November 1, 2016 - 20:14
Truong interweaves the ideas of writing, cooking, sexuality and identity. Binh reflects extensively on what it means to speak a language not one's own and what it means to be forced into silence; to be exiled from a home to which one never fully belonged and identified with the very things from which one is ostracized.
Truong has given Bình a range of literate modes, a repertoire that differentiates him as a queer, racialized subject. Indeed, Bình calls into question the oft-made assumption that reason is the highest form of intellect or literacy. Bình’s skill in the kitchen, is, of course, honed as he reminds us through years of “Repetition and routine. Servitude and subservience. Beck and call” (Truong, The Book of Salt 154). His mastery of all things related to taste, however, is not only a function of his many years of labor, but also indicative of his fluency in, and ontological embodiment of a gustatory epistemology that unsettles dominant forms and expressions of literacy-based knowledge. Aside from his knack for wit and keen observation, his most literate mode is taste, suggesting that the tongue, its taste preceptors, its preference for sweet or salt, is an organ of bodily, affective, and sometimes unspoken truths. Through taste, Binh is best able to describe his own queer sensibility, even before he can name it as such.
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Banished from his family and country because of his homosexuality, Binh is deeply melancholic, holding onto the life he lost through memory and repetition. The elliptical narration, intermittently returning to Binh’s life in Vietnam, demonstrates how fully his present is infused with the past. Binh physically preserves the moment of his expulsion from home by literally internalizing the voice of his disapproving father. Indeed, when Binh describes the day his father disowned him, he repeats the phrase “I stand there still” (Truong 164). This calls attention to the brief paralysis Binh experiences as his father scolds and renounces him (“still” as in immobile) and to Binh’s inability to move on emotionally from his traumatic scene of rejection (“still” as in “continuing till now”). Just as he is haunted by the violence and hatred of his father, Binh similarly relives the love and nurturing he received from his mother. Binh’s every moment in Paris is achingly chained to the past. Binh is haunted by a family and home that he cannot go back to, and therefore wills his own emotional and mental return through uncontrollable and irresistible repetitions of the past.