52 pages • 1 hour read
Monique TruongThe Book of Salt
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 16-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary
When Binh returned to his parents’ home after being fired from the Governor-General’s house, his father disowned him and announced that he now only has three sons. In response, Binh claims whoever his father is, it’s not The Old Man.
Binh relates his mother’s story to Bao, demonstrating how much he misses his mother. Binh’s mother married The Old Man after her father died and her mother contemplated death by suicide after having to survive off her brother-in-law’s scant charity. Binh’s maternal grandmother hired a matchmaker to marry off Binh’s mother, who was so young that she’d only just begun getting her period. She didn’t know anything about sex, her menstrual cycles, or pregnancy. Despite her youth, she never abandoned her Buddhist faith, despite marrying a (supposed) Catholic.
After the birth of their first child, Binh’s father added a kitchen to the house, a place where Binh’s mother could take the crying baby and leave Binh’s father alone. Supposedly, a “scholar-prince” Binh’s mother met after her third son was born is Binh’s actual father. When she became pregnant, he left her money and left, never to see her again or meet his son. After Binh’s mother gave birth to Binh, she paid the midwife to sterilize her. The midwife told The Old Man his wife would never have another child, freeing Binh’s mother from the painful, loveless sex she’d endured.
Binh last saw his mother after being fired for his affair. His father disowned him and threw him out, so Binh went to his mother’s kitchen one final time. After a sad farewell, his mom handed him a red packet—presumably the money his father, the scholar-prince, had given her.
Chapter 17 Summary
Lattimore has been peppering Binh with all kinds of questions about his Mesdames, whom Lattimore calls the Steins like all visitors to their house do.
The women love their car: Stein loves to drive, Toklas to navigate. They see the car as both a machine and an animal. The car is temperamental and prone to breakdowns; they have a “waiting kit” they take on longer trips, since auto travel isn’t common yet, and mechanics can be several towns away. The car is a muse to Stein, who listens to its syncopated sounds and replicates the rhythm in her writing. Toklas believes the car’s fumes are the real inspiration. Stein also loves that she and Toklas are the only women at the garage.
Stein goes out of her way to avoid the company of women. When visitors come, the wives (Stein considers them all wives no matter their actual marital status) go to the kitchen with Toklas. Stein thinks this makes Toklas selfless, whereas Toklas is just happy to keep any potential seductresses or female objects of attention out of Stein’s presence.
Binh tells Lattimore about a conversation he overhears between the Mesdames about Paul Robeson, the famous Black American actor, athlete, scholar, and singer, with a rich, deep voice and a gift for oratory. In their conversation, however, the women see him as a folksy caricature, revealing their bigotry. Lattimore compares this to their need to know whether he is Black—Lattimore attributes this need for a label to them being Americans and thus obsessed with race.
Chapter 18 Summary
Aboard the ship, Binh tells Bao about the red pouch given to him by his mother. Binh, much to Bao’s amazement, has never looked inside. Later, in their room, Binh finally looks in the pouch and finds gold leaf worth far more than he expected. Bao tells him to use the money to stay in the best room on the ship and eat the best food.
Binh recalls his father’s hard drinking and gambling. His parents never enjoyed their physical relationship: To his mother, sex meant bleeding and pain. To his father, it meant touching someone who harbored a smell that sickened him, so he was also relieved when she secretly had herself sterilized.
Binh is proud of his mother’s strength; He admires that she managed without any help from family. After paying the midwife to sterilize her, Binh’s mother worried her ancestors would be angry. When she later learned that preventing pregnancy was also a sin in Catholicism, she lost all belief in a happy afterlife. Nevertheless, though she had little joy or hope, she persevered.
Binh cannot acknowledge that his drinking mirrors his father’s abuse of alcohol and his mother’s unhappiness.
Chapter 19 Summary
Stein has three brothers and a sister, yet she only acknowledges one brother in conversation, saying, “I had a brother once…” (203). Stein left America to join this brother, Leo, in Paris, after failing out of medical school and experiencing unrequited love for a woman. In Paris, the siblings collected art, Leo painted, and Stein wrote. He believed himself to be the sole talent of the family. When Toklas came along, Stein realized she no longer had to live with Leo. She had another option now: Toklas, who believed Stein was the family genius. Leo left, accusing Toklas of stealing his sister though Toklas wrote Leo that Stein “gave herself” to her (215).
Lattimore urges Binh to take a notebook from Stein’s cabinet. Lattimore promises to be careful and to return it the next week. Binh is reluctant; as much as he wants to please and hold on to Lattimore, he doesn’t want to betray his Mesdames and his reasonably happy life with them. Lattimore sweetens the pot by offering to sit for a photograph with Binh. Binh desires this so strongly he relents and steals a notebook. He sees his name on its pages.
Chapter 20 Summary
Binh often likes to indulge in people-watching in a park in winter—winter is the only time he can get lost in Paris. Snow makes him want to stay in bed.
While at the park, he watches a dying pigeon struggle, entrancing children with its flapping and death throes. A woman cups the bird and places it under a tree. Binh yells out in rough French to the children, “That’s enough!” and they scatter. He recalls the best dress his mother had—it was gray, and she expected to grow into it, that it would look good once her hair had gone gray.
The dying pigeon becomes Binh’s mother in her gray dress. He sees her sweating with fever, becoming weak, and emerging from The Old Man’s house. Binh holds her hand as she walks across the street from their home, walking into traffic to die.
Chapters 16-20 Analysis
These chapters focus on the origins of the two main marriages (or lifelong partnerships). There are several emotional parallels between the women before they marry, although their resulting relationships are wildly different. Binh’s mother was in a desperate situation before her family married her off. Similarly, Stein was trapped in a semi-abusive living arrangement with her narcissistic brother—although outwardly she and Leo shared a love of the arts that made their home a popular Paris stop for art and literature lovers, he refused to acknowledge her talent or intellect. Binh’s mother and Toklas were both extremely sexually naïve—in Binh’s mother’s case, because she was so young at the time of her marriage, and in Toklas’s case, because she was just coming to terms with her sexuality. After marriage, both Binh’s mother and Toklas end up in subservient roles to their spouses. All three women marry in a bid to escape their circumstances, but only Stein and Toklas find love and acceptance in their relationship. Binh’s mother lands in an unhappy, abusive, and painful marriage to the Old Man—her only moment of escape is an affair with the mysterious scholar-prince that results in Binh’s birth.
These chapters also raise the theme of legacy. Binh’s mother dotes on Binh, the product of a brief but seemingly happy relationship with the scholar-prince she romanticizes for the rest of her life, imparting the desire for a similar relationship to Binh. Her legacy is this fourth son with whom she shares a special bond and for whose sake she keeps the red pouch of gold leaf the scholar-prince left behind. This gold leaf is the only legacy of his father that Binh will ever know. Stein and Toklas will never have biological children. Instead, their legacy is the nurturing they’ve provided to the artists and writers who frequent their salon and the literary work Stein produces. Binh and Lattimore, whom they’ve taken under their wing, are eager to connect with Stein’s legacy, albeit for different reasons. Binh steals a notebook of Stein’s writing, which becomes an illicit, valuable piece of legacy similar to the pouch of gold leaf.
Family pain permeates the novel, culminating in the proxy death scene of Binh’s mother in the form of a gray pigeon. This vision of his mother dying as a pigeon in the park is a manifestation of his many layers of guilt—for leaving his mother, for failing his hated father, for betraying Stein and Toklas by taking the notebook, and for being unable to say no to Lattimore.
