In KAREN TEI YAMASHITA’s works, lines and bor-
ders which serve to articulate cartographic, politi-
cal, economical, as well as narrative contexts are
further complicated by migration over these lines
as well as the lines’ and borders’ own mobility and
instability. Critic Alvina E. Quintana even asserts
that Yamashita operates as a trickster because she
writes “at the crossroads between worlds,” to “re-
sist and transform” (225). From a more contextual
standpoint, Yamashita’s satirical personification of
NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement),
her magic realism of conjuring a tangible tropic
of Cancer, and naming the character of Manzanar
after an actual internment camp that housed Jap-
anese Americans during World War II are just a
few examples of symbolism that create an ironical
undertone suggesting a critical view of racial, eco-
nomic, and political imbalances in the American
continent.
Bibliography
Lee, Rachael “Asian American Cultural Production
in Asian-Pacific Perspective.” Boundary 2 26, no.
2 (Summer 1999): 231–254.
Quintana, Alvina E. “Performing Tricksters: Karen Tei
Yamashita and Guillermo Gomez-Pena.” Amerasia
Journal 28, no. 2 (2002): 217–225.
Yamashita, Karen Tei. Tropic of Orange. Minneapolis,
Minn.: Coffee House Press, 1997.
Eliko Kosaka
Truong, Monique (1968– )
Born in Saigon, Truong immigrated to the United
States as a refugee at the age of six. Having grad-
uated from Yale University and the Columbia
University School of Law, Truong specialized in
intellectual property before pursuing her writing
career. Despite having grown up in America and,
at her own admission, having a limited familiar-
ity with Vietnamese history and culture, Truong
nevertheless describes Vietnam as a place that
constantly “tugs” at her, a country with which her
identity will always be associated. In a piece for
Time International, she refers to herself as being
lost somewhere between countries: “The physical
journey was completed long ago, but the emo-
tional one is ongoing.” If finding one’s “home” is
an emotional endeavor, then for Truong, such an
act is marked by ambivalence rather than nostalgia.
Truong writes of her feelings about the only mem-
ory she has of Vietnam: “If this useless violence is
my history, a madness that lurks in my gene pool,
a propensity that might again show itself, I am
not eager to travel back to its—and my—place of
origin.” Conversely, if Truong hesitates to identify
with a history of violence, America’s involvements
in war during her adulthood, as well as the igno-
rance and racism she experiences as a person of
Asian descent, prevent her from feeling entirely “at
home” in America.
It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Truong’s
debut novel, The Book of Salt, is about a man lost
between countries. Binh, a gay Vietnamese chef,
flees from his tyrannical father in Vietnam and
finds employment in the house of Gertrude Stein
and Alice B. Toklas in Paris during the 1930s. When
“the Steins” choose to return to New York at the
novel’s end, Binh is forced to decide where his next
home will be. But before Binh’s decision is revealed,
his narrative takes the reader through his life story,
which includes interactions with historical figures,
such as Paul Robeson and Ho Chi Minh. This, too,
perhaps is reflective of Truong’s goal; to include
this lost man in the official history of the Lost Gen-
eration may grant the “lost” author, once a child of
wartime, a means to fix herself in history without
resorting to the boundaries of nation.
Truong is also coeditor of Watermark: Vietnam-
ese American Poetry and Prose. She was awarded the
Lannan Foundation Writing Residency in 2001. For
The Book of Salt, Truong was awarded the American
Library Association’s Barbara Gittings Book Award
in Literature, as well as the 2003 Bard Fiction Prize.
Truong lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Catherine FungTsiang, H. T. (Jiang Xizeng) (1899–1971)
The poet, playwright, novelist, and actor H. T.
Tsiang was born in Qi’an, a village in the district
of Nantong, Jiangsu Province, in China. The sonTsiang, H. T. (Jiang Xizeng) 289