The Book of Salt

by Monique Truong

They were lights that feigned to illuminate but really intended to blind. Lightning before a driving storm, I had thought. But I suppose that was the sailor’s apprehension in me talking. It had been eleven years since I had made a true ocean crossing.

I was certain to find the familiar sting of salt, but what I needed to know was what kind: kitchen, sweat, tears or the sea. I wanted this paper-shrouded thing to divulge itself to me, to tell me even before the words emerged why it had taken my brother almost five years to respond to my first and only letter home.

The irony of acquiring a foreign tongue is that I have amassed just enough cheap, serviceable words to fuel my desires and never, never enough lavish, imprudent ones to feed them.

you have nothing to worry about. I have no interest in your little girls. Your boys . . . well, that is their choice, she should hear me thinking.

Communicating in the negative is not the quickest and certainly not the most esteemed form of expression, but for those of us with few words to spare it is the magic spell, the incantation, that opens up an otherwise inaccessible treasure trove.

And, yes, for every coarse, misshapen phrase, for every blundered, dislocated word, I pay a fee. A man with a borrowed, ill-fitting tongue, I cannot compete for this city’s attention.

I am a man whose voice is a harsh whisper in a city that favors a song.

They crave the fruits of exile, the bitter juices, and the heavy hearts. They yearn for a taste of the pure, sea-salt sadness of the outcast whom they have brought into their homes.

She is a pagan who secretly yearns for High Mass. To her, there is something of both in their Sunday nights that lets her spirit soar.

After years of the imposed invisibility of servitude, I am acutely aware when I am being watched, a sensitivity born from absence, a grain of salt on the tongue of a man who has tasted only bitter.

“Interview,” though, slapped me in the face. The word was a sharp reminder that I was a servant who thought himself a man, that I was a fool who thought himself a king of hearts.

There is a fine line between a cook and a murderer, and that line is held steady by the men of my trade. Really, the only difference between the two is that one kills to cook while the other cooks to kill. Killing is involved either way. The wringing of feathered necks, the smothering of throats still filled with animal sounds, the examples are endless. Learning how to take away life while leaving the body whole and the flesh unbruised, that is how I began my apprenticeship. It is a delicate procedure that those who do not know how call by the misnomer “slaughter.” That is, believe me, too harsh and grubby a word for such a finely coordinated set of movements, as graceful as death at someone else’s hands can get.

While I may never master the French language, I have learned that the true faces of its lofty expressions are often found on their most literal meanings. It is a perverse way of hiding something right in the open, very French in its contempt and cruelty for those who are not. Grace, believe me, is undoubtedly necessary when handling a knife. I can always tell a professional chef from a home cook. The knife work gives them away. There is an economy of movement coupled with a warriorlike aggressiveness that immediately identifies the chef. Such deftness is not required for the preparation of commonplace foods.

A soufflé is most definitely out of the question. Too temperamental, a lover who dictates his own terms. A tart is better, uncomplicated, in the wrong hands even a bit rough. Like an American boy, I would imagine.

“Bridges belong to no one,” he continued on anyway. “A bridge belongs to no one because a bridge has to belong to two parties, one on either side. There has to be an agreement, a mutual consent, otherwise it’s a useless piece of wood, a wasted expanse of cement. Every bridge is, in this way,” he explained, “a monument to an accord.”

Although we strap time to our wrists, stuff it into our pockets, hang it on our walls, a perpetually moving picture for every room of the house, it can still run away, elude and evade, and show itself again only when there are minutes remaining and there is nothing left to do except wait till there are none.

I drink like the Old Man. I am fine after the first bottle, but then I turn red. As these farmers and others have pointed out, I look as if I have been burnt by the sun. My cheeks, I am embarrassed to admit, are crimson. I cannot pass it off as a blush because the color is too intense. But beyond this red cast, I remain remarkably unaffected. Well, that is until I pass out. The line between being awake and not is easy for me to overstep, as I never see it coming. One moment I am sitting at one of the long tables set outside under the harvest moon for the occasion, and the next I am being slapped and doused with water.

Language is a house with a host of doors, and I am too often uninvited and without the keys. But when I infiltrate their words, take a stab at their meanings, I create the trapdoors that will allow me in when the night outside is too cold and dark.

I know, Má. I know. I have never left your womb, is how you want me to feel. I will always be protected, safe inside of you, is what you want me always to remember. Yes, Má, I know. Yes, Má, I am there still.

I know, Má, the pouch is red because red is the color of luck, not the bad kind, just the good. The color of faith trumping fate, of hope growing ripe, of fruits on an endless vine. Red is the color of what travels through our hearts, an internal river that we never have to leave behind. When Monsieur and Madame see red, they think anger, death, a site of danger, a situation requiring extreme caution and care. Ridiculous, overblown, entirely misunderstood. Red on my fingertips, Ma, means that I am still here. Red releases you thick from my body. Red is what keeps you near.

I know Má, black is the color of our hair, the color of our irides with the coming of dusk, the color of a restful night’s sleep, of coal rice, of tamarind pulp, of the unbroken shell of a thousand-year egg. How can this black be the color of sorrow? Underglazed with red river clay, deep water blue, high-in-the-tree-top green, black is luminous, the color that allows us to dream.

What does the gambler have faith in? Those who never wager, I imagine, do not have to ask themselves these questions, never have to acknowledge that the answers are few. The answer, or if he is truly lucky, the answers, define the gambler’s notions of risk and restraint. If “nothing” is the gambler’s answer, he is bound to lose because there is nothing to guide him back from the edge, nothing but the urge to jump. Risk encourages a gambler to be brave. Restraint advises a gambler to be prudent. It is the balance between the two that keeps him in the game.

As if in grief, the bamboos were pressed to the ground. But within a matter of minutes, they nodded and waved. They shook off the rain and reoriented themselves toward the sky. My mother was impressed, indeed. Now that, she thought, is strength. Perseverance and flexibility are not opposites. Survival requires certain compromises. Endurance is defined by the last one standing. These were the lessons, I imagine, that she must have learned.

“Salt is not essential here,” Miss Toklas interrupted. “Consider it carefully, Bin, before using it.” A pinch of salt, according to my Madame, should not be a primitive reflex, a nervous twitch on the part of any cook, especially one working at 27 rue de Fleurus. Salt is an ingredient to be considered and carefully weighed like all others.

The true taste of salt—the whole of the sea on the tip of the tongue, sorrow’s sting, labor’s smack—has been lost, according to my Madame, to centuries of culinary imprudence.

In the city of my birth, you keep the promise that we made to each other. We swore not to die on the kitchen floor. We swore not to die under the eaves of his house.

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. From the very beginning, the best ones, according to Minh the Sous Chef, know how to use the extreme heat, the bitter cold, to their advantage.

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.

O Magazine said, “Salt, whether from ‘kitchen, sweat, tears, or the sea’—is the secret of this perfectly rendered book.” How is salt used as an ingredient in Bình’s story?

Bình uses the color red often when describing his mother: “Red is luck that she had somehow saved, stored, and squandered on her youngest son.” What other meanings does he give to red? Why does he cut his fingertips? Did Bình’s vision of the gray pigeon in the park change your understanding of his mother, and of what Bình left behind in Vietnam?

Bình’s stories are told via his internal voice, one which is far richer, far more agile—in fact, it is a stark contrast to the voice that comes out of his mouth. Bình is a man living in a land, working for employers whose languages are foreign to him. He struggles with their words, and they win the confrontation every time. Limited and silenced, Bình has only his memory and his imagination to keep him company.

Q) You were born in Vietnam and came to the United States in 1975 as a refugee. Did that experience play a role in shaping this novel? A) I was six years old when my mother and I left Vietnam in April of 1975. It was supposed to be just a precautionary measure, a temporary solution to keep us safe from the nightly bombings. My father, who was a high-level executive for an international oil company, stayed behind at their behest. Later that month, when Saigon fell to the communist forces, my father left on a boat for the South China Sea, the same sea that my mother and I were lucky enough to have flown over in an airplane just weeks before. The departure, the loss of home, that act of refuge-seeking, have everything to do with the themes playing themselves out in The Book of Salt. There are no military conflicts in my novel, there are no soldiers, there are no weapons. I suppose it is no coincidence that the first long-distance flight of my imagination as a writer would take me to a time in history when Vietnam was more or less at peace. When you are a child of wartime, peace is the all-consuming fantasy. Also, I think as a child of wartime, one of the questions that stays with me and that I’ve tried to answer for myself by writing this novel is what if there was not a war, what then would make a person leave the land of their birth behind?

Q) Why did you choose the title The Book of Salt? A) Salt—in food, sweat, tears, and the sea—is found throughout the novel. The word “salary” comes from the word salt, so salt is another way of saying labor, worth, value. For me, the title is also a nod toward the biblical connotation of salt, in particular to the turning of Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt for “looking back” at her home, the city of Sodom. That story says to me that the Catholic God, whom the cook is so wary of, not only disapproves of the activities of the Sodomites but also of nostalgia. Bình is a practitioner of both. In the novel, there is an unpublished manuscript by Gertrude Stein with the same name, which plays a significant role in Bình’s relationship with his American lover, Sweet Sunday Man.