Employing Bakhtin's concept of chronotope, this article examines the narrative construction of settings in the novel Dumb Luck by Vu Trong Phung. Identifying the core chronotope in Dumb Luck – the colonial city of Hanoi – as the juxtaposition, bifurcation and interference between two sub-chronotopes – the sidewalk and the French residence, with cultural behaviors that epitomize a rural world in disintegration and a urban world in emergence, respectively, I suggest that Dumb Luck marks not only the first appearance of a purely urban space in Vietnamese literature, but also the first appearance of a truly urban narrative which presents a comprehensive cultural consciousness of urban life. This narrative structure and cultural consciousness c-haracterize the disturbing transformation and modernization of the Eastern world under the brutal imposition of Western culture in the first half of the 20th century.