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354 18 “Love Is Not a Bowl of Quinces” Food, Desire, and the Queer Asian Body in Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt Denise Cruz Food and Desire Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt (2003) is a foodie reader’s fantasy. The novel abounds with tantalizing, mouth-watering concoctions: duck braised with port-drenched figs, tarts crisped with sugared butter, ripe quinces gently simmered in honeyed water. But for the characters in the novel, these delicacies are rendered all the more fascinating because they are created by Bính, the queer Vietnamese chef who works in Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s Parisian household. It was, in fact, this surprising morsel of real-life intimacy—the relationship between Vietnamese laborers and two of U.S. modernism’s most famous figures—that inspired Truong’s novel. In interviews about The Book of Salt, Truong recalls finding a revelation in the pages of the Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, which is both a cookbook and a memoir of Toklas’s life with Stein. “In a chapter called ‘Servants in France,’” remembers Truong, Toklas wrote about two Indochinese men who cooked for [them] at 27 rue de Fleurus and at their summer house in Bilignin. . . . When I got to the pages about these cooks, I was, to say the least, surprised and touched to see a Vietnamese presence—and such an intimate one at that—in the lives of these two women.1 A small, forgotten tidbit thus became the premise for The Book of Salt’s narrator , Bính, Truong’s fictionalized version of the couple’s live-in chef.2 Following Bính as he travels from French Vietnam to Stein and Toklas’s French households , the novel interweaves a present set in 1934 with a narrative that traces Bính’s evolving diasporic, queer Vietnamese identity. Food and Desire 355 I begin with the origin of Truong’s novel because it serves as an appropriate anecdotal amuse bouche for my own interests in The Book of Salt. Bính’s talents are influenced by Vietnam’s imperial history, his diasporic exile in France, and the queer desires circulating in and out of his employers’ homes. Those who delight in his food are amazed by the incongruity of French haute cuisine prepared by Vietnamese hands and the construction of these dishes in queer domestic space. Acutely aware of these dynamics, Bính both draws pleasure from and resists them. Indeed, Truong’s novel is notable because its palate defies mimetic links among ethnic bodies, cultures, and food. Her play with the culinary questions unidirectional narratives that cast the West as a controlling network of desire and consumption. Food reveals the hitherto unacknowledged presence of Vietnamese laborers in the overlapping global and domestic spaces. Imagining, describing, and eating food become a means of potentially subverting the hierarchies in these realms and of constructing nonnormative familial intimacies.3 Yet while food allows access to these new formations, it also reveals their necessary limits. My analysis of The Book of Salt thus explores the politics and implications of a representational strategy that simmers together the literary and the culinary to produce immiscibilities rather than fusions. Ultimately, The Book of Salt highlights how food does and does not stand in for authenticity, how language can and cannot represent objects or people, and how queer desire both fuels and is fueled by Asian bodies. My chapter builds on recent work that has reclaimed the importance of foodways to Asian American literature and culture. Asian American critics have long been suspicious of presumed connections linking food, the body, and authenticity. Often, this criticism centers on the questions of whether or not an Asian American author is capitulating to a mainstream U.S. market; in readings that decry representations of food as “food pornography,” food markets the ethnic subject as not just palatable but also enticing. In part, this recipe for mainstream market success does work. As Anita Mannur has tracked, novels that focus on food or capitalize on an interest in food (e.g., Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club) have been quite successful commercially.4 Working against this suspicion about representational foodways, recent studies by Mannur, Jennifer Ann Ho, and Wenying Xu draw on early foundational work by scholars like Sau-Ling Wong to reclaim the critical potential of the culinary in Asian American literature.5 For these scholars, Asian American and South Asian authors use the culinary to unsettle the normative...

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