The Book of Salt

“Every kitchen is a homecoming, a respite, where I am the village elder, sage and revered. Every kitchen is a familiar story that I can embellish with saffron, cardamom, bay laurel, and lavender.”

For Binh, a kitchen is a place where he can be respected and can always communicate clearly. He commands, controls, and creates. Also, growing up at home, the kitchen was a refuge for both his mother and himself. Free from his father’s presence and cruelty, both Binh and his mother could be at ease and find some joy in simple tasks such as cooking.

“I want to be at sea again, I thought. I want to be at sea again.”

Binh wants to be at the mercy of the waves of passion, attraction, lust, and love. He wants to rise and fall on the waves of emotions, just as he had been on actual waves during his three years as a ship crewman.

“The word [interview] was a sharp reminder that I was a servant who thought himself a man, that I was a fool who thought himself a king of hearts.”

When Binh first goes to Lattimore’s apartment, ostensibly to interview to cook for him on Sundays, he struggles with being his own person with autonomy and identity, pulled by the opposing concepts of self-assuredness and servility—a conflict complicated by issues of colonialism and race.

“Making its way through Anh Minh’s parted lips, the Old Man’s voice, purified, said, ‘I believe in you.’ In the kitchen of the Governor-General, I learned from my brother’s words and found solace in the Old Man’s voice. I received there the benediction that I would otherwise never hear.”

Throughout the novel, we hear the Old Man’s voice berating and judging Binh. Anh Minh, by contrast, is supportive. In this quotation, we see Binh’s need and desire to hear praise and acceptance at least once in his life from his father. Ironically, much of what Binh hears while away from Vietnam is imagined, making it difficult to determine if the chastisements and cruelty emanate from Binh’s own self-loathing or from his father.

“‘Where there is gambling, there is faith.’”

By having gambling and card games on Saturdays, Binh’s father ensures a steady flow of converts, both winners and losers, attending services on Sundays. Binh believes his father would say Binh lost when he gambled on having an intimate relationship with Chef Bleriot, but Binh believes the risk was worth it because there was indeed nothing really to lose. There was no future in the employment of the Governor-General’s kitchen, despite Anh Minh’s hopes. While Binh had hoped for a longer affair, he never saw a relationship with the chef as an act of salvation.

“Either way, my Mesdames cohabitate in a state of grace. They both love Gertrude Stein [sic]. Better, they are both in love with Gertrude Stein [sic]. Mis Toklas fusses over her Lovey, and her Lovey lets her. Gertrude Stein feeds on affection, and Miss Toklas ensures that she never hungers. In exchange, in the fairest of trades Miss Toklas has the satisfaction of begin Gertrude Stein’s [sic] only one. No man’s god can tell me that is wrong.”

For Binh, the Mesdames are an example of a successful, loving relationship. His parents certainly didn’t have such a relationship. Binh’s own relationships have been short-lived, and he continues to look for his scholar-prince. Recognizing that these women have made a happy, functioning life gives Binh hope and comfort.

“Silver is threading my skin. Weightlessness overtakes me moments before my vision clears, my throat unclogs, and my body begins to understand that silver is threading my skin.”

Binh has a habit of cutting himself on purpose in the kitchen. He does it to feel alive, he says—to feel something. This act of self-mutilation seems to have gone unnoticed by his employers—Toklas is the first to pay attention to it. She confronts Binh firmly but kindly and helps him bandage his fingers. Binh recalls the first time he cut himself, accidentally, in his mother’s presence while helping her with kitchen tasks. Self-harm reveals that Binh, while outwardly composed, is inwardly suffering and attempts to find control and balance in an unhealthy way.

“As he aged, the Old Man became more womanish or rather just less of a man. His skin came loose. It hung from his bones, giving him a deflated, soft look. He wore his thinning white hair in a small bun at the nape of his neck. He was prone to sudden attacks, which made him clutch his chest as if he were a breathless girl.”

Binh grapples with the ideas of manhood and masculinity. He rejects his father’s version of masculinity as cowardly and harsh. One way to deflate the terror his father inspires is to compare him to a “breathless girl”—a misogynistic mockery that takes away the Old Man’s power over his sons.

“Pleasure for pleasure is an even exchange. Lust for lust is a balanced scale.”

When Binh spends his first Sunday night at Lattimore’s, he weighs the balance of power between them. Although Lattimore propositioned Binh under the guise of hiring him as a servant, Binh feels they met as equals for the shared purpose of passion. Unlike the unfair bargain between the Old Man and Binh’s mother, or the affair Binh had with Bleriot, who insisted Binh call him Chef even in the throes of passion, this relationship seems more equal. This, of course, will turn out to not be the case.

“I suppose the better question is what keeps you here?”

This question from the man on the bridge to Binh comes back repeatedly to Binh. Its subtext wonders what home is, where a person belongs, and what motivates us to stay or leave a situation. Binh wrestles with all of these throughout the novel.

“Although we strap time to our wrists, stuff it into our pockets, hang it on our walls, a perpetually moving picture for every room in the house, it can still run away, elude and evade, and show itself again only when there are minutes remaining and there is nothing left to do except wait till there are none.”

Truong’s achronological use of time mimics Binh’s own emotional and psychological states. He remains partially trapped in the past even while trying to live his life in Paris. This is perhaps best exemplified by the dying pigeon in the park turning into his mother. Further, we see Binh’s own nihilistic worldview attach itself to the concept of time.

“I have been witnessed. You have testified to my appearance and demeanor. I have been sighted.”

Binh has spent his life mostly invisible to others, either due to his inability to adequately converse in another language or because of his sexual identity. When Lattimore mentions having seen Binh in the flower market, Binh feels no longer anonymous. With this awareness is a mingling of happiness and grief at what is gained and lost by being truly seen.

“Your mother, you explain, is a woman whose legitimacy had also been compromised from the moment of her conception. Her legacy to you is that drop of blood, which made her an exile in the land of her birth.”

Another angle of racial and class prejudice emerges through Lattimore’s ancestry. Lattimore is a light-skinned mixed-race man from the American South who is passing as a white man in France. When Stein and Toklas meet the famous Paul Robeson, a brilliantly talented Black man from the US, they mock his speech and impose upon him an accent and dialect he does not have. Lattimore remarks that the women are Americans after all: Their racist views have leaked out, as they demand to categorize people into racial groups even in enlightened France. Lattimore’s mother being an exile in her home country resonates with Binh, who feels much the same.

“Madame is a snob but not a prude. She did not care about the relations of two men, just as long as they were of the same social standing and, of course, race.”

Binh’s employer at the Governor-General’s house didn’t care about same-sex relationships within her household, but would not tolerate cross-class and interracial relationships, revealing the bigoted hypocrisy of cosmopolitan French people. Binh must negotiate social norms in many different settings, keeping his personal life as private as possible to insulate against the judgment of others.

“‘The French are all right in France.’ What he meant, he explained, was that when the French are in their colonies they lose their natural inclination toward fraternity, equality, and liberty. They leave those ideals behind in Mother France, leaving them free to treat us like bastards in the land of our birth.”

The man on the bridge reveals a truth often unspoken: Colonialism and its impact on the subjected population is something that every character in the novel must contend with, whether as the oppressed or the oppressor. As Binh flows back and forth between memories of life in Vietnam, life at sea, and life in Paris, he must navigate the rules of a colonial society and the pecking order it sets up.

“I spend my months there and never, never see a face that looks like mine, except for the one that grows gaunt in the mirror. In Paris, Gertrude Stein [sic], the constant traffic of people at least includes my fellow asiatiques. And while we may never nod at one another, tip our hats in polite fashion, or even exchange empathy in quick glances, we breathe a little easier with each face that we see. It is the recognition that in the darkest streets of the city there is another body like mine, and that it means me no harm.”

When Binh speaks of his summers with Stein and Toklas at their country house, he invokes the specific loneliness of an outsider or immigrant. He explains how in Paris just crossing paths with another person of Asian descent brings him some sense of connection or belonging. To be in the country in the summer is to forego this small comfort.

“Please, Madame, do not equate my lack of speech with a lack of thought.”

Binh thinks this as Stein and Toklas ask about his omelets. While the reader is privy to Binh’s deep, lyrical, internal voice he can’t communicate outwardly in the same manner due to language barriers. He must keep much to himself and realizes that most people pass him by with little curiosity or thought.

“‘Did you hear me? I said that I have three sons.’”

When dismissed from the Governor-General’s household, the secretary takes one final swipe at Binh by writing his father to tell him about the rumors of Binh’s affair with Chef Bleriot. When Binh arrives home, his father disowns him, saying he now has three sons, and not four. This is when Binh learns of his mother’s affair with her supposed scholar-prince and that the Old Man has known all along. The last exchange between the two men ends with the Old Man spitting on Binh and turning his back on him.

“When my mother woke up she heard: ‘She’ll survive, but she’ll never give birth again.’”

Binh’s mother secretly pays the midwife to sterilize her following Binh’s birth. This means she is free of the Old Man, who only has sex with her for procreation. By rendering herself barren, Binh’s mother frees herself from at least one mode of the Old Man’s cruelty. The Old Man, who values people solely by their usefulness to him, now only demands that she keep selling her rice packets, which barely keep the family afloat, as the Old Man drinks his own earnings.

“A story, after all, is best when shared, a gift in the truest sense of the word.”

The idea of a story being a gift is repeated throughout the novel. Stories from Binh’s mother’s imagination have implanted a desire in Binh for his own scholar-prince. Bao’s stories at sea give Binh a distraction and insight into others. Binh unknowingly gifts portions of his life to Stein and her writings. Stein’s notebook, stolen by Binh, is a gift to Lattimore.

“Perseverance and flexibility are not opposites. Survival requires certain compromises. Endurance is defined by the last one standing.”

Binh believes his mother taught him these lessons during her life. He has learned the art of flexibility and compromise in his work, his status, and his relationships with others. He and his mother are survivors and know that flexibility and perseverance are crucial.

“But as a man who believed in the proliferation of sons, he had to touch this girl who smelled like the only woman he had ever loved. It sickened him each time.”

The Old Man’s mother, the only woman he had ever loved, abandoned him at a Catholic church. Since then, the Old Man has despised all women. Although he seems repulsed by women, the Old Man abhors Binh for Binh’s sexual attraction to men. Binh has no such hatred for women, although he, like the Old Man, has truly loved only one woman: his mother.

“These two, unlike all the others whom I have had the misfortune to call my Monsieur and Madame, extend to me the right to eat what they eat, a right that, as you know, is really more of a privilege when it is I who am doing the cooking.”

When asked by Lattimore to bring one of Stein’s notebooks to him, Binh bristles at the idea of betraying his employers and endangering his position in their comparatively comfortable household. Stein and Toklas let him eat what he cooks for them, and give him a level of respect Binh has not found elsewhere. We see how various aspects of Binh’s existence work against one another, and how he is ultimately used by all parties involved.