Bitter in the Mouth (28 page)

The bottle of bourbon was bone dry. The afternoon was almost gone. The late-afternoon sunlight was making every growing thing in the backyard look as if it were lit from within. All the windows in the blue and gray ranch house were wide open, letting in the sounds of birds and lawn mowers and the occasional passing car. The temperature inside and outside was the same, a rare equilibrium that we registered as the feeling of being comfortable in our own skin. DeAnne Whatley Hammerick and I were still the same. We didn’t break into two or three or four pieces. Our limbs were all accounted for. Our internal organs were pumping and filtering. We were a bit light-headed, but that was just the bourbon talking. DWH and I, finally, had begun the complicated process of doing something that most people, especially a mother and a daughter, could never seem to do. We were forgiving each other for who we were, for how we came into this world, for how we changed or didn’t change it for each other.

The story of my birth parents’ final days in Chapel Hill was what my grandmother Iris, the secret bourbon drinker, had thought would break me in two. On her deathbed, my grandmother thought of these two people whom she had never met but who had changed her family, reinvented it in a way that she couldn’t have foreseen.

DWH had skipped past the story of Khanh and Mai-Dao’s death because she had no idea what really took place. I was the one who was there, the only one who had survived. But to bear witness I had to remember. What took place inside that trailer home in the days and hours and minutes before the fire on the night of July 5, 1975, was lost to me. Whoever carried me out, his or her face was blank to me. Whoever stayed inside, by force or by choice, became strangers to me. The years of my life with them, the life before
this
life, had been erased or, rather, my memories of them had been erased by my benevolent brain. The last word that this man or this woman had said to me was the only thing that remained, as a taste of bitter in my mouth. A fire had made everything else about them disappear.

This was what Thomas told his wife:

The firemen had found me on the gravel driveway of the adjacent trailer home. I was in a nightgown. I was wrapped in a sheet. I appeared to be sound asleep while a fire ate its way through the narrow corridor that I had called home. Tucked inside the pocket of my nightgown were my passport and the first letter that Thomas had sent to Mai-Dao in Chapel Hill, the one with the phone number of the blue and gray ranch house, which she had never dialed. A Chapel Hill police officer telephoned Thomas instead.

Thomas claimed me. He told the police and the social worker that night that he was related to Mai-Dao by marriage. That his cousin, who had died in the war—
that was the only part of the story that Thomas told that was true, Linda; his cousin Brett Hammerick died in the battle of Khe Sanh
—had been married to Mai-Dao’s sister in Saigon. That no one on the American side of the family knew of their marriage. That the Vietnamese side of the family was all in Saigon, unaccounted for and unreachable. Thomas told DeAnne that it had been instinctual. He didn’t mean the instinct to lie. He meant the desire to bring me home. A child needed a father and a mother, he said to DeAnne.

As Thomas recounted his sudden dash toward fatherhood, DeAnne sat at their kitchen table and thought about what he had told her years ago when they were still dating. Not all men have to become fathers, Thomas had assured her. They wouldn’t need to have children in order to be a family, he had agreed with her.
I never thought I would hear a man say these things to me, Linda
. Though I had assumed otherwise, DeAnne had known from the time that she was in her early twenties that she didn’t want to have children.
I didn’t want to become another Iris, Linda
. Her mother, Iris, had told her that no man would think that was natural. DeAnne thought that meant that she would be alone for the rest of her life. But then she met Thomas, and he had made her believe that her fate would be different. Thomas, in a way, had kept his promise to her.

DWH told me that she was completely unprepared for motherhood. She was glad that I was such a quiet child. She admitted that during the first few years of my life at the blue and gray ranch house she sometimes would pretend that I wasn’t there. She would close her eyes and imagine that everything had stayed exactly the same. This became more difficult to do as I grew older.
Thomas loved you so much, Linda
. What DWH meant was that as I grew older I began to look more and more like the young Vietnamese woman whom her husband had loved. As the years passed, the second precondition to my adoption—that they would never speak about my birth father or mother again—did little to alleviate this fact. Thomas and DeAnne didn’t have to mention my birth mother’s name. When I was in the house, Mai-Dao was in the house. As the years passed, though, the second precondition was what Thomas and DeAnne clung to. One silence had led to another, and eventually the silences became the life preservers dotting the dangerous ocean between them. In this way, Thomas and DeAnne survived.

DWH said that she had turned to Iris for comfort, though she knew that there would be little there but truth.

And you also turned to Bobby. This thought didn’t keep me from reaching over the kitchen table and holding on to DWH’s hands. I was understanding for the first time how lonely DeAnne must have felt in the blue and gray ranch house, even when Thomas and I had been around.

Iris told DeAnne that to have a child was to enter into a contract. The judge’s wife explained to her daughter the basic concepts of contract law: promise, obligation, and duty. Iris, the truth teller, said that love wasn’t required. In a pinch, “like” would do.

Thomas turned to Baby Harper. He entrusted my great-uncle with Mai-Dao’s letters. DWH told me that after my great-uncle passed away she had found them in the bureau in his bedroom.
I’ve
a set of extra keys to his house. Your great-uncle was always sweet on Thomas. We always keep the secrets of those we love
. DWH said that the letters were waiting for me now on the hallway table.

Of course, I had wondered how DeAnne Whatley Hammerick could have remembered in such plaintive details the contents of all those long-ago letters. I had thought, in between our sips of bourbon, that she could be making this all up. I decided that it didn’t matter. At least it was a story, I thought. We all need a story of where we came from and how we got here. Otherwise, how could we ever put down our tender roots and stay.

I am indebted to the following for the gift of a beautiful space and a vibrant community in which to write: Ledig House International Writers Residency, the MacDowell Colony, Santa Maddalena Foundation, Bogliasco Foundation’s Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Humanities, Ucross Foundation, Hall Farm Center for Arts and Education, Lannan Foundation, and Hedgebrook. This book would not have been possible without the generosity of Bard College, New York Public Library Young Lions, PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship, and Princeton University’s Hodder Fellowship.

Here’s to the early believers and chance takers: Elaine Koster, Janet Silver, and Martin Hielscher. I am grateful to have you on my side.

Here’s to the intrepid first readers and volunteer fact-checkers: Barbara Tran, David Eng, Trac Vu, Quang Bao, Benjamin Anastas, Dora Wang, Deborah Ottenheimer, and Kristin Brenneman Eno. I owe you a dinner. Please don’t come collecting all at once.

Here’s to the team at Random House: Kate Medina, Sally Marvin, Jynne Martin, Avideh Bashirrad, Lindsey Schwoeri, Amy Edelman, and Vincent La Scala. Thanks for giving this book a home.

Most of all, I am grateful to Damijan Saccio. I would be lost without you.

About the Author

M
ONIQUE
T
RUONG
was born in Saigon and currently lives in New York City. Her first novel,
The Book of Salt
, was a
New York Times
Notable Book. It won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, the 2003 Bard Fiction Prize, the Stonewall Book Award–Barbara Gittings Literature Award, and the Seventh Annual Asian American Literary Award, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and Britain’s Guardian First Book Award. She is the recipient of the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship, Princeton’s Hodder Fellowship, and a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Reading Group Questions and Discussion Topics for
Bitter in the Mouth

Reading Group Questions and Discussion Topics for
Bitter in the Mouth:

1.
Bitter in the Mouth
is a novel that invites us to consider what it means to be a family. How are families defined and constructed within its pages?

2. Linda Hammerick begins her story with her great-uncle Harper because she believes that “a family narrative should begin with love.” How does her great-uncle, a.k.a. Baby Harper, help her to understand what it means to be loved?

3. Linda’s “secret sense,” auditory-gustatory synesthesia, causes her to taste words. How does her unusual relationship with “the word” shape Linda’s personality and life? What other characters in the novel have a unique relationship to “the word”?

4. According to Linda, “[w]e keep secrets to protect, but the ones most shielded—from shame, from judgment, from the slap in the face—are ourselves. We are selfish in our secret keeping and rarely altruistic. We act out of instinct and survival and only when we feel safest will we let our set of facts be known.” Consider the secrets that are kept in the novel and by whom. Do these instances prove Linda’s assertion or disprove it?

5. Linda’s grandmother Iris is the “family truth teller.” What are the examples in the first half of the novel of Iris telling us the truth? Did you understand them to be “truths” or were they, in a way, hidden in plain sight?

6. Linda Hammerick and Kelly Powell have been best friends since the age of seven. What did they have in common that brought them together?

7. “Fat is not fate.” This is one of the ways that Linda distinguishes herself from her best friend Kelly. What is fate then? What are the examples of fate in
Bitter in the Mouth?

8. Author Monique Truong states that “while my first novel,
The Book of Salt
, features an unreliable narrator,
Bitter in the Mouth
is a novel that plays with the idea of the unreliable reader.” She goes on to say that “the first half of
Bitter
is constructed as an invitation to the reader to fill in the blanks.”

What do you think Truong means by this? What were the blanks in Linda’s story, and how did you fill them in? Was your “fill in” based on the stories that Linda tells about her immediate family, your own life experiences, or perhaps on what you know about the author of the novel?

9. In the second half of the novel, Linda reveals a significant part of her life story to us. Did the revelation of this fact change the way that you understand her and her story? Did you go back and re-read the first half of the novel? If yes, what did you “see” that you did not see upon the first reading?

10. Consider your first impression of Linda. Although her synesthesia is a rare neurological condition, were there still ways in which you found yourself relating to her sense (pun intended) of being different and disconnected from her family and from the other children in Boiling Springs?

11. What if the author had switched the order of how she told you Linda’s story? In other words, what if “Revelation” came before “Confession,” and you were presented with the opportunity to identify and to relate to Linda based on her “outer” difference first, as opposed to her “internal” difference. Consider how your own identification with Linda would have been different. Would it have been lessened or heightened or unaffected?

12. Linda tells us that her first memory was a word that triggered a bitter taste. What word do you think it was and who spoke it? What are the clues that lead you to the word?

13. Is Linda Hammerick a southerner? Is
Bitter in the Mouth
a southern novel? Why or why not?