Sensing the Past: Memory, Identity, and Belonging in Monique Truong's Fiction

Abstract

This This paper examines Monique Truong’s “The Book of Salt” and “The Sweetest Fruits” through memory, forgetting, and identity formation. Truong portrays memory as a continued process through which displaced individuals experience belonging, loss, and selfhood across cultural and geographical boundaries. Food functions as a sensory archive preserving personal and collective histories. Through taste, smell, culinary labour, and domestic rituals, individuals remember forgotten worlds, reconstruct fragmented identities, and hold onto a past disrupted by migration and displacement. In “The Book of Salt”, Bình narrates migration, colonial subjugation, racial discrimination, and isolation in Paris through food and sensory recollections connecting him to Vietnam and a self threatened by exile. “The Sweetest Fruits” reconstructs women connected to Lafcadio Hearn, foregrounding fragmented memories and overlooked domestic experiences excluded from dominant histories. Drawing on Ricoeur, Halbwachs, Nora, Assmann, Sutton, and Hall, the paper argues that food enables displaced individuals to preserve cultural traces, negotiate belonging, and reconstruct selfhood within diasporic experience.