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

Truong has alluded to the biographical notes in [her work], referring to herself . . . as a “Southern girl, twice over: South Vietnam and the American South,” and adding, “It’s, of course, only the former that defines me in most people’s eyes.” Monique Truong with her mother at Biltmore House, Asheville, North Carolina, ca. 1978, courtesy of Monique Truong.

Monique Truong’s 2010 novel Bitter in the 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 the 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 the South. Although she does not reveal her ethnic origins until halfway through the 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, the novel explores rape, sexual abuse, and the imposed silence that often accompanies sexual violence. And while Linda’s race becomes a major thematic and narrative concern in the final portion of the novel, Monique Truong makes clear that these issues are interconnected. Through various formal and narrative decisions, particularly the paralipsis surrounding Linda’s racial identity, Truong’s novel investigates a panoply of racial and cultural ideologies that complicate our understanding of the South beyond the black/white racial binary and force readers to consider a “global South.”

A compelling and thought-provoking novel in its own right, Bitter in the Mouth also serves as an important example of the ongoing evolution of southern literature. The novel explores not only a Vietnamese American’s experience in the 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 the South (in the decades following the Vietnam War, no less) helps to expand our understanding of what it means to present “the South” in contemporary literature. Whose South 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 the 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 the binary distinction between black and white?”And while Bitter in the Mouth takes place after Brown v. Board of Education and the passage of the 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 South that is not limited to the borders (and binaries) of the 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 the South’s fascination with the “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 the outwardly invisible condition of synesthesia. While Linda’s condition is not immediately visible to outsiders, she remains subject to ridicule and judgment, including at the hands of her mother. Finally, Bitter...