Fish Sauce Metonymy: On Vi Khi Nao’s “The Italy Letters”
Vi Khi Nao | The Italy Letters | Melville House | August 2024 | 192 Pages
“Going down on a woman reminded me of eating fish sauce,” proclaims Vi Khi Nao’s narrator in the author’s latest epistolary novel, The Italy Letters. The final lines of “Coital Exposure,” a poem from Nao’s luminous 2022 poetry collection Fish Carcass, wonder whether a “verdant penis” is “better with nước mắm (1) / The female organ as / Squid in liquid form.” Elsewhere, Nao calls her own body “cetacean” in “Lady Gaga Apples,” a poem from her 2021 collection A Bell Curve is a Pregnant Straight Line. In an interview anthologized in The Best American Nonrequired Reading of 2018, writer Stacey Tran asked Nao what smell she associates with Asian people. She responds with a cryptic haiku: “Cherry blossoms printed on silk / Soaking in kwan loong oil / Dry shrimp under the tongue.”
The Italy Letters is a similarly self-consumptive, epistolary novel: a long, unsent letter from the narrator (Nao’s stand-in) addressed to a married woman living in Italy who never learns of the narrator’s affection. What transpires is a solipsistic, at times maudlin, and stringently queer prose-song, which inhabits a series of elliptical, amorphous physical transmutations. We descend through a winding “garden of impossibility” plotted with fantasies, confessions, and fragments of digital communications, allowing Nao to teach us how to desire–and how to experience desire as a body. Its sexuality is tense and solvent, like Virginia Woolf on SSRIs.
In 2019, another queer Vietnamese writer, Ocean Vuong, published an explosively popular epistolary novel, written as a letter to his mother. Recent queer diasporic writing has taken on this literary mode, which has its overarching root in James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time: a confessional letter written from an “I” to a “you” that attempts to reconcile an insurmountable gulf of differences–unrequited love, generational trauma, or other things lost in translation. Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) is one of a litany of personal epics of alienation and desire, such as the poetry of Chen Chen and Kai Cheng Thom to the novels of K-Ming Chang, all of which intertwine the myths and images of their home cultures with America. These works share formal similarities: the use of time-skips and space-leaps to traverse continents, lifetimes, and ancestral memories; the allusions to Euro-American queer literary consciousness, what little of it exists, as a universal queerness that transcends cultures.
Critics have surprisingly refused to tackle this swarm of popular memoir-novel-lyrics, like Kai Cheng Thom’s a place called No Homeland (2017) and Lamya H’s Hijab Butch Blues (2023), classifying it as a genre in its own right, perhaps because it is both everywhere and nowhere. Go to any chain bookstore website, however, and search for “queer diaspora voices” and you will see that the category is thriving. Usually, the prose is lyrical, confessional, and faithfully personal to a fault. Sentences flourish with natural images, food and narratives of emigration, heavy with history and deliberately mixed metaphors. Reading the marketing copy for a book of this genre could feel like reading a military recruitment poster: publishers want to make it clear that this book was written perfectly for you. Queer sex is usually depicted as beautiful and painful, but nevertheless, an act of blooming. This is to say, the pussy does not taste like fish sauce.
Whether you think it’s a literary trend or a genre in its own right, it’s undeniable that tenderqueer diaspora writing became so popular among writers post-Vuong. Many of those included are queer and Asian themselves, and took Vuong as their model (I guess I am no exception). Books like On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous sell well foremost because, through the quality of the writing, readers recognize themselves in the narrative. They also deliberately target the young, nonwhite, queer, somewhat-literary audience. I would even argue that, other than autofiction, tenderqueer diaspora writing is the only mode that came close to resembling a popular literary ‘school’ during the last few decades. The style has radiated outwards in unexpected ways. I count among the expanded tenderqueer diaspora literary universe writers who are not queer (Rupi Kaur) and not diaspora (Maggie Nelson). It became absolutely ubiquitous beyond the printed page: you could find it on Tumblr, in poetry slams, in group chats and Instagram literary journals. It’s how a generation of queer kids learned to feel. Though Nao’s career is relatively longer than some of the writers mentioned above, labels like queer and diaspora have only just begun to be applied to her work.
Throughout the past decade of the author’s expansive corpus, nước mắm as metonym for pussy kept appearing, reaching its apex in The Italy Letters. This is a novel full of odors–those feminine, pungent, and parasitic odors of the narrator’s “lesbian body, the lesbian body of others and the diaspora of taste.” For Nao’s narrator, desire unfolds through smelling instead of seeing. Pussy tastes like fish sauce, human embrace is like cheesemaking, and giving head is like diving; mothers can smell the odor of girlfriends on their daughters. This Sappho (or as Nao puns in her 2021 book A Bell Curve is a Pregnant Straight Line, Sapphở) does not fall dead at her beloved’s gaze, but anoints herself with the fantasy of how her beloved should taste. To see and to hear is passive; to smell and taste, however, is far more proactive and possessive, truer to life. In The Italy Letters, desire is a solitude through which one swims. If fish is a metonym for the lesbian body, and to love is to consume, then going down on another’s fish sauce pussy might be seen by Nao as a form of aquatic cannibalism.
For his epigraph, Vuong chose a quote from Last Words from Montmartre (1995) by Qiu Miaojin (2), the posthumous epistolary novel by that mother god of Taiwanese lesbian literature: “But let me see if—using these words as a little plot of land and my life as a cornerstone—I can build you a center.” Similarly, Nao’s narrator addresses her lover in The Italy Letters: “If you had opened me up with your words like canned sardines, perhaps I wouldn’t be here?” And so the narrator of The Italy Letters mines the stories her lover tells her and her own past for signposts–parallels, coincidences, shared anecdotes–in search of a myth between them, a proof that they have already made a world together. Learning about each other is a cascading series of ‘here I did this’ and ‘here you saw that,’ leaping across vast distances and people: “wherever you were in space with time and desire, I still feel connected to you somehow.” As the narrator seems to believe, the world between any two lovers already exists, unaware to them, fractured across space, memory, and time: all they need to do is to chart it into existence.
In The Italy Letters, the basic unit of narrative is neither word nor sentence, neither character nor plot—it is, almost always, a shape that lends itself to change and confession. When the body is only a body in fantasy, speech acts are the only acts possible. Words are slippery and the narrator is twisted up in them like sardines. “The lips of my fingers” freeze with desire, she writes of typing an email–it is the fact of wanting that generates and “elongates” existence; desire is “the ovulation of the world.”
Perhaps that’s why Qiu, Vuong, and Nao each found a home in the epistolary novel: the letter form is good for the unsaid and the no-longer-sayable. Writing a letter allows the nervous lover or child, who’d otherwise stutter in conversation, to slow down and say what they really mean. The letter writer is in control. She can accuse and plead, confess and insult. The terms of the conversation are not decided until the recipient reads it. For all three authors, queer desire is something akin to a private spectacle: we travel alongside the narrator’s singular mind, rehearsing a conversation across lifetimes and impossibilities. We swallow love and never speak of it to others. The Italy Letters inverts the most private desires into a public confession and sets its impossibilities free.
One such freedom regards place. Like a spatial bait-and-switch, there is no Italy in The Italy Letters. Likewise, the mementos of the narrator’s love are intangible: PDFs sent through emails, poem recommendations, suggestions of places to go; reminders, celebrations, encouragements, texts, missed Skype calls. The narrator imagines the Italian woman as an atom and her body as a car. At times, this is as frustrating as it is banal: the narrator dreams of being on a trip, in transit, and in nature with her beloved, always brushing shoulders but not quite catching each other. The space between the women is transient and disembodied, as expansive as it is narrow: “I will imagine myself as you may have imagined me,” the narrator echoes, “I am utterly homeless in my evanescence.”
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If Nao’s early experimental work (Fish in Exile (2016), Sheep Machine (2018)) show her at her most high-octane, speculative, then The Italy Letters is a look into the engine steaming below. Nao, once the indie-indie-indie darling of a generation of MFA applicants, reduces her persona to a pathetic romantic in The Italy Letters. Yet paradoxically, she produces something you could almost call a realist work of autofiction: Portrait of the Artist as an Adjunct. A poet is someone who fucked their roommate; a novelist is someone who falls in love with a married woman over the Internet; an essayist is someone whose internal monologue beats on about tennis and political ineffabilities and the futility of making sense of it all. A writer, like Nao, who has played the role of poet, novelist and essayist numerous times, is also someone who, amidst the impossibility of making a career out of writing, still cares for her dying mother and wants her books to sell.
Of course the novel is spiritually unsellable. The lonely narrator cares for her aging mother in Las Vegas, attends a conference in Los Angeles, and returns to a life of writing in Iowa City by the end of the novel. In this light, the narrator’s love for the Italian woman seems at times an escapism from her mother’s illness and, at other times, an inextricable drive that exists outside of it. The novel’s weaker moments are its dissonant contrapoints against desire: the narrator’s musings on sexual violence and transness felt gratuitous and incoherent, like some sort of politically vacuous gesture grasping towards what the narrator considers to be the margins of womanhood. Amidst bouts of tedious delirium, financial anxiety, and the particularly bitter ennui of musing over one’s own circumstances in a state of paralysis, wading through the pages of Nao’s novel can sometimes feel like walking through a vast house of mostly blank rooms, with an occasional corner bursting with color and blood.
But perhaps that, too, is intentional. Sure enough, Nao’s craft glistens in the moments where The Italy Letters rises above maudlin monologues and anxious preoccupations. The Nao of 2024 is less taut and sharp than that of 2019—more anxious and emotive, more frightfully honest with her craft. Her career testifies that the destination of literary career is no longer the establishment of a certain style, audience, or cultural niche, nor the cultivation of a unique, representative voice that editors so desperately seek and still fail to find. Rather, it’s all about stretching out one’s horizons to what is possible on and off the page: like Nao, you can also write poems and novels and essays and publish a book every year and become super important to a small group of people.
Or you can grow up and write tenderqueer diaspora literature like everyone else. Nao, like many queer diaspora writers, has left home twice: the first time leaving the motherland, and the second, the compulsory heterosexual family structure. But when the narrator wonders whether she was “born as a lesbian in order to escape Vietnam… or if the ocean or nước mắm (fish sauce) turned [her] into a lesbian,” we are left with an odd taste in our mouths. Sure, perhaps this is a truth of sorts, but doesn’t the fish sauce pussy just sound kind of like plain old Orientalism here? Is this really different from Lana Del Rey singing “my pussy tastes like Pepsi cola” to her Scottish boyfriend, all the way back in 2012? Is this really how Nao sees the world, or is she just trying to pander? Why, after an expansive career of defying categories, is Nao doing this right now?
I am not calling Nao a sellout; rather, I am trying to show that there is more to the confluence of style and metaphors and subject matter that we now associate with “queer diaspora writing.” Amidst a new biting generation of diasporic readers turned their backs on “diaspora poetry” (the mangoes! the alienation!); after a generation of autofiction writers deemed writing thinly disguised stories about one’s sex life to be passé, Nao’s new novel is a tongue-in-cheek pandering to that very triteness she’s rejected all her career: come read about this Vietnamese-American narrator’s sensual queer love affair, the blurbs advertise, as if Nao hasn’t had an entire career in experimental literature.
The Italy Letters, like all confessions, is full of tonal contradictions: the fish sauce pussy is incisive because it is cringe; repulsive because it is erotic, self-liberating because it is self-objectifying. But just because a literary trend is irreducible to its parts doesn’t mean we shouldn’t critique it anyway. The Italy Letters is proof that when done right, the tenderqueer diaspora mode can actually produce something pretty powerful out of the same, cliché metaphors. Reading Nao’s control over these trends reveals the truth: it’s always been a problem of craft, not subject matter. When an all-too-legible premise–endless yearning, ‘god, what even is a home,’ ‘I want this white Italian woman I can’t have,’ ‘I’ve got to take care of Mom’—breaks off to allow metaphors like the fish sauce pussy to thrive, Nao’s prose becomes all the more delicious. Like all visionaries, she does not resign herself to her subject matter–she blazes through them and leaves more questions. Does the white woman’s pussy really taste like fish sauce? Can falling in love really feel like coming home? I don’t know, but at least it’s better than mangoes.
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If the conceit of literature is the linguistic transmission of a possible non-linguistic reality, then the conceit of autofiction, as we’ve known it today, is the contention of a possible reality against text while still agreeing to let a story be a story. If the author is more than an author and the character more than a character, then the reader, in turn, becomes more than just a reader. Since the world beyond the text is so permeable, any engaging work of autofiction extends the act of reading into potential transgression—looking up the places and people in the story, fact-checking salacious anecdotes, stalking the writer online, asking is this real, is this real, could this be real?–that involves putting reality to fiction the same way we check names against faces. Autofiction entices the reader to be critic, spectator, voyeur, and onlooker, without inviting or permitting them to perform these potentially invasive acts.
By the end of the novel, I, too, succumbed to this. Who really is this mysterious Italian woman? What kind of person made the narrator this down bad? I mean, I just want to know what she looks like! Opening up an incognito tab, I hastily googled the Italian name from the dedication.
I was stunned to find an obituary. She passed this very July, following a five-year long battle with cancer, only a month before the book’s publication. Looking at the photo I knew, doubtlessly, it was her: she was smiling brightly, somewhere in Italy, between the sun and the sea. Her obituary, written by the husband and family who hovered only as an afterthought in the novel, teemed with the same effervescence with which the narrator described their online conversations: “Everywhere [she] went, that smile of hers drew people to her side. And believe us, she went everywhere!”
Without meaning any disrespect for the dead, I beheld these two narratives—a full and passionate life, and the unspoken, fictionalized desire it inspired—and I was speechless at how the gaps in one filled holes in the other. That narrator’s “garden of impossibility” had been full and fruitful elsewhere. How beautiful was its tending.
1. Vietnamese for fish sauce2. 2014 English edition translated by Ari Larissa Heinrich