Bego?a Simal-Gonz?lez

English

National Taiwan Normal University Repository

 
 
 
Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 39.2 
September 2013: 7-32 
DOI: 10.6240/concentric.lit.2013.39.2.02 
 
 
Judging the Book by Its Cover: 
Phantom Asian America in Monique Truong’s  
Bitter in the Mouth 
 
Begoña Simal-González 
Department of English 
Universidade da Coruña, Spain 
 
Abstract 
Within  the  ongoing  debate  about  what  constitutes  Asian  America,  recent 
“transracial  adoption  narratives”  both  act  as  a  litmus  test  for  “Asian 
Americanness” and introduce the ultimate Asian American phantom. Adoptees 
from Asia who find themselves in America, as new members  of non-Asian 
families, may or may not feel Asian American, but they certainly “look the 
part.” In literary texts too, such adoptee characters represent the phantasmatic 
other for “true” Asian Americans, since they openly defy biologist assumptions 
underlying  racial  categories.  Among  Asian  American  adoption  stories, 
Monique Truong’s recent novel Bitter in the Mouth (2010) is a case in point, in 
which its narrative complexity precisely highlights the issue of what constitutes 
Asian America. Truong’s stance in the novel apparently wavers between the 
quest for the primordial “fixed origins,” so common among adoption narratives, 
and a calculated elusiveness, translated in fictitious stories of origins. In this 
peculiar  quest,  the protagonist’s  racialized  body  is  silenced  for  most  of  the 
novel.  It  may  be  argued  that  the  narrative  strategy  chosen  by  Truong,  by 
withholding, if not erasing, the “racial traces” in the text, actually foregrounds 
the very issue of “race.” At the same time, Truong’s avowed aim in writing this 
novel is to move from such one-dimensional understandings of human identity. 
For  that  purpose,  she  chooses  to highlight  synesthesia  as  the  most  defining 
feature in the protagonist. I will examine whether this strategy is successful and 
what consequences it has for our understanding of Asian America. 
 
Keywords 
transracial adoption, synesthesia, race, Asian American literature, Monique Truong 
 
 
 

Judging the Book by Its Cover: Phantom Asian America in Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth

http://ir.lib.ntnu.edu.tw/ir/retrieve/77000/ntnulib_ja_B0205_3902_007.pdf

Judging the Book by Its Cover: Phantom Asian America in Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth

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