'What keeps you here?': Paris, Language, and Exile in The Book of Salt by Monique Truong

In “Four American Impressions” (1922), a fanciful account of Sherwood Anderson’s visit to 27 rue de Fleurus, Gertrude Stein is compared to a “wholesome cook” who works in a “kitchen of words” (Mellow 1974: 258). Binh, Stein’s Vietnamese cook and main voice in Truong’s The Book of Salt, is “a man with a borrowed, ill-fitting tongue,” who “cannot compete for this city’s attention” (Truong 2004: 18). And yet, any time he works in a Parisian kitchen – “a familiar story that I can embellish with saffron, cardamom, bay laurel, and lavender” (19) – he acquires his visibility by re-writing old stories with food. This paper is an analysis of Gertrude Stein’s and Binh’s complementary roles, that eventually make them the positive and negative sides of the same photography (one of the main themes in the novel): exile and the construction of the self in the Paris of the late 1920s and early 1930s. With a limited command of the colonial rulers’ tongue but an “intimate knowledge of the city,” Binh tells a story that suggests a refined exploration of the notions of home, ethnicity, and displacement through a creative usage of language and translation. The city of Paris emerges as a site of diasporic American and Asian American identity formation, and eventually as “a Madame with a heart” (15), capable of offering him a memory, “that is a story, that is a gift,” where food and sexuality, faith/fulness and writing end up being “highly symbolic domains of interchange” (Xu 2008: 16).