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Monique Truong Monique Truong was born in Saigon in 1968. She grew up in Cần Thơ until the age of six, when she left Vietnam with her mother in what they thought was merely “a precautionary measure” during the chaos of April 1975. Her father, an oil company executive, fled by boat a few weeks later. The family lived briefly in North Carolina and then moved to Houston, Texas. Truong graduated from Yale University in 1990 and the Columbia University School of Law in 1995, where she specialized in intellectual property. She worked as an attorney in New York City for three years but says she “knew the legal profession wasn’t for [her] after the first week of law school”; she now writes full-time. In 1998 she co-edited Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose and published her first novel, The Book of Salt, in 2003. Her interest in the protagonist, a Vietnamese cook living in exile in Paris, was sparked in college . Pursuing a hashish brownie recipe that was contained in Alice B. Toklas ’ cookbook, Truong didn’t find the recipe she expected but did discover mention of two “Indochinese” cooks that Toklas described in her “Servants in France” chapter. “These ‘Indo-Chinese’ cooks were just a minor footnote. There could be a personal epic embedded inside that footnote, I thought.” The Book of Salt imagines those lives through Truong’s main character, Binh. The book earned several awards, including the 2003 Bard Fiction Prize. Her second novel, Bitter in the Mouth (2010), imagines the life of Linda Hammerick/Linh Dao Nguyen, whose synaesthesia allows her to literally taste words. from The Book of Salt (2003) “THIN BIN,” says GertrudeStein, merrily mispronouncing my name, rhyming it instead with an English word that she claims describes my most distinctive feature, declining to share with me what that feature would be. I have learned that my Madame, while not cruel, is full of mischief. She never fails to greet me with a smile and a hearty American salutation: Monique Truong | 203 “Well, hello, Thin Bin!” She then walks on by, leaving me to speculate again on what this “thin” could be. Short, I think, is the most obvious answer. “Stupid,” the Old Man insists. Handsome, I venture, is the better guess. All my employers provide me with a new moniker, whether they know it or not. None of them—and this I do not exaggerate—has called me by my given name. Their mispronunciations are endless, an epic poem all their own. GertrudeStein’s just happens to rhyme. Every time she says my name, I say it as well. Hearing it said correctly, if only in my head, is a desire that I cannot shake. I readjust and realign the tones that are missing or are sadly out of place. I am lonesome all the same for another voice to say my name, punctuated with a note of anticipation, a sigh of relief, a warm breath of affection. “Thin Bin,” says GertrudeStein, “how would you define ‘love’?” While my Madame begins her question with what I have to come to accept as my American name, she has to deliver the rest of it, the meat of it, to me in French. It is, after all, the only language that we have in common. And GertrudeStein’s French is, believe me, common. It is a shoe falling down a stairwell. The rhythm is all wrong. The closer it gets, the louder and more discordant it sounds. Her broad American accent, though, pleases her to no end. She considers it a necessary ornamentation, like one of the imposing mosaic brooches that she is so fond of wearing. She uses it freely on her daily stroll around the neighborhood with Basket pulling at her by a red rope leash. GertrudeStein never walks the Chihuahua. Pepe does not perform well when there is dirt or stone underneath his stiletto paws. First he shakes and then he passes gas. For a dog the size of a guinea hen, he passes more than can be imagined. GertrudeStein prefers the goat-sized poodle. Basket ’s cape, she believes, gives him a sensible air. Together these two ample ambassadors of American goodwill canvass the streets of the Left Bank, engaging the shopkeepers in their doorways, the old men walking their tiny dogs, the kind that, like Pepe, shiver all year round. It is always surprising for me to see Basket strolling with GertrudeStein. For all of...

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