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.
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 immiscibili-ties 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 and limiting dynamics of citizenship, diaspora, identity, community, and globalization. Their efforts question the connections between Asian bodies and food and the dynamics of knowing and consuming the Asian other.6 They reaffirm the importance of food in Asian American novels not as trope or metaphor but as a means of exploring processes critical to identity, subject, and community formations.7 Historically, they contend, this argument makes sense because of the centrality of food to how Asian Americans have been racialized by mainstream U.S. cultural representations, which often pitch Asians and Asian food as either “disgusting” or exotic. Examinations of food in Asian American literature thus offer a complicated response to how food has been employed by both Asian authors and U.S. constructions of Asia and Asians.8 The importance of domestic spaces to the creation and consumption of food in Asian American literature provides opportunities to uncover the complicated matrices of gender, sexuality, and class that structure Asian American identities and communities, as well as possibilities of imagining new alternatives. Yet these critics also are aware of the complexities of these alternatives. As Mannur observed of South Asian diasporic texts, “the ‘culinary’ most typically occupies a seemingly paradoxical space—at once a site of affirmation and resistance.”9
What do we do, then, with a text like Truong’s and its careful play with the very seductiveness of not only food but also the seductive allure of its preparation by Asian hands? Truong certainly is interested in exposing and critiquing cycles of objectification and consumption, yet she also explores methods of resistance that are much more complicated than Bính’s outward rejection of these dynamics. For although the novel subverts the Western appetite for an Asian other, The Book of Salt also extends this critique by reversing the usual directionality of this desire, so that Bính takes pleasure in and relishes the knowledge that others desire him. The Book of Salt thus complicates the networks of pleasure and desire that circulate between Asian laborers and their employers. Bính clearly refuses yet wants to be desired, and this combination of motive and response articulates the complexities of queer diasporic Vietnamese subjectivity, an experience characterized by a need for recognition. This admixture of catering to, relishing, and withdrawing from circuits of desire emerges in the kitchens of Bính’s Messieurs and Mesdames and in the secrets woven into his recipes.
In this chapter, I explore this complex intersection of the culinary and the literary in The Book of Salt. First, I examine Truong’s representation of food—its production and consumption and the circulation of recipes—as critical to Bính’s manipulation of those who desire to know and control him. Building on Xu’s and David Eng’s exploration of queer intimacies in the novel, I next analyze the connections between the culinary and networks of queer desire, arguing that through the representation of preparing and sharing meals, The Book of Salt imagines formations of queer communities. I then turn to what makes Truong’s work truly unusual: the novel’s emphasis on language, negation, and the literary. The Book of Salt calls attention to both the culinary and the literary, and to the possibilities and shortcomings of both genres of production in imagining queer diasporic identities and communities. I end with a brief coda that turns to a very different iteration of the dynamics that I explore in The Book of Salt: the representation of Hung Huynh in the reality television show Top Chef—to acknowledge the widespread and continued consumption of Asian domestic and affective labor.
In the opening descriptions of his life as a chef, Bính reveals that he is quite aware of how his body and labor circulate. Indeed, even though Bính’s agency in Paris may be limited, Truong illuminates his awareness of imperial epistemologies and his ability to maneuver within hierarchical structures of knowledge. His Parisian employers, he confides, fall into three different categories. In the first, after a “catlike glimpse” of his face (16), his employers dismiss him immediately.10 The second group is inquisitive and suspicious and “behave as if they have been authorized by the French government to ferret out and to document” his presence on “their hallowed shores” (16). The third category, in his terms, is “the collectors” (18), who quickly hire him. These men and women, though, are ultimately “never satiated by my cooking. They are ravenous. The honey that they covet lies inside my scars.” Although the collectors may be more “subtle,” they are nevertheless “indistinguishable from the type twos except for the defining core of their obsession. They have no true interest in where I have been or what I have seen. They crave the fruits of exile, the bitter juices, and the heavy hearts” (19).
In this environment—in which the desire to know is linked to consumption of the colonized Asian body, a body that is exiled and estranged in the metropole—Bính’s incredible skills as a chef present opportunities to reverse the epistemological structures and hierarchies of labor and empire in Paris. The preparation of food becomes a means of breaking the bounds separating Bính from his employers. For him, his work as a chef gives him opportunities to experience what Xu calls “some self-determination and dignity,” and the production and serving of culinary creations are processes of delightful—and, most important, pleasurable—manipulation.11 His Mesdames may direct him in the kitchen, but he knows that he retains control over what enters their mouths: “Three times a day, I orchestrate, and they sit with slackened jaws, silenced” (19). Even more delicious: his Mesdames don’t even realize his power. He gleefully confides in us:
It is your ignorance, Madame, that lines my pocket, gives me entry into the lesser rooms of your house, allows my touch to enter you in the most intimate of ways. Madame, please do not forget that every morsel that slides down your dewy white throat has first rested in my two hands, coddled in the warmth of my ten fingers. What clings to them clings to you. (153–54)
The passage of Bính’s creations from his hands to his Mesdames’ mouths reverse assumptions about the hierarchy of American employers over Asian workers or, in broader terms, the French and U.S. empires and their exploitation of Asian bodies. This description moves from rooms in the house, to literal and metaphorical pockets, to the interior cavities of the body. But in the eroticism of this moment, something else is also at work. Bính’s pleasure stems from this intimate transgression, but the sticky cling of residues that transfers from his working fingers to his Mesdames’ throats is tinged with violence and forced entry. Here, even the disrupted hierarchies—of West over East, transnational American over exiled Asian, Madame over servant—ultimately cannot escape the logic of heterosexual violence that has been foundational to imperial structures of power.
In addition to acts of production and consumption, the culinary also gives Bính opportunities to remind himself (and, though they may not realize it, his employers) that their control and knowledge is not all-encompassing. Tantalizing and then refusing to give his employers what they crave, he constantly provokes questions and withholds answers.12 This back-and-forth serves as both survival strategy and amusing game. His Mesdames assume that the exquisite taste of Bính’s dishes originate not in his talents, skill, or work as a chef but from some withheld secret ingredient:
Like children, gullible and full of wonder, they always ask, “What is your secret?”
Do I look like a fool? I ask myself each time. Please, Madame, do not equate my lack of speech with a lack of thought. … They all believe in a “secret” ingredient, a balm for their Gallic pride, a magic elixir that anyone can employ to duplicate my success. Its existence downplays my skills, cheapens my worth. … If there is a “secret,” Madame, it is this: Repetition and routine. Servitude and subservience. Beck and call. (153–54)
In this response, Bính mocks Madame’s ignorance, her failure to recognize that his skill in the kitchen comes not merely from the ingredients alone but from years of difficult service.
Yet again, I want to stress the complexities of Truong’s novel, for despite Bính’s angry dismissal of these questions and his contention that the true secret of his culinary expertise stems from the invisible labor that provides these dishes, he often does include secret ingredients in his recipes. These components give Bính moments of pleasure in an environment in which his desires are dismissed and rendered invisible. In one example, Bính lies to an inquisitive Madame, telling her that the secret to his perfect omelet is a touch of freshly grated nutmeg, a spice that, when added to eggs, results in a final product “laced with the taste of handsoaps and the smell of certain bugs whose crushed bodies emit a warning order to the others” (154). Yet only a page earlier, Bính reveals that his recipe does, in fact, include a secret: a second tablespoon of melted butter carefully tucked inside the omelet just as it begins to puff. Throughout the novel, Bính reveals other surprising ingredients, from peppercorns steeped in milk for gingered ice cream (186) to black truffle shavings on salade cancalaise. These secrets leave the taster with a question, a feeling that there is “something deeper,” “a lingering lace of a feeling on the tongue” (186). His revision of recipes is yet another way to exercise power over his employers, and these elements and techniques can be withheld, misrepresented, or openly shared. He enjoys eluding his Mesdames’ and Messieurs’ will to know, as these unrecognizable tastes are a method of escape from questions, explicit and implicit, about where he is from or why he is in France.
The novel also highlights the exploitation of the Asian laborer through Bính’s recognition that the act of preparing a culinary masterpiece often also requires acts of violence. The Book of Salt stresses that the most delicious recipes require some sort of sacrifice, from the death of a young animal to the realization that while the taste of a meal might linger on the tongue, the labor and sacrifice required to learn and master a dish often disappears once the results are consumed. The most memorable of these shared revelations are recipes taught to Bính by Toklas. Lamb á la Toklas (Bính’s private name for his Madame’s recipe for roast lamb) requires a pré-salé lamb. These lambs are raised in salt marshes on the northern coast of France. According to Toklas, they need no seasoning, for they “are salted and seasoned from the raw beginning.” When roasted to a succulent, perfect brown, their tender and mouthwatering flesh is a “reminder of why we kill and eat the young” (178). In another example, Bính remembers learning how to suffocate pigeons, a technique that Miss Toklas uses to preserve the blood in the bird, so that the result is a plumper and juicier bite. The process requires Bính to use the sense of touch in ways that are excruciating, as he uses his fingers to press on the bird’s throat and eventually to feel the quickening of the bird’s heart as its life is extinguished. Although “the difference in the end result … is spectacular … the required act is unforgivable” (68).13 The horror of strangling a pigeon or carefully cultivating and then butchering a lamb stems from the fact that these animals are killed in this way to increase the diner’s pleasure. Although Bính masters these techniques, he is nevertheless haunted by them, for he becomes complicit in a cycle of consumption and erasure that also affects him. Bính’s reaction to these acts of culinary sacrifice thus critiques dynamics of continued exploitation and the invisibility of their extensive and lingering effects.
In The Book of Salt, the culinary also offers, at least for ephemeral moments, access to nonnormative communities and intimacies that work against imperial and heteropatriarchal structures. After characterizing his employers (the collectors) into three distinct categories, the novel takes an unexpected turn as soon as Alice B. Toklas opens the door to the Toklas-Stein residence on the rue du Fleurus. Indeed, like Bính, we expect Stein and Toklas to fall into one of these categories. Yet what is most striking about Bính’s relationship with them is that they are in many ways unlike his other employers. Instead, the bounds of this queer domestic household allow for alternative formations that include temporary, queer affiliations between expatriate modernist and Vietnamese laborer. Bính, GertrudeStein (one word in The Book of Salt), and Toklas create, even for small and tiny moments, a familial intimacy. The unique queer and diasporic household on the rue de Fleurus thus temporarily allows for cross-class affiliations that are not otherwise available amid the overarching structures of empire and globalized labor.
These fleeting moments of community and connection often stem from opportunities to share a meal or to learn and revise a recipe. The novel highlights the affinities shared by Bính and Toklas, both of whom are subject to the whims of GertrudeStein and her desires. Toklas, like Bính, seems most comfortable and at home in the kitchen. The two share a cautious admiration for each other and their shared cooking talents. Like Bính, Madame Toklas also relies on secrets (like a prized gazpacho recipe made without salt): “Intrigue,” Bính confides in us, “is what my Madame aspires to in all of her creations” (179). Bính and Toklas are joined in this queer affinity that is also about their labor—the behind-the-scenes orchestrations that make Stein’s life enjoyable.
Yet even with these close connections to his Mesdames, Bính is constantly reminded that lasting intimacies are impossible. One example centers on a simple preparation of eggs. In the novel, Bính falls in love with Marcus Lattimore, and after their first night together, he struggles to find an excuse for his absence. He lies about his whereabouts and tells his Mesdames that he failed to return home because he was drunk and asleep after consuming an entire bottle of rum given to him by Lattimore. Dismayed at the thought that someone has taken advantage of Bính, Toklas (who introduced him to Lattimore), invites the chef to prepare a simple “meal en famille, as the French would say.” Such a simple repast,
a platter of fried eggs and a loaf of bread placed in the center of a family’s table are never an insult. It is a ritual in intimacy. It is food that has no business with the outside world, food that no hired cook would ever dare serve. A family member, maybe a friend, but never a servant. I understand my Madame’s gesture perfectly. With Miss Toklas on one arm and GertrudeStein on the other, I step into the circle that Miss Toklas has in that moment drawn. There is no visible trace of its outline, but I always know that it is there. I have sensed its presence in all of the households that I have been in. (102)
Truong uses the present tense to convey the immediacy of Bính’s emotional response to Toklas’s offer, its temporal binding “in that moment.” Bính can imagine his inclusion into this intimate circle as family member and not servant, an opportunity represented by the promise of food created without fuss or bother, the intimate simplicity of eggs and bread served for loved ones. Bính finds, however, that when faced with this completely unexpected gesture, he cannot continue to lie. He guiltily discloses the truth and in doing so, is “excommunicated yet again from that perfect circle that is at the center of every home” (103).
In contrast to such disappointments, a few pages earlier Truong presents an alternative formation of queer Vietnamese community over a meal laced with the flavors of diasporic longing. Bính meets a “man on the bridge,” the fictionalized version of Nguyen Ai Quoc / Ho Chi Minh, who invites him to an intimate dinner for two. This meal is unique in The Book of Salt, as it is the only scene in which food is prepared for Bính and not by him. Again, Truong disrupts the links between ethnic and national identity and food. The flavors of this meal are haunting and memorable for the diners because they are drawn from the chef’s experiences in many locations. With Nguyen Ai Quoc, Bính becomes the diner and experiences the sensual pleasures of food, so often orchestrated by his own hand. The pleasure, for Bính, though, is not of exotic consumption but of familiarity, the recall of long forgotten memories and taste associations, the surprise of Asian cuisine and partnership in an unexpected location, and the experience of dining with a countryman who is familiar with its flavors. The menu can only be described as flavored by the diaspora. In reflecting on the meal, Bính appreciatively notes that it is “not Chinese food” or “American, either” but food made by a Vietnamese chef, who, Nguyen Ai Quoc tells him, “will always cook from all the places where he has been. It is his way of remembering the world” (99). Bính delights in the undeniable bitterness of watercress, perhaps unrecognizable to a Parisian palate but instantly identified by Bính, especially when it is quickly wilted in a searing hot pan. Salt-and-pepper shrimp are flavored with fleur de sel, morels, and brown butter. The meal is also a seduction; throughout the meal, the two men flirt over a game of questions and answers as Bính guesses the ingredients of each course. The tongue, Bính reminds us, cannot lie, for a diner cannot deny the sensation of taste. In this meal, food allows him to immediately forge an intimate connection with another Vietnamese man. The two men, connected by exile and their presence in a place where their bodies are constantly marked as curiosity, enjoy a momentary reprieve from this scrutiny, over a quiet dinner that takes place in an empty restaurant.
The novel’s placement of these moments of intimacy alongside one another, the promise of a shared meal (ultimately withheld, in the case of Stein and Toklas, and realized, in the case of the man on the bridge), also attest to the immiscibilities that are critical to Truong’s exploration of potential queer affiliations across class, race, and nation. The Book of Salt imagines, through food, a sensibility that is more than the politics of the plate. Each of these scenes is similar in that the representation of queer community, family, or connection is tied to the fleeting pleasure of food, the taste on the tongue that, while perhaps memorable, is also ephemeral. Thus Bính’s desire for and connection to foundational figures—whether those belonging to Vietnamese nationalism or literary high modernism—in the end do not last, and food, rather than representing unquestioned forms of ethnic authenticity or easy possibilities for community, instead underscores painful and bitter realizations.
In The Book of Salt, the culinary is both literal and literary, and the language and literary construction of food is critical to Truong’s examination of the complexities of labor, the diaspora, and queer community formations. In this section, I turn to the novel’s engagement with the culinary through the literary. Truong’s choice of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas is crucial because they are, in David Eng’s terms, “poster children of queer liberal pluralism,” and because of Stein’s unique relationship to language and the literary and her deeply fraught representations of race and class.14 Truong’s play with language and translation clearly responds to Stein’s own fascination with raced and classed others, manifested most famously—and infamously—in Three Lives. Through works like Three Lives (and especially Melanctha), scholars have wrestled with the difficult combination of aesthetic and formal innovation—trademarks of Stein’s high modernism—and her construction of tragic immigrant, working-class, or racialized bodies.15 The novel’s setting, however, already undermines the presumed hierarchies that would set this U.S. modernist figure apart from and above the Vietnamese laborer working in her home. In Paris and Bilignin, both Stein and Bính are expatriates and exiles. Both are viewed as curiosities, Stein for her relationship with Toklas, and Bính for his racialized body. Most important, both have difficulty communicating in French. Although the novel itself is written in English, the narrative we read is presumably an English translation of French or Vietnamese. Bính and Stein thus meet on the common, linguistic ground of their mutually awkward and limited French. These layers of multiple transformations and reconfigurations, together with Bính’s own slippery unreliability as a narrator, highlight Truong’s exploration of the possibilities of language and narrative, on one hand, and the novel’s undermining of the assumed power dynamics of Stein as an elite modernist and Bính as merely the represented object, on the other.
The novel’s interest in the possibilities and failures of language and representation is closely tied to the culinary. In a method that recalls Stein’s own literary strategies, Bính quickly learns to develop a practice of communication by means of negation, a character trait that was inspired by Toklas’s descriptions of her cook, Trac.16 Truong explicitly ties this form of communication to the global marketplace. He develops this strategy in the Parisian markets as the act of pointing to and then rejecting objects, cuts of meat, and ingredients becomes critical to his navigation of Paris. For although “communication in the negative is not the quickest and certainly not the most esteemed form of expression,” he recognizes that “for those of us with few words to spare it is the magic spell, the incantation, that opens up an otherwise inaccessible treasure trove” (18). The strategy of communication by means of negation is critical to “those” like Bính, those who lack fluency in French and find themselves participating in the global markets of Paris as simultaneously a purchaser, a laborer, and an object of desire. In maneuvering the ins and outs of Parisian markets through negation, Bính subverts a global marketplace that depends on and denies his labor and objectifies his body as an exotic trophy and curiosity object.
But the act of translation or, to be more accurate, the failed capacities of translation also counter those who, like Stein, read, catalog, represent, and ultimately exploit Asian laborers. “GertrudeStein, love is not a bowl of quinces” illustrates this response. In context, this quotation refers to a game that Stein plays with Bính. The game begins early on in his employment at rue du Fleurus, when he discovers that he cannot remember the French word for pineapple. Frustrated, he stammers that he wants “buy a pear … not a pear” (35) and then twists his body into the shape of a pineapple to convey his meaning. Stein finds the combination of Bính’s coinage and charade intensely amusing, and every evening, they gather at the dining table with an assemblage of objects that is reminiscent of her catalog in Tender Buttons. Stein, Bính tells us, has a seemingly infinite hoard of buttons, glass globes, and other knick-knacks, “a whole world stashed away” (35) in drawers and cubbies. Stein points, and Bính defines, always through negation. Her beloved poodle Basket is a “dog not a friend” and Pepe, a Chihuahua, is a “dog not a dog” (36). After four years of playing the game, Stein, tired of objects and family dogs, raises the level of discourse, asking Bính, “How would you define love?” (33).
This question marks the end of the game. Bính’s answer, however, also emphasizes the shifting connections between the Vietnamese laborer and his employer, between the “other” represented, and the modernist writer who attempts to represent him. Bính refuses to submit to Stein’s attempt to learn more about his carefully guarded past, her desire to taste what he has previously called the bitter fruits of exile. “Ah,” he thinks,
a classic move from the material to the spiritual. GertrudeStein, like the collectors who have preceded her, wants to see the stretch marks on my tongue. … I point to a table on which several quinces sit yellowing in a blue and white china bowl. I shake my head in their direction, and I leave the room speechless. (36)
As with many moments in The Book of Salt, Bính’s explanation of this game is entangled in a subnarrative: his painful memories of his love for an American man who eventually exploits Bính’s affection to get ahold of one of Stein’s unpublished manuscripts. At the end of this chapter, Bính tells us that even when ripe, quinces “remain a fruit hard and obstinate, —useless, GertrudeStein, until they are simmered, coddled for hours above a low steady flame. … GertrudeStein, love is not a bowl of quinces yellowing in a blue and white china bowl, seen but untouched” (40). Bính’s strategy has already fueled the literary technique that has become associated with Gertrude Stein’s style, for “she is affirmed by [his] use of negatives and repetition” (34). This scene is full of ironies. As Catherine Fung notes, the conversation turns on a “metaphysical pun” (a pear not appear), which depends on Truong’s English version of Binh’s recasting of an exchange that supposedly occurs in French (pear in French, notes Fung, is “poire” and appear is “apparaître”).17 The novel disrupts presumptions about origins and reverses dynamics of colonial mimicry.18 Just as we find out later that Stein has written a manuscript based on Bính, here her trademark technique is imitation. Yet the metaphor’s beautiful bitterness articulates Bính’s compromised position and also serves as a reminder that even though he might believe that he can subvert the representational logics of empire and labor, these moments are, in the end, only fleeting and fragile.
The plea that initiates this game—Bính describing what he wants to buy and how he must contort his body in order to express this desire—illustrates the novel’s constant, delicate threading together of multiple forms of economies and consumption. The wish that cannot be fulfilled—and the object, taste, or emotion that escapes expression—are linked to the novel’s interest in where and how language fails and to the lack of awareness of Asian laborers in global and colonial networks. Tropes of negation and repetition are thus ultimately also tied to these bodies and their histories. A pear is thus not a pear, and love is not a bowl of quinces. The taste of salt can be linked to four different sources—blood, sweat, tears, or the sea. Highlighting both multiplicities and failures, Truong’s intersection of the literary and the culinary thus compels us to consider more carefully how we think about, know, and collect the Asian body.
Four years after Monique Truong published The Book of Salt, the Vietnamese-born and classically trained chef Hung Huynh was revealed as the winner of the Bravo reality competition Top Chef. Although in terms of genre, Truong’s contemporary novel is far different from that of reality television, I end this chapter with a comparison of Huynh and Bính to highlight the persistence of these representational and narrative patterns. Both Truong’s novel and Hung Huynh’s portrayal on Top Chef illuminate the continuing and vexed complexities that are still attached to Vietnamese and Asian laboring bodies and to the networks that continue to consume and desire them. Hung Huynh illustrates a similar incongruity to Bính’s—a Vietnamese body that could execute French culinary technique with precision—yet who initially seemed to refuse the role of grateful Vietnamese migrant. What I’m interested in here is the crafting of Hung Huynh’s persona on Top Chef and his transition in the show from the cold-hearted villain to his final metamorphosis into the grateful immigrant who recognizes his Vietnamese “soul.” My brief analysis considers how Top Chef (aided certainly by Huynh’s own behavior) made this transformation.
Huynh quickly stood out in the third season of Top Chef for his amazing technical skills. Nonetheless, despite the consistent praise for his culinary technique and precision, the show characterized him as manipulative, cold, and calculating. Editors and producers used the contestant’s self-professed strategy of crafting a “win-at-all-costs Top Chef persona.”19 He was often shown racing around the kitchen, oblivious to those in his path (he later explained that he used this tactic to unnerve and even annoy his fellow contestants). In the mis-en-place relay race, a challenge in which the contestants are assigned different tasks, he furiously butchered four different chickens in record time. His speed, precision, and technical mastery became part of his evolving character on the show as someone who was cold and calculating. “Even Hung’s biggest detractors,” note the editors of The Top Chef Cookbook, “had to be astonished by his technical skills, honed while working at Guy Savoy in Las Vegas. He could bone a chicken in seconds, whip up a killer sous vide, re-create a classic dish at Le Cirque, and even build a trippy Smurf-like village out of cereal.”20 Huynh’s portrayal on Top Chef was drawn from his behavior on the show, his strategy for winning, and the careful editing that is central to any reality competition. Ultimately, this construction also depended on Huynh’s refusal of intimacy with other contestants, with the judges who tried to advise him, and with Bravo’s viewers. Eventually, this combination led to the persistent observation that Huynh, although he consistently exhibited culinary technical mastery, also produced dishes that lacked heart and soul. “Hung,” reflected Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi, “works on technique … I do think there’s something to be said from really cooking, um, with your palate and cooking with love and all that. I don’t think that Hung doesn’t bring love to his cooking, I just think he approaches it from a much different, [sic] from a technician’s standpoint.”
In the final episodes of Top Chef, Huynh’s persona quickly, and rather amazingly, began to shift. In these closing moments, he began to reclaim both an immigrant narrative and nostalgic longing for his Vietnamese culture as the true inspiration for this work. As if in direct response to the judges’ critiques regarding his lack of passion and soul, Huynh began emphasizing the importance of his Vietnamese family. This new version of him centered on the proper reclaiming of this Asian heart and soul, a process that supposedly inspired his victory. Frank Bruni, writing for the New York Times blog Diner’s Journal, recaps this sudden and dramatic character turn:
I also thought [Hung] might be a goner for another reason: the transparent groveling and obsequiousness of his remarks to the judges’ panel in last week’s episode and in this one’s. On the heels of a comment that he didn’t seem to cook with enough heart or soul, Hung suddenly morphed—at least semantically—into one big, red beating heart that had been marinated for 24 hours in essence of soul.
Anytime a judge asked him a question, a Hung response went something like this: “I was just cooking with my heart! I have so much love in my cooking! My cooking is about love and soul and, oh, did I mention heart? Did I mention the soulful cooking of my mother and my grandmother and my aunt and my uncle and our next-door neighbor and how it took up a permanent place in my own heart, which is so full of the love of cooking?”21
Part of Bruni’s satirical humor is its accuracy; Huynh spoke often about his family as the inspiration of his cuisine and as the source for his passion for cooking, and both the fervor and the frequency with which he used these strategies were surprising. Moreover, he suddenly dropped the cool demeanor that had become his trademark during the show, and the closing episode featured shots of a tearful Huynh overcome with gratitude and joy.
The conclusion of Top Chef rescripted Hung Huynh, and the finale linked his triumphant victory to his display of an immigrant’s gratitude, hard work, motivation, and determination.22 His participation in the competition was pitched as leading to an important lesson. Experience in the United States (albeit a highly fictionalized and manipulated form of “real” experience) supposedly led not to assimilation but to a sentimental reclaiming of difference and its value. The editors of the Top Chef cookbook, released a few years after Huynh appeared, confirm this story; in the introduction to Huynh’s section of the book, they describe him as “driven by an inspiring immigrant narrative.”23 In his finale blog, Judge Ted Allen adamantly defends Huynh and alludes to this plot of immigrant striving:
I have never agreed with the notion that Hung’s food lacked “heart” or “soul.” Ever. You see it in every knife stroke, and you taste it in (almost) every dish. Yes, he has seemed less than cuddly with his competitors at times—I think that’s really what Hung’s detractors are reacting to. We should consider, though, that most of that was really the product of editing, prodding by interviewers, a few ill-chosen remarks, and a not-very-convincing job of trying to be the Santino/Jeffrey/Marcel/Stephen [ Top Chef“villains” from previous seasons] that Hung thought the show wanted him to be—a natural hazard of this wildly successful reality format. Set that stuff aside for a moment, and chew on this: What drives a young man to become that excellent with a knife, that relentless with his curiosity about cooking techniques? Who else in this cast has worked harder to master the classics and to explore new frontiers in food, to scratch and claw all the way into the kitchen at Guy Savoy in Vegas, a restaurant so exacting that it’s hard to draw parallels?24
What Allen asks his readers to mull over is the indescribable and, for the presumed Bravo viewer, seemingly unfathomable immigrant desire and motivation. Ultimately, even for Allen, even though Huynh may have been masterful with his knife skills or palate, it is his motivation as a Vietnamese migrant that truly secured his Top Chef victory. This production of Hung Huynh as learning how to correctly perform as a grateful immigrant subject—a model minority chef—also presumably made him more palatable as racialized object (“Chew on this,” offers Allen). The consistent invocation of terms like heart, soul, and passion are important, for these emotional registers are the means through which Huynh can form intimate relationships with the Top Chef viewers. Allen’s post also highlights Huynh’s production as an Asian sexualized subject for both queer and straight viewers of the Bravo network; his cheeky title, “Well, Hung,” recalls popular U.S. representations of Asian masculinity as effeminate.
Clearly, the reality television star Huynh and Truong’s fictionalized Bính are far different in their representations of Vietnamese queer masculinity. What Huynh’s case does show, however, is that the fictional dynamics in The Book of Salt have very real counterparts. Both Truong’s novel and the treatment of Huynh in Top Chef illustrate the ongoing exploitation and consumption of Asian domestic and affective labor that, even when visible, still remains too easily dismissed and forgotten. Indeed, the happy ending of Top Chef opposes Bính’s careful refusal of such easy versions. Rather, Truong’s intervention is to dwell in complexities. For although another narrative of empowerment might, perhaps, momentarily taste sweeter, it would also be unpalatable precisely because such a story would deny the lingering bitterness of historic and continued exploitations.
1. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, press release for The Book of Salt by Monique Truong, available at http://www.hmhbooks.com/booksellers/press_release/truong/#questions.
2. Truong combines portrayals of two Vietnamese cooks, Nguyen and Trac, in her own construction of Bính. See Anita Mannur, review of The Book of Salt, by Monique Truong, Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 4, no. 3 (summer 2004): 120–21.
3. For other analyses of Truong’s novel, see chapter 2 of David Eng, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), which focuses on queer affiliations and temporality; Catherine Fung, “A History of Absences: the Problem of Reference in Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 45, no. 1 (2012): 94–110; Y-Dang Troeung, ‘“A Gift or a Theft Depends on Who Is Holding the Pen’: Postcolonial Collaborative Autobiography and Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt,” Modern Fiction Studies 56, no. 1 (2010): 113–35; and Wenying Xu, Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian American Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008).
4. Anita Mannur, Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 10–19.
5. For earlier work that focuses on Asian American food and literature, see Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong, Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Monica Chiu, Filthy Fiction: Asian American Literature by Women (New York: Altamira Press, 2004); Eileen Chia-Ching Fung, “‘To Eat the Flesh of His Dead Mother’: Hunger, Masculinity, and Nationalism in Frank Chin’s Donald Duk,” LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory 10 (1999): 255–74; and Wilfried Raussert and Nicole Waller, “Past and Repast: Food as Historiography in Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone and Frank Chin’s Donald Duk,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 40, no. 3 (1996): 485–502. See also Jeffrey Partridge, “The Politics of Ethnic Authorship: Li-Young Lee, Emerson, and Whitman at the Banquet Table,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 37, no. 1 (spring 2004): 101–25; and Wilfried Raussert, “Minority Discourse, Foodways, and Aspects of Gender: Contemporary Writings by Asian-American Women,” Journal x: A Journal in Culture and Criticism 7, no. 2 (2003): 184–204.
6. Mannur, Culinary Fictions; Xu, Eating Identities; Jennifer Ho, Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels (New York: Routledge, 2005).
7. Xu, Eating Identities, 2; Mannur, Culinary Fictions, 1–17.
8. Xu, Eating Identities, 8.
9. Mannur, Culinary Fictions, 8.
10. Monique Truong, The Book of Salt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2003). Page numbers of quotations from this book are in parentheses.
11. Xu, Eating Identities, 140.
12. My reading of Bính’s subversive strategies is conversant with Eng’s and Xu’s examination of subversion and agency. See Eng, The Feeling of Kinship, chapter 2; and Xu, Eating Identities, 127–47.
13. Xu helpfully also traces the trope of pigeons in The Book of Salt to Bính’s relationship with his mother.
14. Eng, The Feeling of Kinship, 74.
15. See, for example, Corinne E. Blackmer, “African Masks and the Art of Passing in Gertrude Stein’s Melanctha and Nella Larsen’s Passing,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 4, no. 2 (1992): 230–63; Laura Doyle, “The Flat, the Round, and Gertrude Stein: Race and the Shape of Modern(ist) History,” Modernism/Modernity 7, no. 2 (2000): 249–71; Michaela Giesenkirchen, “Ethnic Types and Problems of Characterization in Gertrude Stein’s Radcliffe Themes,” American Literary Realism 38, no. 1 (2005): 58–72; and John Carlos Rowe, “Naming What Is Inside: Gertrude Stein’s Use of Names in Three Lives,” Novel 36, no. 2 (2003): 219–43.
16. Xu, Eating Identities, 128.
17. Fung, “A History of Absences,” 101.
18. I am thinking here of Homi Bhaba, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” in The Location of Culture (London, New York: Routledge, 1994), 85–92.
19. Kate Krader, “Top Chef Winner’s Tips,” Food & Wine, February 2008, available at http://www.foodandwine.com/articles/top-chef-winners-tips.
20. Lianna Krissoff and Leda Scheintaub, eds., Top Chef: The Cookbook (San Francisco: Chronicle Books: 2008).
21. Bruni, Frank, “The Top Chef Finale: Of Bad Lobster and Tame Cake,” Diner’s Journal, October 4, 2007, available at http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/the-top-chef-finale-of-bad-lobster-and-tame-cake/.
22. The portrayal of Huynh reminds me of Christina Klein’s work on narrative of sentiment and integration in Cold War Asian American relations. See Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
23. Krissoff and Scheintaub, Top Chef, 207.
24. Ted Allen, “Well, Hung,” October 3, 2007, available at http://www.bravotv.com/top-chef/blogs/ted-allen/well-hung.