모니크 트루옹의 『소금의 책』에 나타나는 먹는 자와 먹힌 자의 사이성 = The Betweenness of the Eating and the Being Eaten in Monique Truong's The Book of Salt

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper examines the question “How does the eaten eat?” posed by Anne Anlin Cheng in “Digesting Asian America” through a close reading of Monique Truong's The Book of Salt (2003). The novel moves fluidly between historical fact and fiction, depicting—through the perspective of Bình, a Vietnamese cook—both the glamorous world of the Parisian literary elite in the 1920s and 1930s and the hunger- ridden life of an Asian immigrant, queer, working-class laborer. Truong's narrative strategy—anchored in Bình's distinctive voice that is at once melancholic, acerbic, and witty—produces a multilayered narrative in which past and present intersect and coexist. This structural layering mirrors the harmonious layering of flavors in Bình's culinary practice, creating a dynamic interplay between form and theme. Food and cooking function as central metaphoric devices in the novel, and Bình's culinary expertise provides an aesthetic lens through which to examine creativity, resistance, and cultural hybridity amid the precarious conditions of diasporic life. This paper analyzes Bình's narrative of memory through food metaphors and further explores how Bình—a colonial immigrant, a homosexual, and a cook in metropolitan Paris—transforms from a diasporic, marginalized laborer who is consumed and objectified into a speaking subject who articulates and reconstructs his own memories. Ultimately, The Book of Salt demonstrates how a being that is racially othered and sexually consumed can reinterpret its experiences, reconstruct meaning, and thereby establish a relational identity and a narrative position.