Revising Ho Chi Minh: Diasporic Historical Fiction in The Book of Salt and The Zenith

Through a reading of Vietnamese American author Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt (2003) and Parisian writer-in-exile Duong Thu Huong’s The Zenith (2012), this essay examines the ways in which the two diasporic Vietnamese novels revise modern Vietnam’s founding father Ho Chi Minh and thereby challenge the Communist Party’s official historiography. Resisting both the lingering civil war’s Manichaeanism and the militant anti-Communism of the diaspora, the texts present Ho as a figure of hope through which to imagine national reunification and an alternative future for Vietnam.