“One of Us”: Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth and the Twenty-First-Century Southern Novel

Abstract

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Monique Truong's 2010 novel Bitter in Mouth opens with narrator Linda Hammerick reminiscing about her close relationship with her great-uncle, before introducing us to her experience with synesthesia. (Linda has auditory-gustatory synesthesia, meaning words she hears or speaks trigger specific tastes.) The first half of novel traces her youth, particularly her experience as a victim of sexual assault, before Truong upends readers' assumptions by revealing that Linda's full name is Linh-Dao Nguyen Hammerick, thus forcing us to consider how Linda's racial identity functions in a novel already replete with explorations of marginalized social groups in Although she does not reveal her ethnic origins until halfway through novel, Linda's narration of her childhood has emphasized her status as an outsider; she is unable to speak of her synesthesia without fear of being thought crazy, while her closest relationship is with her gay great-uncle Baby Harper. In addition, novel explores rape, sexual abuse, and imposed silence that often accompanies sexual violence. And while Linda's race becomes a major thematic and narrative concern in final portion of novel, Monique Truong makes clear that these issues are interconnected. Through various formal and narrative decisions, particularly paralipsis surrounding Linda's racial identity, Truong's novel investigates a panoply of racial and cultural ideologies that complicate our understanding of beyond black/white racial binary and force readers to consider a global South. A compelling and thought-provoking novel in its own right, Bitter in Mouth also serves as an important example of ongoing evolution of southern literature. The novel explores not only a Vietnamese American's experience in South, but also issues of queerness, class, ability, and sexual violence. While these topics of course are not new to southern literature--consider Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers's grotesque characters, or Randall Kenan and Dorothy Allison's explorations of rural queerness--their juxtaposition with Linda's experience as an adopted Vietnamese orphan living with synesthesia in (in decades following Vietnam War, no less) helps to expand our understanding of what it means to present the South in contemporary literature. Whose is it? Who gets to claim it? Whose (hi)story is told? As Leslie Bow notes, one of our chief ways of interpreting southern race relations is through lens of Jim Crow segregation. She asks, How did Jim Crow accommodate a supposed 'third' race, those individuals and communities who did not fit into a cultural and legal system predicated on binary distinction between black and white? And while Bitter in Mouth takes place after Brown v. Board of Education and passage of Civil Rights Act of 1964, it expands this discussion to consider southernness and foreignness, acceptance and isolation, ability and difference. (1) Truong asks readers to consider a more modern idea of a that is not limited to borders (and binaries) of former Confederate states. And while authors such as Faulkner, O'Connor, and Harry Crews are also known for their depictions of characters deemed grotesque, emblematic of South's fascination with freak (recall O'Connor's wry comment, Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one), Truong presents a protagonist with outwardly invisible condition of synesthesia. While Linda's condition is not immediately visible to outsiders, she remains subject to ridicule and judgment, including at hands of her mother. Finally, Bitter in Mouth joins a burgeoning corpus of Asian American literature set in and about Alongside such authors as John Jung, whose memoir Southern Fried Rice (2005) recounts author's life in Jim Crow South, and Cynthia Kadohata who, in novels including The Floating World (1989) and Kira-Kira (2004), portrays limited economic options available for Asian American families, Truong presents an innovative depiction of region, one that asks readers to broaden their expectations and understandings of modern by focusing on intersections of race and ability that have at times gone underrepresented in southern studies. …