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Boots!

Where would we be without booms?

Where would we be without good?

No, Zintuberg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

You know, I've been waiting 10 years to talk to my guest, Monique Trung, again.

She's the author now of Bitter in the Mouth. It's published by

Random House. Her first novel, The Book of Salt, was one of my favorite books, and I think a

very seditious book. She is a very unusual writer. She was born in Vietnam. She came to America when she was six years old. And I think that this book, Bitter in the Mouth, is the record of being asked constantly. What was it like to grow up Asian in America?

And the answer was, I didn't grow up Asian in America. And the book is very interested in making sense of this experience and trying to find

honest and meaningful questions like what was it like to look Asian in America while you were

not raised Asian in America?

What an interesting question, Monique.

Could you talk a little bit about that to me?

Sure. Well, first, it's wonderful to see you again, Michael. You're right. That is one of the sort of the heart. There are many hearts to this book, but that's one of them. When I came to the

United States in 1975, my family moved to a very small town in North Carolina, Boiling Springs,

the same as Linda Hamrick in this book. And in a matter of days, I became no longer a little girl, but I became

a symbol of something that I had no idea, what it entailed what it meant. And that symbol was that I was now an Asian person in America. And that came

with it so many things, particularly in the context of 1975, post-Fietnam, the fall of Saigon, that meant I symbolized everything that America felt about the Vietnam War and this country's involvement with that war.

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