All characters appearing in this work are fictitious.
Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 by Trami Nguyen Cron
Table of Contents
Chapter 1, A Star
Sauteed Crab in Secret Sauce
Chapter 2, Virtues
Feminine Salad
Chapter 3, In the Time of the Emperor
Vegetarian Imperial Rolls
Chapter 4, Trust
Sour Fish Soup
Chapter 5, Breaking Out of Tradition
Fish in a Clay Pot
Chapter 6, Merging of Cultures
Steak and Potato Stir-Fry
Chapter 7, Sweetness of Life
Flan Custard
Chapter 8, Through Hell
Hades Rice
1
A Star
SAUTEED CRAB IN SECRET SAUCE
Cua Rang Sauce Cà Chua
4 Servings
INGREDIENTS:
Optional: A pot of oil for deep frying crab
2 tablespoons chili oil
1 teaspoon chopped garlic
9 ounces chicken broth
2 ounces ketchup
2 tablespoons chili sauce
1 teaspoon fish sauce
1/4 cup chopped lemongrass
1 Dungeness crab
1 1/2 tablespoons sugar
2 eggs
6 sliced red Fresno peppers
1 fried shallot
1 1/2 tablespoons green onions sliced into coins
4 sprigs cilantro
Quarter the crab reserving the top shell. Optional step: Deep fry for 4 minutes.
Heat the chili oil in a wok, add garlic, and sauté until caramelized. Add chicken broth, ketchup, chili sauce, fish sauce and lemongrass and stir. Once the sauce comes to a boil, add the crab and toss in the sauce until the crab is hot and completely coated. Add sugar and bring to a boil, then add the egg and scramble. Garnish with the sliced peppers, fried shallots, green onion and cilantro.
I knew I didn’t belong. I glanced around the sprawling L.A. hotel ballroom, looking from face to face, and the same thought kept hitting me like a gong being pounded: “What am I even doing here?” I’d worked over the years to stamp out any hint of an accent. I could speak just fine, but I knew there was no way I had the look or the back story the producers of the reality show Sliced and Diced hoped to find. They had gathered their newest batch of two hundred wannabe star chefs, me among them, in the over-air-conditioned depths of the Los Angeles Hilton. No one could knock my wardrobe, it was true. I had wriggled into a black pencil skirt and black lace top revealing just enough cleavage. My long dark hair, almost black, was loosely curled to create those waterfall tiered waves. The camera would like me, but that didn’t mean the producers would. I am a Vietnamese immigrant.
At barely five feet tall, I knew I was not tall enough for the Sliced and Diced producers. Given my lifelong love of food, I was not thin enough. My skin was not light enough. I was not dainty and pretty enough, at least not by Vietnamese standards. My saving grace was my large, double-creased, dark eyes. This Western feature is revered by most Asian women. Many opt for surgery to change their eyelids, creating a scar to mimic a crease on their upper lids. Some use Scotch tape at night to hold back their lids so that by morning they’ll have the crease for at least a few hours. How they sleep with their eyelids taped back, I have no idea. Everyone in my family has the signature large eyes and double-creased lids. They say people who don’t have the crease appear sly and untrustworthy.
Waiting in the cold hotel ballroom, my thoughts raced back to my conversation that morning with my mother, who was in fine form. She happily recounted what my stepfather had asked her when he found out I was trying out for the show: “Does she even know how to cook?” My mother then paused, as if delivering a punch line, and broke into cruel laughter.
“‘You don’t really need to know how to cook for those shows anyway,’” my mother continued happily, relaying what she claimed to have told my stepfather. “‘Kieu knows enough. Besides, she will have me to help with her presentation.’”
My mother might as well have taken out a knife and plunged it into my back. That was her way. She could wield a knife on me, but she could never wield one on a show like Sliced and Diced. Nobody would understand a word she uttered. Back home in Vietnam, she was respected as an articulate woman who could write beautiful poems in the ancient Chinese style. Now in California she did not even have the ability to communicate with her youngest son about simple things like his college career plans. She spoke only a few words of English.
My mother’s attacks always found their mark, but that morning for some reason I was able to ignore her. This was my day. I felt lucky. I muttered the appropriate half-hearted laugh in response, polite but dismissive, and moved on. Still, the story left me with misgivings that I filed away to be considered later. Could it possibly be true that even my stepfather didn’t know I was a talented cook? How could that be? Growing up I would sometimes cook when Mom was not around. She ran a catering business out of our home and I was her only assistant. As an adult I created gourmet meals for the family when they came to California to visit. I had a momentary flash that maybe Mom was so jealous, she made up the story to put me in my place and remind us both that she was the cook in the family. If anyone was going to be on TV, she should be the one, not me! I was shocked to find myself having such thoughts. It was the first time in my life I’d ever questioned my mother’s motives. I was thirty-eight years old.
Was I seeing a rivalry play out that was another version, a kind of pale copy, of the tortured interplay between my mother and grandmother that ran through my childhood like the San Andreas Fault runs through California? When I was eight years old, living in Paris, Grandma took a bath and asked me to help scrub her back. She sat in the tub facing away from me and I slowly scrubbed the soft, white flesh on her back with a small washcloth while trying not to look at her other body parts. She noticed me trying not to look.
“Are your mother’s breasts more saggy than mine?” she asked me suddenly.
I didn’t know what to say. I had never seen my mother’s breasts, but had seen my grandmother’s many times. Grandma twisted around in the bath tub to meet my gaze and demand a reply. I was on the hot seat. Silence would have been disrespectful. If I told her I had never really thought about it, her pride would have been hurt to learn I had not studied her breasts in detail.
“Yes, Ngoại, Mom’s breasts are more saggy,” I said, scrubbing her back.
“I know,” she agreed quickly, smiling triumphantly. “I’ve told your mother many times that she should take better care of them. After having only two children, her breasts are even saggier than old-lady Ngoại’s breasts after five children.”
I felt guilty about that conversation in the days that followed, and in fact feel guilty about it to this day. I did not protect my mom’s breasts’ honor. Where did my loyalties lie? With my mother, the mystery woman who gave birth to me, or to Ngoại, the woman who raised me? Or should I have simply told the truth, which was that as a kid such things were beyond me. I was far too young to have breasts of my own.
This was the kind of riddle from my past I’d have liked to sort through with my husband. For some couples a road trip is a chance to step back from the hectic daily grind and catch up on each other’s lives. For me our six-hour drive down to L.A. for Sliced and Diced meant several hours of staring out the window as a deep male voice read from a book. My husband was not a man who had ever felt comfortable expressing his thoughts or feelings. He had a vast collection of audio books and listened to them all the time – on long trips, to and from work, even just popping out to the store.
They were his means of escape. I’d often wondered what childhood calamity left him so withdrawn. I’d probed for answers, but to hear him tell it he had grown up in a home straight out of Leave It to Beaver. And the truth was, my in-laws had a lot in common with Ward and June Cleaver. Everything about their two-story home in upstate New York, where he grew up, seemed perfect. The only thing that left a mark in my memory was the basement. It was neat and equipped with a wide enough array of tools to build an entire house. I imagined John’s father must have spent endless hours in that basement, tucked safely away from the family, removed from his wife, tinkering with his tools, the occasional whir of saws and drills only highlighting the absence of words and human connection.
I looked over at my computer engineer husband and made my usual bid to prod him to open up to me. “Honey, if you could do anything and money was not an object, what would you do?” I asked him.
A flicker of annoyance passed over John’s eyes. I had interrupted the calming monotone of the male narrator’s voice. John reached for the pause button with what felt to me like exaggerated slowness. Even his movements struck me as tedious. I stared at his scabby, bloody fingertips, victims of his nail-biting habit, and waited for him to reply. I’d almost forgotten my question by the time he finally spoke up.
“I would be a counselor,” he said, just so, and I was waiting to see where he might go with this promising beginning. But those five words represented his total outpouring.
I gestured with my right hand to encourage him to continue. He kept his eyes on the road, silent.
“Why?” I finally asked, trying not to show any annoyance.
“It would have been interesting,” he said.
In the endless chess match that is marriage, he’d just check-mated me. I had only two options: continue pulling teeth without the proper dental equipment, or let him get back to his comfortable audio-book world. Fine. For him being stuck in the car together for six hours must have been torture enough without being forced to connect with his wife. Flashing the gracious smile of the defeated, I reached over and pressed the play button.
“Number thirty-nine, forty and forty-one!” came the announcement in the waiting room for Sliced and Diced. I felt steel bands of anxiety encircling me, knowing it was almost my turn to be called.
The woman who made the announcement was in her twenties, blonde and fit with that absent look of surfers and fashion models who don’t really care but want you to think they might. She was probably some kind of intern the network hired for the cattle call. I could tell she took her job seriously as she glanced down to double-check her clipboard with a look of crisp efficiency. My pits felt suddenly sweaty and my stomach started to churn as if I had food poisoning. Mom and I both had this condition. Whenever we got too excited, we needed to run to the bathroom.
Hurrying off to find the ladies room, I spotted an African-American woman along the way who was still working on her five-page application right then and there. I couldn’t believe it. I’d spent many long days laboring to make sure I had completed mine absolutely as well as I could. I couldn’t take my eyes off this woman with her blonde hair, too-tight jeans, two-inch French manicured-tip fingernails and red pen squiggling away. I wondered what the theme of her show would be. I doubted it could be anywhere near as good as mine.
“Number fifty-seven, fifty-eight and fifty-nine!”
My turn! Before I could panic, I looked over at John for reassurance. He smiled and gave me a “You’re OK” nod. Sometimes his calmness was just what I needed. My thoughts were veering wildly toward questions I should have settled well before that moment. Should I just be myself ? Or should I create some flashy character who would grab the producers’ attention? Someone impulsive and rude and charismatic? Someone who acted out and threw tantrums? No meek person was going to be selected for the show, that much was clear. Even contestants who didn’t end up winning often landed their own shows if they were somehow big personalities or colorful or interesting. Why hadn’t I thought all of this through beforehand?
I decided I’d have to come across as the Ruthless Asian Chick. The only memorable, successful Asian TV personality I could think of was Margaret Cho, who was crude and loud. She was never delicate. She was everything a Vietnamese woman should never be. I would work a Cho variation: I would be blunt, self-assured and bossy. In other words, I would be myself.
I walked into the small meeting room and there was the young woman I’d assumed was an intern, now sitting behind a table covered with a white table cloth. She motioned for me to sit down with a sweeping wave of her right hand, like a queen summoning the peasant to bow. I fought back a flinch and then eased into a smile. There was no way I was going to let this girl intimidate me. She glanced at my application, then looked up and fixed me with a stare that was both insolent and friendly.
“What is your show going to be?” she asked.
“VietnamEazy,” I told her, a smile of pride breaking through. “Vietnamese food made easy with American ingredients.”
I saw a quick twinkle pass her eyes. She motioned for me to stay in my chair while she grabbed her smartphone, stood up and left. I was taken aback. I was not sure if she’d been daydreaming and wanted to send a quick text to her boyfriend suggesting a new move they should try in the bedroom as soon as possible or if I’d offended her so much that she couldn’t stand to waste another second in my presence. Had she caught a whiff of my sweaty armpits? Oh no! My eyes danced around the small meeting space. I felt a fresh blast of machine-frozen air and wished I had a scarf. I love my scarves. If my neck is warm, I am warm. Ngoại always said to cover our necks in cold areas or we might get courant d’air, French for a draft of air. Every Vietnamese knew that this deadly wind attacks its victim, causing permanent or temporary paralysis or a crooked face.
I heard the door close quickly behind me and saw the girl coming back toward me in a hurry, trailed by an older man with thinning gray hair and a bland, distracted air. He grinned as he approached and stuck out his right hand.
“Tell me more about your show’s concept,” this producer said. “VietnamEazy, was it?”
I gave him a broad smile.
“Yes, exactly,” I said. “The American audience is ready to learn to make Vietnamese food. I arrived in Kansas with my family when I was eleven. It was a challenge for my mom to find Vietnamese ingredients, so she developed a way to make authentic-tasting Vietnamese food with American ingredients that you can get in the supermarket. I’ve improved the recipes over the years and am really happy to be able to share them now.”
He moved on to other questions about food and cooking. He asked what I did for a living and if I was able to leave my life for three months to tape the show, if I was fortunate enough to advance all the way through to the finals. I told him it was no problem at all, since I owned my own acupuncture clinic in Santa Cruz and could easily add another acupuncturist to see my clients while I lived out my dream.
“You will hear from us within twenty-four hours,” he called back to me on his way out, leaving as quickly as he had arrived, still smiling with that amused look of discovery in his eyes. “Are you going to be around?”
Where else would I be?
“Yes!” I replied happily.
I thanked the blonde woman on my way out. She may be young, I thought to myself, smiling at her, but she was no dummy.
Our home in Saigon was the tallest and grandest on the street. Ngoại forbid us to go barefoot outside like all the other children. Sometimes Minh and I would wear our French-designed shoes just far enough down the street that Ngoại could no longer see us and then pull them off. There was nothing like the freedom of bare feet. We didn’t care about hurting ourselves. We didn’t worry about catching deadly diseases. We just wanted to fit in with other kids and not get picked on because of our fancy clothes.
One day when we were playing, a neighbor girl slammed right into me by accident and sent me sprawling to the ground knee first. The jolt startled
me. I sat down and realized that a brown piece of glass had pierced my left knee. Blood was everywhere. I looked up to find Minh standing over me, staring at the blood. I didn’t feel any pain.
“Minh, get Ngoại,” I told him.
He just stood there, unable to peel his eyes away from my knee.
“Get Ngoại!” I screamed.
He finally snapped out of his trance and ran as fast as he could to get Grandma. She came right away and kept repeating “thôi chết rồi, thôi chết rồi – this is death, this is death!” I felt cold rush over me and started to shake. Uncle Quốc, my mother’s younger brother, held me in his arms and hopped on the back of his best friend Uncle Khôi’s Honda motorcycle. They raced through the streets of Saigon to get me to a hospital. My next recollection was of being set on an operating table with bright lights over me as I stared up at Uncle Quốc’s face. Where is my mom? I want my mom. Why isn’t she here? Uncle Quốc held my hand as the doctor told him they had to sew my knee up. I spotted a long needle and had to look away. I kept my stare above me and felt nothing except the embrace of solitude even as I gripped my uncle’s fingers in my left hand. After what seemed like a long time, it was over and the pain finally crept in. They moved me to a resting room where I waited for Mom to arrive. I fantasized about how she would run to me and hug and kiss me. She would tell me she felt so sorry for me. I would be in heaven with all the attention she would lavish on me.
I heard the quick clicking of platform heels and knew she had arrived. Mom came over to my bed with fear in her eyes. She wore a billowy yellow shirt, tight bell-bottom jeans, brown platform shoes and a big brown hobo bag. Her hair was knotted back in a bun. She hovered over my bed and glanced at my knee. She did not hug me or kiss me. She did not touch me or even speak to me. I could only read her face, but was afraid to look into her eyes. Did I see love or disappointment? I couldn’t tell. I was causing trouble for her and that thought hurt more than any pain I felt in my knee.
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