the book of salt

The Book of Salt, to me, feels like getting to have dessert first at a meal. I enjoyed delving into this book, and I love the vivid, sensitive, luxurious way Monique Truong describes her characters and their lives. The detailed descriptions of meals and surroundings always feel like a treat to read. In other books, I found it delightful to be able to savor such lengthy illustrations of the action playing out on the page.

I feel like the theme of intersectionality that has been brought up in conversation in and out of class is coming back into focus in this text. Recently, I finished Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker, which is certainly not a parallel text to Truong's novel with any kind of intertextual relationship as Getting Mother's Body and As I Lay Dying did. I picked up Native Speaker because I wanted to read an Asian-American narrative. As I worked my way through the first few chapters of The Book of Salt, I kept thinking back to Native Speaker for the common themes: both are stories about displaced Asian men whose racial identities cause them to feel a sort of rootlessness in their respective countries. The central characters of both texts are haunted by the memory of their deceased fathers, they both have troubled love lives, and they both struggle to articulate a life caught between two cultures, two languages, and two places. In Native Speaker, the main character, Henry Park, observes the life of the man he works for, who eventually comes to act as a substitute father figure and serves as a way for Henry to overcome the burden his father left him with. Similarly, I predict that Binh will observe the relationship between Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, his employers, and his impressions of their relationship will inform the way he approaches his own queer identity. 

Going forward, I'm especially interested in the ways that Binh's narration will be able to communicate things that have been left out of history. The erasure of his experience, which is perhaps what prompted Monique Truong to write this book, is resisted in this book, by giving Binh authorship over his own story and his self-portrayal. There are many angles of this book that can be used to understand Binh's story. Asian family dynamics, interracial relationships, queer relationships, immigrant labor experiences, and the feeling of being an alien have all come into play so far. I'll be interested in talking about the ways these varied experiences and identities collide with each other to form a composite one with Binh.