If I were a collector of lovely quotes from books, this book would have many. I often thought “That was a good line” while I read. The prose is lyrical and delightful. However, the structure of the story is lacking - or maybe nonexistent, meandering, dreamlike. It made it hard to dig in, despite the pretty surface.

“In Paris, 1934, Bính has accompanied his employers, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, to the train station for their departure to America. His own destination is unclear: will he go with "the Steins", stay in France, or return to his native Vietnam? Bính has fled his homeland in disgrace, leaving behind his malevolent charlatan of a father and his self-sacrificing mother. For five years, he has been the live-in cook at the famous apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus. Before Bính’s decision is revealed, his mesmerizing narrative catapults us back to his youth in French-colonized Vietnam, his years as a galley hand at sea, and his days turning out fragrant repasts for the doyennes of the Lost Generation." — publishers blurb

Monique Truong writes an honest book about the relationship of the colonized to the colonizers. Her narrator is a Vietnamese cook for the Mesdames, Gertrudestein (said as one word by all those around her) and Alice B. Toklas while they live in Paris. Understanding well his own circumstances, forced to flee his job at the Governor-General's in Saigon and rejected by his colleague brother and always by his father after an affair he has with the chef is found out.

It takes time to consider who he is in his family, who his mother was and his life ahead. He allows himself to hope briefly in meeting an American lover but his place in the household where he works is humiliatingly low in comparison the the Mesdames' pets.

This is a story imagined from a brief mention of Stein and Toklas having hired a cook in Paris. So much seems real.

Read this for my class on queer Asian American literature. Cool story, cool prose, cool structure, awesome commentary on the “archive” … but idk something about the ending made me feel unfulfilled