Monique Truong Quotes

All my favorite establishments were either overly crowded or pathetically empty. People either sipped fine vintages in celebration or gulped intoxicants of who cares what kind, drowning themselves in...

Alcohol, I had learned, was an eloquent if somewhat inaccurate interpreter. I had placed my trust that December night in glass after glass of it, eager not for drink but for a bit of talk.

I am forced to admit that I am, to them, nothing but a series of destinations with no meaningful expanses in between.

I was certain t find the familiar sting of salt, but what I needed to know was what kind: kitchen, sweat, tears or the sea.

We loved our opposites so that we could free ourselves from our selves.

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.

Sorrow, even when tempered by sweat and toil into a whisper weight of gold, is still sorrow. Worthless to us both in the end, Má.

Má, please do not cry. I know I could have bought bread with it, a room for the night. I could have bought acts of love with it, but I could have never bought back the years of your life. Sorrow, even...

But that, I am afraid, was my mistake from the very beginning, the fatal flaw in my design. I thought that I could suffocate the Old Man with shovelfuls of dirt and mud. But with his body in the soil,...

The irony of acquiring a foreign tongue is that I have amassed just enough cheap, serviceable words to fuel my desires and never, never enough lavish, imprudent ones to feed them. It is true, though,...

After a week's worth of failed fairy tales—stories that made my eyelids flutter open and not shut—my father tried telling me stories that belonged only to him. Thomas told me of an island off the coas...

Such a match, even if identified, would only allow me the illusion of communication and you the illusion of understanding. I could claim, for example, that my first memory was the taste of an unripe b...

While you have been waking up to the aroma of coffee brewing, dressing to the hushed rhythm of other people’s labor, I have been in the kitchen since I was six and in your kitchen since six this morni...

Every day when I walk the streets of this city, I am just that. I am an Indochinese laborer, generalized and indiscriminate, easily spotted and readily identifiable all the same. It is this curious mi...

I know you are in your best áo dài. You bought it when you were just eighteen. Gray is not a color for a young woman. Gray is the color you wanted because you were practical even then, knew that gray...

The Old Man, like the French, believed that black was the only appropriate color to display and wear in order to show grief.I know Má, black is the color of our hair, the color of our irides with the...

I did not give you my permission, Madame, to treat me in this way. I am here to feed you, not to serve as your fodder. I demand more money for such services, Madame. You pay me only for my time. My st...

Seconds before, we were a boy and a girl standing next to each other. The distance between our bodies was out of habit and not out of lack of curiosity. His movement was swift and unexpected. I rememb...

The truth about my family was that we disappointed one another. When I heard the word 'disappoint,' I tasted toast, slightly burned. But when I saw the word written, I thought of it first and foremost...

I had forgotten how different my language looks on paper, that its letters have so little resemblance to how they actually sound. Words, most I had not spoken for years, generously gave themselves to...