His story centers in Paris in his life as the cook in the home of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and is supplemented by his memories of his childhood in French-colonial Vietnam.

This book is structured as a stream of consciousness narrative, in which Bình's present circumstances are mixed with episodes from his past, showing bits and pieces of people and events from the Lost Generation in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s.

Bình is a gay Vietnamese cook who, at the present time in the novel, is living in Paris, working as the personal chef to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas.

Bình struggles to find a love, acceptance, and a home in Paris after traumatizing experiences in his youth in French-colonized Vietnam; in particular, he wrestles with his father's criticism and rejection of his homosexual son.

Gertrude Stein abstains from the routines of domestic life, preferring to focus on her writing or inspiration for it and leaving the management of 27 rue de Fleurus to her lover, Alice Toklas.

He is another Vietnamese man in Paris, who has been to many places and held various jobs in the past, including cook, kitchen boy, photograph retoucher, and letter writer on the Latouche Tréville.

In reality, Ho Chi Minh was in Paris for a brief period in 1927, and he worked on a boat named the Latouche Tréville.

Although these facts are never explicitly stated in the book, they suggest that the Man on the Bridge was Ho Chi Minh.

Binh represents a position in between these two extremes, as he assimilates into the French colonial structure to, for example, find work, but retains a running critique in his mind of all that he sees, thus allowing for a sort of internal rebellion.

For example, Binh describes how in Paris he is simply seen as French Indochinese, with no effort being taken to ascertain if he is from Vietnam, Laos, or Cambodia.

Binh, the "Oriental" narrator, turns the West into an object of study and critiques what he sees as its strange cultural practices, such as the Steins' pampering of their dogs.

Binh describes how salt can mean different things depending on where it comes from: kitchen, sweat, tears, or the sea.

He deals with many of the themes common amongst people in diaspora, including struggling to acquire a second language (in Binh's case, French), adapting to new social norms, and reaching out to other members from his same ethnic community (e.g., The Man on the Bridge).

As a minority living in diaspora, Binh struggles to create an identity for himself which reconciles his new experiences and self-conception to his past.