This essay was originally published in the Full Stop Quarterly “Literary Dis(-)appearances in (Post)colonial Cities,” edited by Michelle Chan Schmidt. Subscribe at our Patreon page to get access to this and future issues, also available for purchase here.
How does a person locate the city that seems to not want them? This is a question that came to mind as I read Ayhan Geçgin’s Lungo Cammino (tr. Giulia Ansaldo, 2023) and revisited Thuận’s Chinatown (tr. Nguyễn An Lý, 2022). In both texts, the cities in which the characters are situated remain aloof, distant, and ungraspable. I often forget what cities they should be in, only receiving reminders sparsely scattered throughout the novel. At the nexus of these vanishing cities is also the vanishment or self-effacement of characters who are their undesired. In Chinatown, the narrator’s husband, who is of Chinese ethnicity, has disappeared for almost 12 years, having escaped from Hà Nội due to intense state discrimination; the narrator also effaces herself from her immediate reality of the Parisian metro. On the other hand, in Lungo Cammino, our narrator erases his identity as he walks to exit Istanbul, to the point of forgetting his name, his history, and his purpose. There’s a fugitive quality to their movements, as though trying to escape the grasp of grand narratives, which here are that of the State and the History to which it is tightly connected. They do so by reducing the city to an outline or to incoherent fragments in their movements.
Considering their cosmopolitan history, this fragmentation in the scheme of capitals like Hà Nội, Paris, and Istanbul isn’t anything new. However, putting this in the context of the Chinese-Vietnamese border conflict, Parisian immigrant politics, and Turkey’s move to join the European Union, the character’s quasi-disavowal of the city can be read as an act of protest against the State’s hostility towards the undesired groups that threaten its homogenous self-image. In manipulating the city’s image into something unique only to themselves, something now opaque to outsiders, these characters tell their stories and the stories of their cities without giving it away to contingencies.
Translation and opacity
Before diving into these texts, I have to address the nature of translation. Both texts I’m comparing are translated texts. Furthermore, both are translated within different languages: from Vietnamese into English, and from Turkish into Italian. (All quotations from Lungo Cammino will be given in Italian first, followed by my translation into English.) This is relevant in two folds: firstly, the translation further feeds into the cities’ cosmopolitan images, for their signs have assumed new and slightly deviated meanings and functions outside of the source text reader’s control; secondly, the translation can be seen as an added layer of opacity to the cities. In particular, this opacity is framed by the fact, as a reader, I am not entirely familiar with Istanbul, and the Hà Nội discussed here is before my days. However, this is not to be seen as a loss. Rather, in the context of negotiating an identity in the age of nation-states, this opacity, this distance created by the translation, compliments the fugitive movement of the characters.
Cities and intelligibility
To understand the mechanism and politics behind the fragmentation of the cities in these texts, I would like to propose Michel de Certeau’s concept of walking as a tool. In what is now a foundational text in the praxis of urban reading, “Walking in the City,” de Certeau argues for the practice of everyday walking in the city as a possible moment of resistance against the Foucauldian disciplinary structure, operated by cities’ administrations and urban planners. He begins by contrasting two phenomenologies of the city, that from up high and that from below. Though the first instance renders the city as legible text to its viewer, to Certeau, this legibility would ultimately give way to oblivion because the view causes the city text to become solely a simulacrum. The act of seeing the city in panorama, in a grand scale, renders the city static and detaches the viewer from the locality. This detachment could only transform whatever they see into an unsustainable representation. The connection between this view and the myth of Icarus further suggests an ultimate collapse. In contrast, those down below, those who walk—to Certeau, an “elementary form”—escape “the imaginary totalizations” of the eye. Their “bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ [that] they write without being able to read.” In the intelligibility that arises through fragmenting the city’s image, the walkers exercise an evasion of discipline that outlives the “decay” of the legible city.
In relation to Chinatown and Lungo Cammino, what Certeau’s walking offers is a framework of resistance in the unconscious, intelligible actions. It provides a way to understand the mechanism of fragmentation behind the refusal of both narrators to be present in the city, to embody the temporal spatiality of the right now. Certeau’s comment on this everyday practice as something which has “a certain strangeness that does not surface,” and that only “outlin[es] itself against the visible,” also offers a description for the dialectical antagonistic force taking place in the relationship between the characters and the cities. For as the characters present themselves only in fragments, so the city too is pulled into this vortex. While Chinatown does this by dispersing itself into various cities, Lungo Cammino does it by omission of name. However, unlike in Certeau’s text, the novels’ aloof cities do not stem from urban planning but are deliberate acts on the characters’ parts.
The nation-state and capital cities
As established above, the city is a milieu in which power is exercised. In the same chapter, Certeau even states that “the language of power is it itself ‘urbanizing.’” This connection between state power and the city becomes more pronounced when we consider the capital status of the cities in focus, Hà Nội and Istanbul. In the introduction to Political Landscapes of Capital Cities, Jessica Joyce Christie, Jelena Bogdanović, and Eulogio Guzmán postulate that capital cities are “places where elites are located and where their use of physical form instigates the creation and production of constellations of authority.” They are thus where “political authority is constantly renegotiated and reestablished.” And so pervasive is this physical form that at times, the system of the State arguably overlaps with and even eclipses that of the city, whereby local indexes not only point to the physicality of the urban space alone, but inevitably refer to a bigger narrative: that of the nation.
This point is perhaps most evident in the first part of Lungo Cammino, titled “The City.” As soon as a location name is mentioned, it is quickly followed by the presence of the State. As our nameless narrator departs on his “egira” (or hijrah) and walks towards Üsküdar, he notices ad posters, among which one reads: “la Turchia forte è la nuova Turchia, mezzo litro in regalo per ogni linguetta restituita, prendi prima paga poi” (“The strong Turkey is the new Turkey, half a liter free for each returned tab, take now pay later”). I remember being struck by this sentence in particular, evoking the country’s name before I could situate Üsküdar. Quickly, the situation no longer feels like an unrooted existential walk, but a political story. The choice not only to describe what appears to be a petrol ad, out of all potential ads, but to attach a slogan with the rhetoric of “forte” and “nuova,” echoing “Make America Great Again,” brings the image of the nation up to the forefront. After this, our spatial awareness retreats as we are brought back into our narrator’s thoughts. The text then focuses on his movements and inner feelings, with the flickering movement of external perception of a few neighborhoods, though most places remain nameless.
The presence of the State is later manifested more concretely with the presence of two policemen. Despite being offered a place to stay, our narrator continues to spend night after night out on the streets. He gets mugged and starves, and one morning finds himself in a hospital. There, we soon find out that he participated in the 2013 Gezi Park protests, a series of demonstrations that started as a protest against Istanbul’s urban reforms and quickly became a fight for freedom of expression across Turkey. Already, in the reference to the Gezi Park protests, we are quickly brought from the local into the national discourse. Though the protest is not mentioned by name, a footnote gives us the expression’s context when our narrator is accused by the policemen of being a “vandali” (“hooligans”) in the Italian translation. This accusation, though vehemently denied by our narrator, indicates the inevitable formation of the subject under the eye of State authority. The police threaten to gather a “dossier” (“file”) on him, notwithstanding the validity of the file’s content, simply because they deem him as a threat, and thus undesired to the State.
This eclipse of the State can also be seen in Chinatown. This essay will focus on the character of Thụy and his relationship with the capital of Hà Nội, chiefly because Hà Nội is the main city that inscribes the story of Thụy’s story before he disappears, a character-city connection sustained by his relationship with the narrator. (Arguably, this extends to the city of Sài Gòn and other places too, but that’s for another essay.) In this case, before a city name is even invoked, we face authority figures as well as the discourse of the nation through Thụy’s introduction:
“In school everybody called Thụy that Chink. Spawn of Deng Xiao Ping. Goon boy of Beijing. In the neighborhood everybody would see him and ask, hey when are you going back to your country. Have you sold all your furniture yet. The headmaster was summoned by the local police. Student Âu Phương Thụy should be watched closely. Student Âu Phương Thụy’s family have expressed their wish to stay in Vietnam. The higher ups are still deliberating. The higher-ups have not yet made up their mind. But it’s our duty to ensure that he is watched closely. The party congress has decreed that Beijing is enemy number one of the Vietnamese people.”
Similar to Lungo Cammino, we go from the narrator’s localized context in the Parisian metro; to the national context with the ambiguous “they,” evocative of Big Brother; to another country, Vietnam, where the sequence repeats in quick succession. In this particular passage, we sense the depth of the State infiltration. From family to classmates and neighbors, to teachers and higher-ups, Thụy’s presence is not only relevant to the still-anonymous city—though with references to the border conflict, it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume this is in the North—but to the nation. Similarly to Geçgin’s narrator, Thụy is the undesired, and his opinion does not matter. The State looms over them, eclipsing the locality of the city, usurping the fragmented embodiment of city life and gathering it in a detached national simulacrum. Only much later do we get an indication as to where Thụy’s story might be taking place, when it is mentioned that he used to eat lunch on Tạ Hiện Street, in the Old Quarter of Hà Nội. Unlike Lungo Cammino, Chinatown is more explicit with its indexes of location, more generous with its signposting of places. Nonetheless, these signposts do not facilitate the recognition and stability of a city; the signs obfuscate it further. This is because the characters are in constant movement and the reader bounces between various cities and landscapes, while the narrator in Geçgin’s story seems to be trapped in the capital city for a while. Consequently, the forces of fragmentation and unifying do not act separately but seem to be in constant tension.
Fugitive movements: experience of the undesired
As demonstrated above, the State is omnipresent in the two texts. They become a barrier that simultaneously excludes characters from and traps them within the city. In Chinatown, the State intervenes in Thụy’s presence in Hà Nội, and in fact, in any city. On the other hand, in Lungo Cammino, the State presents itself as trapping the narrator within the city, despite the narrator’s reluctance to acknowledge this. Adding to the already complicated relationship between the State and its capital cities, this act of disappearing—both the characters and the city’s image—comes with a larger political implication once we understand that the characters of undesired groups shape these urban tales. I want to refer to these groups as “undesired,” rather than the usual “minority,” to draw focus to the fact that they are targets of tight control rather than non-contingent smallness. While in Chinatown, this is most evident in Thụy’s narrative and pertains to the question of the Chinese-Vietnamese people in Vietnam during the 1970s, these “undesired” groups involve the Kurdish people as well as the bekâr group in Lungo Cammino, though they are not explicitly named. To understand what is at stake here, we need to take a step back to look at the context of these cities.
The question of Chinese immigration became a prevalent topic during the 1970s as the Sino-Vietnamese alliance collapsed, escalating to a war around the Northern borders in the late 1970s. During this period, many Chinese-Vietnamese were encouraged either to assimilate fully and adopt the Vietnamese nationality, or leave. This resulted in a rise of Chinese migration towards the South, where there’s still a considerable ethnic Chinese community, as well as a mass exodus back to mainland China. Traces of the once-flourishing Chinese community in the North are now ethereal. In a similar vein, Thụy’s existence is enforced by absence. Throughout the novel, Thụy’s presence is nearly always accompanied by negation. The narrator’s parents would “never mention him. They acted like they’d never heard of any Thuy. They acted like there was no Thuỵ in class.” Her friends would keep telling her to “forget in order to live.” Parisians never “bothered to ask after Thuy, no one bothered to inquire after the boy’s father.” Even the narrator herself “didn’t want to know” what Thụy was up to.
Down to his birthplace of “Yên Khê”—not an actual place on a map—Thụy is ungrounded. In a way, Thuỵ’s hypervisibility beneath the State’s eye ultimately makes him invisible. This is compounded by the fact that he is not the main character and that his existence is told through others, among which the narrator herself is central. Despite having been married, their relationship remains ambivalent. The narrator remains unyielding to the conventions of romance, but she ultimately is the only one to bear witness to Thụy’s existence, consistently weaving fragments of him into a location, or within her relationships with her parents, her friends, or her son. Consequently, this push and pull tension between the narrator and Thụỵ makes his presence as unpredictable as a flickering light bulb, on the cusp of breaking.
While in Chinatown, this fugitive movement is framed by outsiders rather than the one who is escaping, in Lungo Cammino the escapee frames the act himself. This obscuring is created by the narrator’s yearning for immobility, his desire to stop, to disappear: he never utters his actual name, nor that of the street where his house is situated. Throughout his journey in the city, he refuses to be in the present, very much like the narrator of Chinatown. Yet, unlike in Chinatown, even the past isn’t something he wishes to dwell on: “Ma ora basta, si disse, ora basta pensare al passato” (“But that’s enough, he said, enough thinking about the past”). This omission of spatial indexes, as well as the articulation of his desire to get outside of time, can simply be read down to the narrator’s desire to forget, to stop thinking. But why does he decide to go on this “egira,” and what is the effect of this oblivion? The above techniques create an effect of unbelonging, culminating in the realization that “nonostante fosse nato e cresciuto in quella città, sentiva di non conoscere né la città né quelli che la abitavano” (“Although he was born and grew up in this city, he felt as though he knew nothing of the place, nor of the people who lived in it”).
This unbelonging is reinforced by the selected relationship he engages in, before ending up in the hospital and forced to interact with State authority. For instance, his first and only meaningful encounter is with Mahmut, who comes from Hakkâri and introduces him to the job of rubbish picking. Though it is not explicit, Mahmut could arguably be part of a social group called bekâr, or bachelors—usually single men from the countryside who have migrated to the city looking for work, often in an under-respected sector. Along with frequent mentions of Kurdish speaking and the presence of Syrian people—both groups known to be subject to discrimination by the Turkish government— the bekâr evocation paints this story as that of the undesired, in terms of class as well as ethnicity.
In the state of hypervisibility or deliberate obliviousness to their surroundings—though their intentions are not—the capital cities in which Chinatown’s characters and Lungo Cammino’s narrator are or were situated, become fragmented and reduced to mere outline. Echoing back to de Certeau’s text, the novels become a place in which the cities can only silhouette themselves against what is mentioned by the characters, and the characters themselves are outlined against their environments. The characters’ outlines, fragments, are also held together through the relationships they have with others. These relationships are characterized paradoxically by a degree of alienation: Thụy is compartmentalized into an idea to be treated at a distance, if not denied exclusively. On the contrary, the disavowal is initially enacted by Lungo Cammino’s narrator himself: from the moment he leaves his house, forgetting his mother, he forecloses himself from any kinship until he himself is rejected from the urban landscape, reinforcing his own rejection even more. Nevertheless, understanding the underlying politics in this fugitive walking, these self-effaced, “undesired” characters consciously (or not) attempt to evade their capital cities’ grand narratives of their ‘threatening’ presence. In refusing to locate their cities, in choosing to live in between the city’s fragments, the texts that Thụy and Lungo Cammino’s narrator create not only offer an alternative urban story, but seem to want to move beyond the city, beyond using it as a shorthand for the nation.
Final walk
To live in a city that does not want you becomes a shorthand for the impossibility of escaping from the State, lodged within the system. Perhaps the only way is to become invisible; or, referring back to de Certeau, perhaps the only way is to walk. In walking, these fugitive characters oppose the “totalizing eye.” The texts they produce for the reader are also, arguably, walking texts: for they too work against a panoptical access to these characters, who remain, like their cities, spectral, ghostly. The act of rejection, disavowal is a dialectical dance: the more the State negates the characters, the more obstinate the characters are towards its presence. But this dance nevertheless leaves traces, traces that ultimately trouble the negation, the absence. In the context of a fugitive narrative, this might not be anything groundbreaking, but what these texts also offer is a tentative and alternative way to locate the city within its past or present relationship with the narrator. This city is no longer simply Hà Nội or Istanbul; the abstract idea of it on paper encompasses much more.
Let’s return to the opening question: How does a person locate the city that does not want them? Perhaps, in a fraught situation, one can only locate the city between the words, between what is said, with relationships holding the outlines of the city and the characters together. Here, I want to echo a line from Lungo Cammino that encapsulates this overall sentiment: “Ecco, da dentro questo adesso astratto, pensò, da dentro questo brutto per sempre, tirerò fuori una luogo concreto” (“Here it goes: from within this abstraction, he thought, from this eternal ugliness, he would pluck out a concrete place”). To locate a city is thus to retreat into the abstract, into the imagination, in which one can retrieve a true concrete place, the ground on which these undesired characters can stand steadily.
Phương Anh is a translator and writer from Vietnam. They have published translations, poetry, reviews, and essays on Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, PR&TA, and in Here Was Once The Sea: An Anthology of Southeast Asian Ecowriting among others. They once worked as a bookseller and are currently a Publishing Assistant at Tilted Axis Press. They study cultural studies at university.
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