Bitter in the Mouth

Linda is the narrator and protagonist of the novel. Born Linh-Dao Nguyen, Linda travels to the United States with her parents as a young child, first for her father’s postdoctoral studies, then—with the fall of Saigon—as refugees. Following a fatal fire that burned down her family’s small mobile home and killed her parents, Linda is taken in and formally adopted by Thomas Hammerick—her biological mother’s former, secret boyfriend from her time studying abroad in New York City—and raised in Boiling Springs, North Carolina. However, Linda’s ethnicity is not revealed until the end of Part 1, and she does not discover how she came to be adopted until the end of the book, at which point she is around 30 years old, as she does not remember anything prior to her new life with any clarity.

Though Linda loves her great-uncle and father, the latter of whom dies when she is still in high school, she has a tense relationship with her mother and grandmother, the former of whom sees only her husband’s one true love, and the latter of whom sees her as a transactional obligation rather than a child to be loved. Further, Linda experiences a form of synesthesia that causes her to experience tastes when she hears words, which she refers to as “incomings.