The Book of Salt

by Monique Truong

Vietnamese, a language that had centuries ago been cast into a neat Romanized script, chased with tildes, circumflexes, breves, acute and grave accents, an oblation from the Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes. The Jesuit, like all missionaries after him, understood the power of literacy. The written word never stops proselytizing, never dies of malaria, and has an uncanny tendency to reproduce, an act that he as a man of God was not privy to. The Jesuit dismantled the ideographs of Vietnam and taught his converts their catechisms in a language reconfigured for the sake of simplicity. Easier to learn and easier to teach, thought the Jesuit.

It is one thing to be alone in life, she thought, but to be alone in death would be unbearable.

Faith is the beginning of the story of my life.

“If you don’t believe in God, then how do you explain the chestnut?”

A gift or a theft depends on who is holding the pen.

Words, Sweet Sunday Man, do not have twins in every language. Sometimes they have only distant cousins, and sometimes they pretend that they are not even related.

Cooks, unlike poets, are unmoved by the weather.

A snowfall in February, silent—sullen would not be overstating it—is for me the most unforgiving. There is no pretense of grace, no lofty swirling, no laceworked confetti. The sky just opens up and pours down powdered sugar, cracker crumbs, salt. These are my exact thoughts.

As they say, Old Man, blood is thicker than water. But in our case, you have mired the seas with so much refuse and malice that no ship, Old Man, can navigate those waters and bring me back to you again.

Death, believe me, never comes to us first in words.

Blue is the color of a pristine sky, the color of a placid, sleeping sea. Blue is the iridescent gleam on the scales of a fish, a color that swims deep and fares best far from shore. Blue is the last bit of beauty that this animal has left to share, before a knife finds its soft underbelly and guts it.

He had already taught me the English word for “sweet.” “Sour” and “bitter” were soon to come.

Má, please do not cry. I know I could have bought bread with it, a room for the night. I could have bought acts of love with it, but I could have never bought back the years of your life. Sorrow, even when tempered by sweat and toil into a whisper weight of gold, is still sorrow. Worthless to us both in the end, Má. Better that a stranger circles the globe with it than your youngest son.

I have heard that at a certain age men either renew a longing for the bosom of the woman who nursed them or those of distant mountains.

Two “storms” aboard one ship, I thought, was certainly a sign from somebody’s god, a sign to jump overboard and swim back to shore.

Lovers who have lived a lifetime together have the luxury of never having to say anything new.

Salt, I thought. GertrudeStein, what kind? Kitchen, sweat, tears, or the sea. Madame, they are not all the same. Their stings, their smarts, their strengths, the distinctions among them are fine. Do you know, GertrudeStein, which ones I have tasted on my tongue? A story is a gift, Madame, and you are welcome.