HIGH POINT, N.C., July 29, 2015 – Dr. Kirstin Squint, assistant professor of English at High Point University, recently published an interview with author Monique Truong, titled “Both Souths that I’ve Known,” in the 2015 issue of North Carolina Literary Review.
Truong is the author of bestselling novels “The Book of Salt” and “Bitter in the Mouth.”
Squint’s interview focused on Truong’s experience growing up as a Vietnamese American in rural North Carolina as reflected in “Bitter in the Mouth.” This includes Truong’s use of themes from the Southern literary tradition, including those Squint says she consciously echoed from Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
“Our conversation included a discussion of the ways that Asian American and Southern traditions can intertwine,” Squint says. “For example, when I asked her why she referred to herself as a ‘Southern girl twice over’ and what the word ‘Southern’ signified to her, she replied: ‘War between North and South. A civil war is one of the hardest things to come to terms with, and both my Souths have faced it and lost.’ She links her family’s experience in the Vietnam War to the experience of the U.S. South, which becomes her first home in the United States.”
They also talked about Truong’s inclusion of North Carolina history in her book, including the legend of Virginia Dare, the life of slave-poet George Moses Horton and the Wright Brothers’ first flight.
Squint, who researches and teaches multiethnic and Southern literature at HPU, recently included “Bitter in the Mouth” on the reading list for one of her classes and received great feedback from students.
“It’s a really rich text for class discussion, and we spent a lot of time talking about its representations of gender and the globalized South,” Squint says.
Squint collaborated on the questions with Professor Nahem Yousaf of Nottingham Trent University and conducted the interview with Truong at the 2014 meeting of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature in Arlington, Virginia. Squint served on the program committee for the conference and currently sits on the society’s executive board.
North Carolina Literary Review has been published annually since 1992 by East Carolina University and the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association.