52 pages • 1 hour read
Monique TruongThe Book of Salt
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 5-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary
Anh Minh, now the sous-chef in the Governor-General’s house, has convinced the Old Man to let him get Binh a job in the kitchen as well. The first lessons Anh Minh teaches Binh are about the particulars of others working in the household. Anh Minh says not to gossip about but to take heed of these various traits. Anh Minh then gives Binh cooking lessons. He acts as though he doesn’t mind Chef Bleriot coming in and taking the head chef position.
Binh sees the futility of his brother’s efficiency: “Anh Minh believed that if he could save three minutes here, five minutes there, then one day he could tally them all up and have enough to start life all over again” (43). Binh enjoys listening to Anh Minh because Anh Minh is the only son who inherited his father’s deep voice but uses it to speak encouraging, rather than damaging, words, distinctly unlike their father.
The Old Man was harsh to all his sons, stating they shared the nickname Stupid. The second-oldest brother became a railroad porter in second class, hoping always to advance to the next level. The third son worked at a printing press.
Anh Minh becoming a sous chef was only the beginning, according to the Old Man. Their father believed his eldest son soaked up all the good his mother’s womb had to give and had inherited the Old Man’s talent, intelligence, and ambition.
The Madame at the Governor-General believed the French were superior to perhaps every other culture, and certainly superior to the Indochinese. Behind her back, the servants mock her frequent refrain that everything should function “as if in France.” She never acknowledges that in France, she held a lower position than she does in Vietnam.
As a young child, Binh’s father had been abandoned by his beloved mother at a Catholic church, which is how he became so entrenched in the church, going from choir to altar boy to a student at the seminary. However, Binh’s father declared that God told him to get a wife, so he left the seminary, found a humble home, and procured the help of a matchmaker. He worked filling pews in a local church headed by a Vietnamese priest who would pay a token amount for these services. The Old Man filled church seats by holding gambling nights and then taking the gamblers to services on Sunday to pray for help or thank God for the night before. However, these converts were aging and steadily dying off.
Anh Minh is worried that he can no longer protect Binh now that Binh has been dismissed from the Governor-General’s kitchen, due to his affair with Chef Bleriot.
Chapter 6 Summary
On the ship, Bao tells Binh a long story about a family of basket weavers that went back generations. At first, these weavers had attempted to grow rice, but water hyacinths overtook everything so the rice wouldn’t grow. Eventually, they gave in and used the hardy, unmovable hyacinths to weave baskets. They were able to support their family well after this. Eventually, a 15-year-old son wanted to go elsewhere, to see what possibilities the world offered. He intended to grow cuttings from his family’s crop of hyacinths but they wouldn’t grow anywhere. He ended up on a boat with Bao, having run out of land to grow his flowers. Bao had told him to try Holland.
When Binh met Bao and heard the story, Binh was 20 and full of pride and lust. His middle brothers were handsome and garnered the attention of the girls and women in the neighborhood, but these women weren’t what Binh desired.
Binh could never display his pride in the Governor-General’s household. It was dangerous for a Vietnamese person to stand fully erect, to cock an eyebrow, or to look proud—it could mean quick firing from a job.
At 20, Binh was in love—he had an affair with Chef Bleriot that got him fired. Binh accompanied Bleriot to the market since the chef’s Vietnamese was non-functional and even worse than Binh’s French. The 26-year-old Bleriot insisted on being called “Chef” at all times—by the servants in the kitchen and when being intimate with Binh. Nevertheless, Binh believed that love and lust were gambles worth taking. He didn’t think at 20 to ask why the son from Bao’s story wouldn’t return home to his family’s hyacinth farm.
Chapter 7 Summary
Binh has a habit of cutting his fingers: “I want to say it brings me happiness or satisfaction, but it does not. It gives me proof that I am alive, and sometimes that is enough” (65). Most employers do not notice, due to all their attention being on the plates, rather than the servants’ hands and because of their insistence on white gloves for the help.
Anh Minh explained that the Chinese are far more fastidious and then told Binh the story of the official tasters for the royalty of China. These people had exquisitely sensitive palates and considered the position a privilege. However, royalty cared little about their gourmet tastes; only a warm body was necessary to check if the food was poisoned. Supposedly, the tasters’ already cultured palates would become even more sensitive and discerning due to the risk of death from the best food they’d ever had. The risk made the dish all the better when the taster survived.
Binh states there’s a fine line between a cook and a murderer: “Really, the only difference between the two is that one kills to cook, and the other cooks to kill. Killing is involved either way” (67). Toklas shows Binh her method for killing pigeons and then explains that feeding a little liquor to a larger bird makes the task simpler. Binh compares Toklas’s method to his mother’s, saying that his mother’s was more economical in approach.
Binh’s habit of cutting comes to Toklas’s attention within his first month in her employ. She first asks if Binh’s been drinking and then checks his hands. He stammers an excuse as Toklas tells him she and Stein have tasted blood in their food. She demands firmly, but not cruelly, that he needs to bandage his hands. Binh recalls the first time he cut himself in the kitchen, while he was a young boy cooking with his mother. It was accidental, but it had an effect on him he can’t shake even as an adult.
Binh feels at ease with Toklas and Stein. The concierge warns that his “Mesdames cohabitate in a state of grace. They both love Gertrude Stein. Better, they are both in love with Gertrude Stein” (71), using Stein’s first and last names on purpose. In the household, she is always Gertrude Stein—the person, the literary patron, and the celebrity persona melded into one.
Chapters 5-7 Analysis
Binh’s description of the Old Man’s cruel treatment of his sons explains why he continues to haunt them. Self-aggrandizing, bitter, and discouragingly insulting, The Old Man cultivated in his sons the defeatist sense of self he ostensibly didn’t want them to have. Now adults, the men accept second-class positions and are unable to see through the oppression of the colonial system that surrounds them—it is a feeling they grew up with. Even Binh, who is observant enough to document this dynamic, can only cope with his father’s legacy by cutting himself and berating himself in his father’s voice.
It is not surprising that after growing up in a household dominated by a strong personality that expected subservience from everyone around him, Binh now feels comfortable and at ease working for Stein and Toklas. Their relationship, though much more genuinely loving and respectful, replicates the dynamic Binh saw in his own family—here, everyone worships at the shrine of Gertrude Stein. Still, Toklas is the first employer to notice Binh’s self-harm, treating him less like a servant and more like a member of an eclectic family.
Through Bao’s story of hyacinth basket weavers, the novel introduces the theme of homecoming—and the impossibility of recreating one’s home environment once one leaves it. The story echoes the decision that Binh faces throughout the novel: whether to stay with Stein and Toklas or to return to Vietnam to see his dying father. His practice of self-harm, which emerges in this section, represents his attempt to take control of his situation even if it means he must sacrifice part of himself. This becomes an important theme in the rest of the novel.
The power dynamic in Stein and Toklas’s relationship mirrors the dynamic between Chef Bleriot and Binh. One partner is dominant, demanding respect and deference, while the other is expected to serve. In Binh’s case, Race and Sexuality play an important role; Binh’s Vietnamese background adds a layer to the power dynamic between him and Chef Bleriot that Stein and Toklas’s relationship lacks. It is the racial and status hierarchy that Binh transgresses, rather than his engagement in a same-sex relationship that gets him fired. This dynamic foreshadows the decisions Binh faces later in the novel as he learns that society will allow him to embrace his race, sexuality, or class, but not all three.
