It's Paris, 1929. You're young, Vietnamese and gay. You don't speak much French, but you can cook a mean omelet. You see an ad in the paper: "Two American Ladies Wish to Retain a Cook." You answer the ad. You get the job.
It would take quite an imagination to conjure up such a situation, but in fact, it really happened. The literary Mesdames Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas had exactly such a chef for six years at 27 Rue de Fleurus, where they hosted fabled salons for "The Lost Generation."
But, as these things go, the chef was relegated to a line in a cookbook. It was in that book that Monique Truong happened upon the mention of the "Indochinese cook," and began to concoct a far more delectable treat than Miss Toklas' famous hash brownies, which was what she'd originally been looking for.