expressions more available. Thuận positions her characters in parallels and triangulations — how much of their fates align with or stray from the mother and daughter’s experiences become fascinating to parse through. For example, it is significant that Mr. Linh was present in Hỏa Lò as an interpreter to witness the narrator’s mother cross paths with Paul Polotsky, although he never suspected the intimate nature of the two’s encounter. Embedded in Mr. Linh’s detached confession of his formerly fatal obsession for the narrator’s mother in Hỏa Lò is a story of three very different fates of people who find themselves in Vietnam in 1954 — the resistance, the collaborator, the colonizer:
“Paul was as dewy-eyed as Linh and my mother were hardened. The day my mother became a liaison girl for the Việt Minh and Linh began life as an employee of the French military, Paul enrolled in a liberal arts university. At the end of his sophomore year, he rewarded himself with an adventure to Indochina, the land he’d learned about in books — and books only — and Hà Nội was his first stop. While the Vietnamese avoided the Hỏa Lò like the plague it was, Paul solicited his Deuxieme Bureau uncle to fix him a visit to the notorious place, to bless his adventure with a real sense of adventure.”
Thuận then draws connections between Mr. Linh and Bill, who she sees as “cold fish,” unmoved and aloof as they were in their stories:
“Mr. Linh wanted to convince me that the fatal obsession that my mother had aroused in him years ago had long vanished, and Bill wanted to impress on me that the same had happened to the tremendous emotions that Polotsky had once agitated in his chest.”
Mr. Linh, Bill, and the narrator herself are all haunted by the ghosts of her mother and Paul Polotsky — people they never had the chance to really know. In some ways, it is easier to understand Mr. Linh’s fixation on the mother when they were young and nineteen, and Bill’s search for his father Polotsky, than it is to understand why the narrator is so adamant about finding Polotsky. The narrator is not yearning after a lost love like Mr. Linh, nor is she looking for the father she never had like Bill. The narrator never imagines what an eventual confrontation with Polotsky will be like, and the reader can only guess whether she wants Polotsky to be a part of her life beyond as an enigma of her mother’s past. Perhaps her “fatal obsession” with Polotsky is her way of coping with the immense loss of her mother. The “tremendous emotions” the daughter masks through her aloof narration of her mother’s funeral are refractions of the immense loss that Mr. Linh and Bill feel, as unemotional as all three appear.
The emotional lives of other characters facing similar circumstances, from her mother’s fellowship colleague Mrs. Huệ and her Việt kiều lover Mr. Đỗ, to the neighbor Mr. Điền who became a “loose bike chain” in Paris when en route to Cuba, reflect and refract onto the mother and daughter’s experiences. The narrator becomes somewhat of an unintended oral historian, forced to listen to stories that record how Vietnamese lives diverged, at home and diasporically, in just a half century. The reader emerges from the plot’s elusivity through the cast’s collective history that contextualizes the mother and narrator’s complicated interior lives under postcolonialism, war, and socialism.
Elevator in Sài Gòn is an empathic exercise of patience for the reader, who should be prepared for the discomfort of not knowing. Why does the mother go to such great lengths to hide her relationship with Paul Polotsky? Why does the daughter go to such great lengths to uncover it? By the novel’s end, the overwhelming feeling of loss I felt — this omission in History, this admission to silence — provided the best answer. I imagine myself returning to Elevator in Sài Gòn for what the writer Thuận does best — her elaborate explorations of Vietnamese characters, living their quiet, calculated lives under the socialist regime or as immigrants abroad.
Elevator in Sài Gòn
by Thuận
translated by Nguyễn An Lý
New Directions
Cathy Duong co-hosts cà phê book club, a monthly book club that meets in coffee shops across north Orange County, CA (IG: @caphebookclub). She enjoys traveling to Little Saigons, playing V-pop on her ukulele, and analyzing diasporic Viet literature.
