In an interview subsequent to the publication of the translation into English of Thuận’s novel, Chinatown, interviewer Phuong Anh observes that the author’s main characters are searching for an answer to a question that ultimately drives that novel. Thuận’s answer is instructive:

 

It is true that my characters are always driven by the desire to uncover secrets hidden somewhere in the midst of their seemingly flat lives. […] Their brains are like a multi-layered fiddle, constantly sifting through the information they receive, but I doubt that they’ll find the answers to their questions. The truth is always more complicated than people think.

 

True to form, Thuận’s second novel available in English, Elevator in Saigon, offers another character who is driven by a desire to uncover secrets. The narrator is constantly shifting through the information she receives, but often simply has little understanding of its relevance to any of the questions she asks. More interesting is the ride itself, one of crossed paths and destinies and a host of distractions.

 

Elevator in Saigon is set in 2004, largely to underscore the fateful year of 1954 and Điện Biên Phủ, fifty years earlier, when the secrets began. It is also a year that provides the importance of the three locations in the novel’s larger socio-political underpinnings: Hanoi, Saigon, and Paris.

The initial catalyst in the narrator’s search is the death of her mother, who has fallen down an elevator shaft. Tragic as it is, the fall itself participates in absurd, comic, slapstick, and other dissociated states associated with humor or a weakened sense of magic realism. The death brings the narrator back to Vietnam for the first time in fifteen years, where she is reunited with her elder brother, Mai, a real estate broker in Saigon. Buying and selling properties has brought him considerable wealth. There are extravagant dinners. He buys the narrator an entire wardrobe because she is unable to decide which outfit she wants. Indeed she freezes, naked in the dressing room, staring at herself in the mirror, and unable to make a decision which outfit she wants to try on first. He also built his mother’s three-story home with the faulty elevator. It is the only private residence in Saigon with an elevator, faulty or otherwise.

Her mother has come to some considerable success as well, from her work as a liaison for the Việt Minh during the French occupation in the early 1950s, to serving as Deputy Secretary of the Party Committee, as Vice Head of the Local Civil Unit, and as Head of the the University Sub-Department, in addition to her roles as a Socialist Wife and mother of two children. She and her husband slowly drifted apart, partly because she won’t answer his questions about her three days in Hȯa Lò. An affair?

The narrator knows most of this. She had lived through much of it before leaving Vietnam at twenty and has spent her adult life in Europe, most recently in Paris teaching Vietnamese to small cohorts of students.

 

Her quest begins with her discovery of a photograph and her mother’s notebook.

 

I had found that notebook in the room where my mother had lived for the two weeks before the accident, in an unexpected place: stuffed inside her pillow.

      I found a photograph, black-and-white and yellowed somewhat by time. The photograph was of a young white man, with dark hair and ever-so limpid eyes. And on the back of the photo, three lines, handwritten: Paul Polotsky, 1954, 21 avenue de Suffren, Paris. My mother’s familiar hand.

 

Her initial questions? Who was Paul Polotsky and what was her mother’s relationship with him.

The information she uncovers is of such different kinds and comes from such varied sources that it is difficult for her to sift through let alone connect into a coherent story.

 

In 1954, her mother, then nineteen, is arrested by the French and interrogated. After three days she is released. The narrator hears this from Mr Linh, a translator, now seventy years old, but then also nineteen. He couldn’t take the violence of the interview and ran vomiting from the room. For Mr Linh it was love at first sight. She never knew, nor did they ever cross paths. Also in the room was a white European named Paul Polotsky, also nineteen, who was touring Asia on a short break from college in Paris. His stop in Hanoi? Hȯa Lò prison of all places.

Post-unification (1977), she has a short academic fellowship in France. The narrator believes her mother maintained some interest in Paul Polotsky and hopes that her mother and Paul would have met in Paris. The story of her mother’s time is barely mentioned in her conversation with Mrs Huệ, one of three women on the fellowship, and Mr. Ðỗ, her husband. Their story? How heavily the women were chaperoned. The narrator concludes that close attention prevented any possible contact between the narrator’s mother and Paul Polotsky. This despite the fact that Mrs Huệ met and fell in love with Mr Ðỗ on that trip to Paris under the very eyes of the chaperon. Again, it is true love.

Part of the fun in the presentations of these conversations are in the dramatic tellings themselves, the extended pauses as characters collect themselves and what the narrator reports of the moment and speculates during those pauses. Thuận likes to play. In addition to over-arching rhythms of the conversations and, indeed, shifting movements through time and settings, there are small bits of fun. In a pause in the conversation with Mrs Huệ and Mr Ðỗ, the narrator looks out the window to find a neighbor emerging from her car. She has clearly just vomited. Relevant? Or is she just riffing from the earlier scene with a “true love is sickening”?

Thuận is meticulous in crafting such connections throughout the novel. She also sets up numerous situations that feel like random acts of humor. In Paris, the narrator discovers a surprising number of Paul Polotskys in her search through phone books from the past ten years. She calls one after another, with odd speculations arising from hang ups, changed phone numbers, and disconnected lines. She reports the entire conversation with one of the oddest, one where the woman on the other end, prompted by the mention of Paul Polotsky, suggests the narrator is with the Chinese immigrant mafia and is after deeds to four islands in remote Siberia that the Qing lords drew up with the Tsar and lost to the Japanese and are now involving the CIA. Of course the CIA had called the woman the day before, an American named Bill, who is also searching for information about Polotsky. Bill and the narrator’s paths cross several times. At twenty, Bill had asked his mother who his biological father was. The narrator interviews a forsaken lover. “Paul Polotsky, huh? What I wanted was to smash is damn face in.” She got her revenge. It appears that Polotsky had quite a history with women.

The narrator follows a woman named Victoria Polotsky. On a bus, Victoria has her wig pulled off by a hyperactive three-year old. Is it revelatory or merely part of the narrator’s attention to hats and hair? In a hot pursuit through the streets of Paris, the taxi drivers realize what is happening and appear to be enjoying themselves. One scoots through a yellow traffic light to lose the narrator’s taxi, only to linger in a cross street so that that his pursuer can catch up.

However much the truth might be more complicated than people think, for Elevator in Saigon the truth is less important than the quest itself with its fabric of crossed destinies and intersecting stories. As with Thuận’s earlier Chinatown, Elevator in Saigon is an incredibly well-orchestrated portrait of a mind trying to making sense of the world.

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Rick Henry was a Professor of English at SUNY—Potsdam where he directed the BFA in Creative Writing.