[3] She has also written Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose, along with Barbara Tran and Luu Truong Khoi, and numerous essays and works of short fiction.
[4] Her father, an executive for an international oil company, initially stayed behind for work but left the country after the fall of Saigon.
Truong describes her childhood and schooling experience in Boiling Springs as "exceedingly difficult and emotionally brutal.
"[6] Truong experienced constant racism, discrimination, and bullying in her small town due to the fact that she was the only Vietnamese American child at her all-white elementary school.
[8][9] Truong's first novel, The Book of Salt, published in 2003 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, takes place in post-World War I Paris, and tells the story of Binh, a Vietnamese cook who works for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.
[3] Her second novel, Bitter in the Mouth, published by Random House in 2010, tells the story of a Vietnamese-American adoptee growing up in the American South.
Diane Leach wrote in The Los Angeles Times: "Monique Truong’s bone is the outsider’s plight, and her pen is a scalpel, laying perfect words down along that nerve until even the happiest reader understands what it means to forever stand apart from your family and the larger society you inhabit.
[16] Her essays on a variety of topics, including food, racism, the Vietnam War, and the American South, have appeared in The Wall Street Journal,[17] O, The Oprah Magazine,[18] The Washington Post,[19] and The New York Times.