Art Is + Monique Truong

SP Blog’s series "Art Is +" is an attempt to view art through the eyes of artists and writers themselves. In wide-ranging interviews with vital new artists and writers from both Asia and the USA, the series ushers these voices to the forefront, contextualizing their work with the experiences, processes, and motivations that are unique to each individual artist. "Art Is +" encourages viewers and readers to appreciate art as the multitude of ways in which artists and writers continually engage with our world and the variety of spaces they occupy in it. Read our interviews with Symin Adive, Geraldine Kang, Paula Mendoza, Zining Mok, JinJin Xu, and Leonard Yang.

In conjunction with Gaudy Boy’s publication of Monique Truong’s novel The Sweetest Fruits in Singapore and Malaysia, available for purchase online here, we are pleased to present this illuminating interview with the Vietnamese American author. This is also the first post of SP Blog’s month-long series of writings on the theme “Sharing Borders.” Follow the series of articles by subscribing here.

Monique Truong is the Vietnamese American author of three award-winning novels: The Book of Salt (2003), Bitter in the Mouth (2010), and The Sweetest Fruits (2019). Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellowship, New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Prize, PEN/Robert W. Bingham Fellowship, Princeton University's Hodder Fellowship, and the Bard Fiction Prize, among others, she is also a former refugee, essayist, lyricist/librettist, avid eater, and intellectual property attorney (more or less in this order). She's based now in Brooklyn, New York.

Photo: The author with Waseda Bear, the mascot of Waseda University in Tokyo, where she was based as a U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellow in 2015. Lafcadio Hearn taught at Waseda prior to his passing in 1904.

Monique Truong’s The Sweetest Fruits follows the life of Lafcadio Hearn, the Greek-Irish writer behind the first Creole cookbook, through the voices of three women in his life. As Hearn’s own life weaves through New Orleans, Cincinnati, and Japan, Truong’s work speaks of the homes we carry in us as our bodies seek shelter in various places. While chronicling the lives of Rosa, Alethea, and Setsu with Hearn, the novel centers the women—their travels, their ambitions, their curiosity. A lesson in the power of points of view, The Sweetest Fruits places language and authority back in the hands of women portrayed in past biographies as passive. Truong reminds us to question the narratives that history imposes on us, and to listen to the lives that live in the spaces in between.—Janelle Tan

“There are no true boundaries between us,
except for deep bodies of water and high mountain ranges.
We’ve long ago figured out how to traverse both.
Our partially-known Histories are the only things
that separate us now."

Janelle Tan: You open the book with hunger, in the broad sense of appetite, of need and desire. I’ve read that you were drawn to the stories surrounding Hearn’s life by finding his cookbook about the Creole cuisine of New Orleans. What did it mean for you, as a writer, to locate the narrative in not just Hearn’s hunger, but a broader sense of want?

Monique Truong: There’s a well-known quote attributed to the American cookbook author Julia Child: “People who love to eat are always the best people.” I agree with her, though I would replace “always” with “often.”

I do find myself gravitating in life and in literature to people/character who have a keen interest in food. A cookbook author, as Lafcadio Hearn was, certainly qualifies, but really the more interesting question to me is why did he harbor within him this specific “love”? That’s the question that sent me on my eight-year journey with him around the world. I found a multitude of answers, and they all lead me back to the word “hunger,” which is another way of saying “need” or “lack.”

JT: I’m curious about all the images of sea, or water, throughout the novel – how often water comes up in Hearn’s own life: the Greek islands of his birth, the Irish Sea, the Ohio River, the port city of New Orleans, and Matsue on the coast of the Sea of Japan, where he first lives on moving to Japan. Did all the water in the novel come from a sense of how strongly it moves through Hearn’s own life?

MT: I’m so glad you picked up on the bodies of water! I wrote the very first line of my novel while at the Gaea Foundation’s Sea Change residency in Provincetown, Massachusetts. I’m not sure it’s still around, but it was an amazing gift as they give you an entire house for two months. The Atlantic Ocean was literally steps away from the house, and when it was stormy, which was often in February and March while I was there, the entire structure rattled and swayed. I’d never lived so near to the water before—or as it felt to me then: almost “in” the water—and the experience made me realize how much a body of water can be a “character” in the lives of those who live adjacent to its shores.

My months in Provincetown was at the very beginning of my research for this novel, and it made me much more aware of the presence of the waterscapes in Lafcadio’s life and in the lives of the three narrators of my novel: as a means of travel, escape, isolation, and freedom or lack thereof as in the case of Alethea Foley, Lafcadio’s Black wife. Prior to the Civil War, the Ohio River served as the boundary between Kentucky where she was born into slavery and the “free” state of Ohio, where she would live post-Emancipation and meet the young Lafcadio.

“To be renamed or misnamed is symbolic
of being among strangers,
which is what it means to be an immigrant and a refugee.
The act of renaming yourself, however, is invested
with power, change, choice, and possibilities.”

JT: I think of Hearn’s journey also as one of naming. He inhabits several different names through his life: Patricio, Patrick, Paddy, Pat, Lafcadio, and Koizumi Yakumo. The names mark how he is regarded as a different person to different people. You center the immigrant act of naming and renaming in the novel. How has your experience as a former refugee and Vietnamese American woman been shaped by naming and renaming? Did that influence your decision to tell Hearn’s story?

MT: Our given names are the first gifts that we receive and from the dearest, nearest people in our lives. The names will shape our identities within the family and beyond. Our given names are also often a primary thing that changes, out of necessity or choice, upon our becoming an immigrant or refugee.

For the first six years of my life, my given name was “Dung,” (I’m from the south of Vietnam, so the “D” is pronounced like a “Y”), and my parents changed it to “Monique,” my Catholic baptismal name, before sending me off to school in the little town in North Carolina, where we first lived after coming to the U.S. My parents were both fluent in English, but many Vietnamese refugee parents were not. What if I’d gone off to grade school with a first name that meant animal excrement in my new language? How much more would I’ve been mocked and teased? The irony was that the town was so small that most of my teachers hadn’t encountered the name “Monique” either. “Mon-nee-q” was how some of them said it.

To be renamed or misnamed is symbolic of being among strangers, which is what it means to be an immigrant and a refugee. The act of renaming yourself, however, is invested with power, change, choice, and possibilities.

Lafcadio’s experiences with renaming belong to both, except for his final change to “Koizumi Yakumo,” which was a legal requirement. During his lifetime, the only way to obtain Japanese citizenship was to be adopted into a Japanese family. Thus, “Koizumi” is the family name of his second wife, Setsu, and “Yakumo” was a given name that he chose for himself. In this one man, I’d found a hybrid of both necessity and choice.


JT: I’m struck by the way the movement of the women of this novel is reflected in Rosa’s journey. At the start of the novel, she moves from the Ionian islands to a country that she does not claim as hers. Later, Setsu talks about her and Hearn’s moving around Japan and their “weak roots.” When you think about how the women in this novel move, do you think of it as a movement towards, or a movement around?

MT: For all three of my narrators, I think of movement “beyond.” Rosa, Alethea, and Setsu crossed boundaries, not just those demarcated upon maps but in terms of proscribed norms and societal expectations. They are intrepid, inquisitive, and each a traveler in her own way—words, by the way, that are used by biographers to describe Lafcadio Hearn but never used for these three women.

“So much of The Sweetest Fruits is an implicit critique
of who had access to the written word and who did not.
Whose stories are valued and whose were not?
Whose narrative gifts resulted in accolades
and whose were taken for granted or forgotten?"

JT: I read an interview you gave where you talked about the way Hearn describes Alethea in his writing—that he is struck by her storytelling gifts. Did Hearn’s fondness for Alethea’s voice and ability to tell stories resonates in any way? I think often of Asian cultures and their oral traditions—does the oral tradition influence your storytelling? How so?

MT: If Alethea heard your question, she would laugh and rhetorically ask, “Oral tradition? What other traditions did I have?” It was illegal to teach an enslaved person to read and write, and she bore the scar of this childhood deprivation all of her life. Lafcadio’s mother, Rosa, would laugh too, as she was also denied access to the written word, having been born into a family and a society that thought it only necessary to educate the male children. Of the three narrators, only Setsu had the opportunity to attend school but stopped before high school when her family could not afford the fees.

All three are described by Lafcadio Hearn’s biographers as “illiterate,” but as your question clearly shows these biographers could have instead described them as having access to the “oral tradition.”

Hearn made a literary name for himself by rewriting the ghost stories, folktales, and fairytales of Japan. All of them belong to the “oral tradition,” yes? They are the stories told by the traveling bards and musicians who entertained from village to village, retold and embellished by the “common man,” or spun by women for their children, etc. Hearn’s true talent was that he didn’t dismiss these stories outright when he too heard them. He wrote them, or his version of them, down, and in that act of documentation he found fame and adulation. He found a place in literary history.

So much of The Sweetest Fruits is an implicit critique of who had access to the written word and who did not. Whose stories were valued and whose were not? Whose narrative gifts resulted in accolades and whose were taken for granted or forgotten?


JT: In some ways, Rosa is haunted by her Venetian and Romaic language even when she cannot speak it in Dublin. As writers, our work is made of language. How would you describe your relationship to language—to English, to Vietnamese, and to whatever “shadow languages” (as you put it) haunt your speech and writing?

MT: My first language is Vietnamese, a language that I speak now like a child of six and can barely read or write. My first foreign language was French, a language that I now know best through the vocabulary of food and menus. My second foreign language is English, and it is the only one that I’ve fluency in and is the basis for my livelihood.

Taken together, my relationship to language is that of a stepchild. English is my stepparent, whom I love and who loves me back. We don’t share the same blood and DNA, and at unexpected moments those facts can make me feel alienated and alone. I never forget that there are so many around me who are born into this language and thus take it for granted. Not noticing its quirks and oddities. Not appreciating its beautiful specificities and irregularities. Not working to strengthen their love relationship with it, as I do every day.


JT: I’m also thinking about language as a means of communication between a couple. You have Rosa say: “As it often happened between us, Charles and I agreed not to understand each other.” Setsu’s communication with Hearn is limited by her inability to speak English, and his Japanese. Language is not just a means of political hegemony, but it rules basic everyday communication. Do you think, in Setsu and Hearn’s case, for example, that the ways couples communicate in the book are still ruled by the power structures inherent in language?

MT: “The power structures inherent in language” were certainly apparent to me, as I read the many biographies about Hearn. This was especially glaring, when the focus was on “Hearn’s language,” which was the patois of simplified Japanese and English that Lafcadio and Setsu spoke with each other and eventually their four children. His biographers would have us believe that he singlehandedly devised this language, and Setsu was its passive recipient. That Lafcadio’s fluency in English made him the creator and conveyor between the languages, while Setsu’s fluency in Japanese didn’t allow her to do the same.

In my novel, I totally rejected this power structure and how it might have played itself out within their household. Their language was an act of collaboration, resulting from a doubled position of lack and of desire.

"... the idea of “unreliability” can only exist when History,
written with a capital “H,” as in the official and the widely accepted,
is partial, one-sided, and documented
by one segment of a society."

JT: I’m curious about the unreliable narrators in this novel—there is the sense that every history is at least a little bit unreliable. How has your personal experience, even as a lawyer, shaped your sense of what constitutes history and narrative?

MT: After the Trump presidency, which made a mockery of verifiable facts, simply and stupidly labelling those not advantageous to its agenda as “fake,” I find my longtime fascination with writing “unreliable narrators” horribly validated. I’m used to critiquing the distortions and discrepancies found in the history books and in the archive, but when it was happening in real time it was nauseating to me. I share this with you because the idea of “unreliability” can only exist when History, written with a capital “H,” as in the official and the widely accepted, is partial, one-sided, and documented by one segment of a society. All of that can be said of what we now call History. The Sweetest Fruits is considered “historical fiction,” but I would suggest that the phrase is redundant.


JT: The Sweetest Fruits will be published for the first time in Singapore and Malaysia by Gaudy Boy. What do you hope that Singaporean and Malaysian readers take away from the novel?

MT: With the pandemic, the following should be clear to all of us now: Our lives and stories are connected. Sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes entirely unexpected. Who would have thought that a woman from the Ionian Islands, a Black woman from the U.S., and a Japanese woman would intersect within the memory of a half-Greek, half Irish, Japanese national named Koizumi Yakumo?

There are no true boundaries between us, except for deep bodies of water and high mountain ranges. We’ve long ago figured out how to traverse both. Our partially-known Histories are the only things that separate us now.


Janelle Tan was born in Singapore. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Mass Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, No Tokens, Winter Tangerine, The Southampton Review, Nat. Brut, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from NYU, where she was Web Editor for Washington Square Review. She is a Brooklyn Poets fellow and Assistant Interviews Editor at Singapore Unbound. She lives and teaches poetry in Brooklyn.