Analysis Of The Book Of Salt By Monique Truong

Contrastingly, The Book of Salt by Monique Truong portrays the protagonist, Binh, as a man who is constantly haunted by the voice and image of his radically stifling father, the Old Man. Everytime his doubt takes a hold of him, Binh is further confined by the opinion he thinks the Old Man will have, despite Binh’s hatred for him. “Every day, I hear the Old Man's voice shouting at me from beneath the earth, where, I tell myself, he now lies,” Binh explains (Truong 267). The Old Man’s blatant hatefulness and unacceptance is evidenced in many situations, but especially in the day he found out about Binh’s sexual relations with another man, which was the day the Old Man “was no longer [his] father” (230). When Binh recalls this day, he says twice,

Unable to return to his home and to his mother, memories of her inundate Binh’s present life. He says “’She’ was also a fishing village girl, who sat by the shore and darned the nets, who sang the same songs as her brothers but had never been allowed out to sea” (114-115). Because she is a woman, a “she,” Binh’s mother is not allowed to feel the freedom her brothers feel. Similarly, Binh is condemned as “lai cái, which Binh explains, “What they mean is that I am mixed with or am partially a female,” (189). Arguably, their common struggles as feminized, and consequently, externally diminished and lessened by society, bond Binh and his mother so closely. After recalling a memory of his mother naturally jumping to his aid after he cuts himself while preparing a meal, the memories of the pain they both have felt and share negate and falsify a feeling of being at sea that otherwise would dominate. The freedom of the sea here connects Binh to his mother even more closely because they both have experienced it being denied to them. Still, this connection to his mother loosens the Old Man’s suffocating hold on Binh, and thus, the sea indirectly liberates

This society, in contrast to Vietnamese society where he “was above all just a man,” distortedly assumes his weaknesses, his story, and his past with one quick glance at his body. “To them [his] body offers an exacting, predetermined life story” (214-215) that limits who he can be and leaves him little room for his own input and creation. However, cooking, something that also connects him to his mother, does provide Binh with a vehicle to express a little individuality and allows him to live like “a fish in a barrierless sea” (262). In addition, he initially envies his lover, Lattimore, who he calls “Sweet Sunday Man,” for “the blank sheet of paper that is [his] skin” that Binh thinks allows Sweet Sunday Man to define and introduce himself as whoever he wants to be (214). He realizes, however, that the racial hierarchies that govern society have just as intensely infiltrated Sweet Sunday Man, whose subscription to this racist structure shamefully forces him, as a black man, to pass himself off as white (159) and in turn, open a world of undeniably more abundant opportunities. In addition, Binh and Sweet Sunday Man’s sexual preference is not openly accepted in France, as evidenced by the Parisian trained chauffeur that refers to Binh’s sexuality as a “condition” with many “mutations” that is in need of a