From abjection to ecstasy: The emotional ends of eating in Monique Truong's Book of Salt

Abstract

Nine years after the American writer Gertrude Stein died in 1946, her partner, Alice B. Toklas, composed a cookbook devoted to the culinary adventures that the couple shared in France. Fifty years later, Monique Truong fashioned a novel narrated from the perspective of the Vietnamese cook who worked for the famous couple. While the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook underscores cooking as a medium through which to express cultural authority and expertise in a foreign land, Book of Salt deals directly with food as a colonizer's weapon. By giving voice to a Vietnamese protagonist skilled in French culinary techniques and practices, however, Monique Truong does far more than shed light on culinary colonialism; she underscores cooking as a powerful means of communication and cultural transgression. Like Toklas and Stein, Binh, the narrator of Book of Salt , speaks French haltingly. Like Toklas, however, Binh is eloquently well-versed in French culinary beliefs and practices, a fact that enables him to destabilize myriad power relations. Binh's culinary expertise challenges and dissolves hierarchies that privilege heterosexuality over homosexuality, white over non-white, colonizer over colonized, and stasis over dislocation. This underscores the power of food as a medium of self-construction and cultural defiance.