The protagonist of Vu Trong Phung’s 1936 novel Dumb Luck (So Do), Red-Haired Xuan, soars high in the pantheon of fictional fake-it-till-you-make-it characters. There are echoes of Damon Runyon’s rogues, hints of some of Charlie Chaplin’s characters, and more than a touch of Thomas Ripley, albeit a decidedly less lethal version.
Red-Haired Xuan’s seemingly inexorable superpower is to fail, sometimes inexplicably, upward. He provides the sinew which (loosely) connects a series of satirical vignettes, catty caricatures and smart social commentary. The result is a piercing insight into 1930s Hanoi, and one of the best, and probably funniest, books about the Vietnamese capital in the early 20th century.