Childhood in Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong
The narrator of ‘Bitter in the Mouth,‘ Linda Hammerick, realizes early in the novel that her family has been keeping secrets from her. Linda recalls the last words her cruel and bitter grandmother, who was the only person known to tell her the truth, as she tells her that she knew so much about her that would break her into two (Truong, 2010). Linda will then take many more years to discover the secrets that these words held; but after then, she had to voyage through her difficult childhood in the small fictional town of Boiling Springs in North Carolina. Linda’s quirks in the novel are numerous: a letter writing friendship with the affectionate Kelly that is rather unacknowledged at the Boiling Springs High; the idolization she had for her granduncle Baby Harper (described as singing-talking and closest). The hidden rape by the yard boy; and of note the assumed status of Vietnamese heritage which the narrator nor the Hammerick Family overtly referenced till the end of the novel. This article will review the representation of the theme childhood in Truong’s (2010) novel “Bitter in the Mouth.”, Linda’s plight in childhood as a Vietnamese migrant living in America, and her difficulties adopting the cosmopolitan neighbourhood way of life.
Her Childhood
Linda lives in fairly upper-crust family as the only child in Boiling Springs in Chicago – her father is a lawyer – living in an almost -too-perfect world. She portrays her childhood family as an extension of neoliberal pressures, where children have the will of the nation forced upon them through the conspicuous priorities of her parents, and such family ending up to become a non-haven for the pressures of the outside world, but another terrible, insidious reflection of them (which is odd and unexpected) (Truong, 2010). She has a loving for her sophisticated, great uncle, Baby Harper, who has been an unmarried throughout his life and works as a librarian at the Gardner-Webb College. Linda upsets the American idea of acceptance, offering hopeful ideas of intimacy by choosing to stay close to people who matter to her most. She loves her father who she equalizes to Atticus Finch. Linda loves her close friend and ally Kelly with whom they carry a correspondence of a thousand letters that runs on for decades. Her mother, DeAnne, however, emerges as a starchy ‘60s Happy Homemaker who churns out food into tasteless canned soup casseroles that she does not love.
Synesthesia
The author slowly reveals throughout the novel that in many ways, Linda is dissimilar to the other dwellers of Boiling Springs. The one particular condition about her that we find without hesitation in the book is that she suffers from Synesthesia- a neurological abnormality that causes overlapping of her senses (Truong, 2010). Specifically, she suffers from a condition that causes spoken words to have a taste in her mouth. She becomes beset with boys whose names taste like orange sherbet and parsnips; for example, her teen crush, is associated with the taste of orange sherbet; home is linked to Pepsi; you have been canned to green peas; and Jesus to fried chicken. Adding injury to insult, she is the only one with this condition in the town – nobody, including her parents, had comprehended the idiopathic condition. Truong (2010) recalls:
“Many of the words that I heard or had to say aloud brought with them a taste – unique, consistent, and most often unrelated to the meaning of the word that had sent the taste rolling into the mouth. On my report cards, my teachers conveyed this undetected fact to my parents as ‘your daughter’s unwillingness to pay attention in class” (Truong, 2010, p.21).
The metaphoric use of synesthesia elucidates the idea of food that serves to nourish, unite and sometimes repulse people. Linda, a quasi-Vietnamese adoptee, has her palette aligned to the south. She tasted collard greens and okra. Though she lived in Vietnam till she was seven years, she has little remembrance of the foods, which further complicated the idea of transitional adopted as a cosmopolitan. Linda displays her American palette with an overwriting of her ancestral lands, indicating the way America extends tolerance and acceptance to incoming subjects, but which of course is inherent to the pressures of the “American dream” to conform to the right kind of citizens by disavowing her heritage. She feels her racially marked appearance complicates matters as it makes her an open secret- more like Boo Radley, but never the Scout Finch of her stories- except that see dares to venture outside and still gets unnoticed. The people around her show stunning concerted efforts not to recognize, see or talk about her race, displaying the silent practices and codes that form coherent neighborhoods.
Kelly, Alcohol, and Tobacco in School
As the narrator subsequently works through high school, she deals with the incomings of the tastes with stronger tastes of alcohol and cigarettes. At the time of her graduation from the Boiling Springs High School, she is a full addict, almost smoking a packet of cigarettes per day (Truong, 2010). The giftedness of Linda, despite the synesthesia, surfaces amid these – becoming the cleverest child in the school, the Brian. Linda becomes an ally to Kelly who is then troubled with an unplanned pregnancy and a poor self-image. To fashion into the societal norms of the town, Kelly and Linda decide that the two displeasing kitten must fast metamorphose into cats; it becomes inconvenient that Linda becomes the bright girl of the class and the chubby Kelly, on the other hand, the buxom beauty queen. Linda combats her instincts to focus un class with tobacco and alcohol.
The Strained Family Relationship
DeAnne, her mother, becomes distant – with the author not revealing clearly as to why her conduct and behavior is such strange. DeAnne cannot abide by the “crazy” Linda who nobody understands, and by doing so forces her daughter to keep quiet by her affliction, or gift, and learns gradually to suppress it. Her mother does not register the tragic and dreadful raping incidence of Linda by the local landscaper (Truong, 2010). The chilling indifference of her mother seemingly forever turns Linda off from the home and family, she becomes torn away, never seeking assistance from them in the time of need. She finds other networks of closeness, networks that are such mediated by a connection to help her feel a sense of belonging. Harper Evans Burch (her grand uncle), that the family knows as Baby Harper, is the only family member that Linda is ever close to; he offers her a shoulder to lean on through life’s ups and downs (Truong, 2010).
At first chance, Linda leaves home – her slowly decaying family ties have not moored her- like her father, Thomas Hammerick. She heads for Yale to study law, yet her synesthesia never vanished. Troung (2010) narrates:
“I had not thought about my refusal to return to Boiling Springs as a habit, but it was. Like smoking a pack of cigarettes a day or biting my fingernails, the act of not returning home had an ameliorative effect on my psyche. It had begun with an idea, fizzy and new in my eighteen-year-old brain, that family was a choice and not fate. If that was true, then I chose not to have a family” (Truong, 2010, p.137).
Linda, a stellar student, soon settled in the City of New York practicing Law in a firm, laying her path to becoming a junior partner till again, tragedy strikes.
Relevance in the Neo-World
The extraordinary tale of Linda is the maturing tale of many other bright girls in the world. Linda, stuck with her hyperactive brain, must trade her overwhelming sensation of childhood for the societal compels of adolescence, and the damp yet likely livable realism. Linda never entirely succeeds in shedding her somewhat troubling insights and intelligence, she wonders the number of house backyards that girls have lain with their molted skins vowing never to be shy, fat, and awkward. The observations of Linda such issues as motherhood, feminism, and Southern prejudice make her an enigmatic outsider, a relatable narrator.
The book is a representation of the childhood life of the author that was marred by war, migration, cultural shock in the new country and separation with the family. Truong was born on 1968 in Saigon, Southern Vietnam, at a time when the country was undergoing the peak of the Vietnam War. Young Truong, at six years had to become a refuge in the United States with her mother. Her father had to stay behind to oversee work at an international company where he was an executive. Her father later followed them after the communist force defeated Saigon. Briefly, the family remained in a relocation camp in California before moving to the Northern part of Carolina- where they lived for another four years, moved to Kettering Ohio before finally settling in Houston, Texas.
Truong’s (2010) “Bitter in The Mouth” is less than the making of a believable plotline than an absurd conglomeration of events enough to make a character. Linda’s’ aim in the novel is to quantify extent of the authors many secrets, to find out the true meaning of the word that had incited her first synesthetic taste experience; a taste only remembered as bitter. The synesthetic baffling puts young Linda on a classical teen hood seeking to self-defining herself that the story ends in biographical odds, turning them into more realistic events that potentially happen naturally to a little girl who desperately wants to gain a better insight of herself. It is a story of self-realization; suggesting the necessity for Linda’s quest, but then with an unachievable goal. The death of a family member brings her home, persuading an unlikely reunion the estranged DeAnne- her mother- where she finally learns the story behind her birth; a truth that is seemingly beguiling and exotic.
References
Truong, M. T. D. (2010). Bitter in the Mouth. New York: Random House.
