VietnamEazy
Page 3
Ngoại and her husband would have these arguments at the end of every month. That was when they would run out of money. She didn’t have the best money management skills. She would spend all the money he had given her for the month on clothes, jewelry, gifts and other fineries to impress her friends. She rationalized this by telling herself that he spent his money on drinking and other women. To her thinking, his money rightfully belonged to her. So besides being upset about not having enough money to pay her creditors, she sometimes added bouts of jealousy. She’d cry and beat her chest while reminding him how much she loved him and sacrificed herself to allow him to run around with other women. She had a gift for the dramatic. She was able to cry and make hacking and vomiting sounds on command. He usually yielded to her theatrics. He might not have been convinced, but who would want to witness the same awful scene unfold on a monthly basis?
As for his behavior, it was accepted for men to be philanderers. That was considered part of their male nature, phóng khoáng, or free-spirited. It was a quality to be admired in a man so long as he still took care of his wife and children at home. When Ngoại’s demands were not met, she’d take her disappointment out on her first child, whose mere sight fueled her fire. She used to make Mom recite her poetry homework every night. If Mom failed to have it memorized, she was banished to the kitchen until she got it. Kitchens were usually built separately from the main house, out in the courtyard, to prevent the smoke from infiltrating the house.
Sitting in the dark on the cement floor with just a kerosene lamp to keep her company terrified Mom. So instead of concentrating on her homework, in the flickering light she would imagine ghosts and spirits lurking behind every pot and pan. This fertile imagination distracted her from the words on the page. After a few hours Ngoại would check in on her and if she had failed to memorize the required poems, she found herself sleeping on the cement floor. Those were the good nights. The bad ones involved spankings with a feather duster made from a long woven rattan stick with layers of brown chicken feathers glued to one end. Ngoại would hit Mom from her legs to her buttocks to her arms. The face was always avoided. That would have been crossing a line: To hit a person in the face was considered abuse. The spanking was usually accompanied by name-calling and insults, all of it heard by the neighbors. On these nights it was as if Grandma was possessed by demons while anger spewed out of her. These ghosts were all too real for Mom.
“You are stupid!”
“You are a whore!”
“You are worthless!”
“I should have never given birth to you!”
The next morning, the old lady next door would catch Mom on her way to school to check her wounds, put iodine on them and softly shake her head back and forth. “You didn’t deserve it, child,” she would assure her. “Misses got so angry. You didn’t deserve it.”
Mom appreciated the old woman’s soothing words. She recounted these stories to me over and over, giving them the passion and tone required to help a listener feel you were there. I focused on her words until I had every scene memorized, including the one where she was beaten for a record-breaking time from sundown to sunup, until the bamboo stick splintered into skinny pieces and Ngoại had to grab whatever else she could find to continue the spankings. No adult ever intervened. No one ever called authorities.
Ngoại’s husband was never home when these beatings occurred. Her anger usually boiled over when he went away on business trips. One day, when there was a knock on the door, Ngoại thought her husband had forgotten his keys. Although irritated, she managed to pull herself together to greet him with her charming smile. But to her surprise, it wasn’t him. It was an older woman dressed in country garb with six children behind her. She was his first wife from the countryside.
They used to call Hollywood a dream factory, and that was just what came to mind when I was dropped off outside one of the former big studios and walked in through the gate, past cavernous structures in which a set could have been created to evoke almost any reality. Finally I was inside the right large warehouse, staring at an expanse of mini-kitchens, row after row of sinks and counters and stoves. Kitchen utensils, knives, cutting boards, pots and pans – they were all off to the side, patiently waiting to see some action. I was greeted by a young man with blond hair and kind eyes who asked me to turn in my twenty-page signed contract of do’s and don’ts and directed me toward the back. It was then that I got a look at my competition. There were thirty of us waiting to snatch up the opportunity of a lifetime to become the new star on Sliced and Diced.
I kept my gaze straight ahead, seemingly nonchalant, as I relied on my peripheral vision to check everyone out. It was critical to come across as if I couldn’t have cared less about any of them. I wanted them to know it didn’t matter what any of them were doing because the star had arrived. I wore a fitted, orange sleeveless dress with pockets that flared slightly from the waist. I had my signature thirty-twoinch Mikimoto pearls around my neck like religious Buddhist beads. I had on comfortable black pumps this time. I carried a large Gucci tote bag with all my cooking knives and other necessities, including an extra pair of black, flat ballet-inspired shoes, just in case.
I was thrilled to see only one other Asian girl. She looked about thirty and was heavier set, a sign of a real food lover, and definitely not Vietnamese. My guess was she was Chinese. I was not concerned about her.
I saw a really young guy, about twenty-five with Elvis hair. This was his way of being unique. Fine, I’d fall for that. But could he cook and speak on camera at the same time? And what was his special point of view? Let me guess, he could make a banana PB&J sandwich?
I tried to remind myself never to underestimate the young. They have energy and life in them that can inspire an audience. I have been inspired by TV chefs like Bobby Flay and Rachel Ray, who were quite young when they began to build their audiences. Look at them now. They practically own their own TV networks.
Someone came around and gave me my number. Number eight. My lucky number. I was still staring at that lucky “8” in my hand when the loudspeakers crackled with an announcement from the director.
“You know the drill,” he said. “This is your moment. There are thirty of you now. Only twelve will make it to the show. Keep your blades sharp.”
I avoided eye contact. I didn’t need to make friends with Elvis or the Chinese girl. I didn’t need to make friends with anyone. Like all the contestants, I had a cardboard box full of ingredients awaiting me. This contest was a sprint. We had twenty-five minutes to prep, twenty-five minutes to cook and three minutes to present our dishes on camera. I picked up my cardboard box and walked toward one of the counters.
Garlic. Check.
Onions. Check.
Lettuce. Check.
Cracked and cleaned cooked crab. No! There was crab, but it hadn’t been prepared as I’d asked. Cracking and cleaning the crab would add about five minutes to my prep time. I was annoyed, but quickly regained my calm. Just a little extra hurdle. I knew I could still make this work.
French bread. Check.
Vegetable oil. Check.
Sugar, ketchup, tomato paste, red pepper flakes, salt and pepper. Check.
Where was my lemongrass? There was no chopped lemongrass? It was the key ingredient to the dish. Otherwise it might as well be called Chef Boyardee Crab.
I debated my options. I didn’t want to be labeled as difficult right at the outset, so I decided not to make an issue of the oversight. I became more and more nervous and my armpits started to feel a little warm. I needed to shift my focus away from this mishap and concentrate on my three-minute presentation.
The first round of contestants completed their prep time and moved on to their cooking segment. That meant it was my turn as part of the second group of contestants. I chopped my onions into little cubes with ease. Mom taught me how to chop onions like a pro, without ever cutting my finger. The trick was using the knuckle from my left middle finger as a guide for th
e knife with each chop. I ran my knife under tap water every so often to wash the onion juice from the blade so my eyes would not tear up and make my mascara run. I chopped the garlic, washed the lettuce and opened the canned tomato paste. I cut, cracked and cleaned that cooked crab in four minutes flat. I’d made this dish many times, so it came easily to me. My twenty-five minutes were up!
I waited off to the side while they cleaned the kitchen from the previous five contestants. I could smell the aroma of curry in the air. There was my competition. I homed in on a nice-looking, older Indian woman dressed in a silk sari of beautiful bright pink woven with gold threads to make a sharp pattern trimming the edges of the fabric.
We sure needed an Indian chef on TV. That was a cuisine that was still a mystery to me. I had never explored how to make Indian dishes from scratch, thinking it was too difficult. Sure, we had our versions of curries in Vietnamese food, but they were nothing like the Chicken Tikka Masala or Saag Paneer we usually ordered from restaurants. Sometimes I bought prepared Indian sauces in jars at the grocery store, but they always tasted off, so I would add fish sauce to make them a little VietnamEazy.
Cooking Shift No. 2 was now up! Our every move would be scrutinized by judges as if we were on camera. I ended up with Stan, a stocky man with stubby fingers. He watched me closely and kept asking me questions to gauge my cooking knowledge and also my ability to think on my feet. It was like being on Iron Chef with constant jarring interruptions.
I started by sweating my onions and garlic in a large pan until they were translucent. I explained that all these ingredients could be purchased in any American grocery store. Then I added all the remaining ingredients except for the crab. At that moment I decided to reach into my dress pocket to pull out a little plastic bag of chopped lemongrass. Stan-the-judge’s eyes lit up. I flashed a confident smile.
“One is always prepared to bring a little VietnamEazy to every dish,” I told him.
I opened the bag and delicately used the tips of my fingers to sprinkle the lemongrass into the pan as though I were concocting a potion that needed a pinch of magic dust. I stirred it in and added the crab. There were only three minutes left to plate and present the dish. I quickly cut up a few slices of French bread and placed individual lettuce leaves on a large platter, spread out like a big fan. With my perfectly manicured, natural nails front and center, I carefully arranged each crab piece on top of the lettuce. I placed three slices of lightly toasted bread to the left side like lotus petals to finish each plate.
I took a risk with the lemongrass. Thank God it paid off. It was an element that Stan did not expect, but I did not get disqualified because that ingredient was in my recipe. The judge motioned for me to bring my plate toward the camera section. He nodded to me with a smile of approval and admiration that hit me like a burst of sunshine on a cloudy day. I was going to need all the confidence I could get for my three-minute on-camera test.
Those three minutes could change everything for me. Often while working at my acupuncture clinic, I’d let myself dream about a scenario just like this. A reality show was just the excitement I needed. In my late twenties I received a diagnosis of mild attention deficit disorder of the inattentive type. My symptoms were completely manageable without any medication. But I did have a bottle of Ritalin in the back of my makeup drawer just in case. Those pills helped me get through my fifteen-hour flights from San Francisco to Paris once a year to visit Ngoại. I inherited this condition from Mom. I loved our active conversations as we hopped from topic to topic, leaving our families still contemplating an earlier point we’d raised. It bothered them to no end, but to us it felt perfectly natural. We communicated on a level of organized chaos. There was no one else I knew who could do this with me. When speaking with friends, colleagues and patients, I had to refrain from letting myself go and instead maintained an exterior calm to hide the mania that was roiling inside. I chose to pursue a career as an acupuncturist to force myself to remain quiet for eight hours a day, four days a week. It was therapeutic to listen to yoga music under dim lights while inserting little needles into my patients.
Now I was facing bright lights, three camera operators, one director and a bunch of miscellaneous people doing I did not know what. I should have taken my pill today. Why didn’t I think of that? Then again, I avoided taking those calming pills most of the time because they muted my personality. I was going to need that today!
“Now Kieu, we would like for you to say a little about what you’ve prepared,” the director coached me. “Don’t forget to tell us stories about how you came up with the dish.”
I was still debating if I should tell a wonderful childhood story about cooking with Ngoại. I never cooked with my grandma because the maids did all the cooking. In Vietnam, I barely entered the kitchen. Or should I tell them I learned how to cook because I worked in my family’s restaurant beside my mom since I was twelve? I was there every day after school until closing. Sometimes when things were slow, I walked next door to the public library to read comic books. That was how I learned English. The pictures and word bubbles helped me understand this new language faster than I realized: After six months of reading comic books about fighting the evils of the world, I casually picked up a book about Ramona Quimby by Beverly Cleary that had been left behind on the little table by a blonde girl with her mom. And that was that. I abandoned comic books forever. I loved reading stories about this spunky six-year-old American girl whose mind ran as free as the Huggins’ family dog, Ribsy. Although I was older than the Ramona character, it was nice to live out a little bit of a childhood that had passed me by.
“Miss Kieu, are you ready?”
“Yes, I am,” I said.
I held my plate of sautéed crab, smiled and looked straight at the camera.
“Action!” said the director.
“Hi, my name is Kieu. I’m going to show you how to make an amazing Vietnamese crab dish that will leave your friends and family wondering what’s your secret!” I said, smiling and holding the plate a little higher toward the cameraman to my right, inviting him to zoom in on the plate.
“If Vietnamese food sounds intimidating to you, don’t worry,” I said brightly. “We are going to make it VietnamEazy for you!”
I made sure to emphasize and stretch out the final syllables – Eee-zee.
“You can get all the ingredients we are going to use right at your local supermarket,” I added.
I dumped all the prep ingredients except the crab into a large pan with the hot oil.
“My family migrated to Kansas in the early 1980s,” I said. “Needless to say, there were no Asian supermarkets around for my Mom to buy her ingredients. So she had to get creative and made us amazing, authentic dishes with ingredients we could find at any grocery store.”
Looking straight at the camera I gave it my best Midwestern twang.
“Yes, believe it or not, I used to speak English with a Kansas accent, y’all.”
OK, maybe people in Kansas don’t say “y’all.” But they don’t know that in L.A.! I paused for comic effect then continued, holding up the bowl of chopped lemongrass.
“The most important ingredient in this dish is lemongrass,” I said. “If you cannot find fresh ones, you can get them already chopped up in a jar in the foreign food section.”
I turned to the deep pan and threw in the crab.
“Once the sauce is ready, we toss in the cooked crab that your butcher has nicely cleaned and cracked for you, then stir.”
The time tracker was holding out the “30 seconds” sign to me. I held up the finished plate to the camera once more and smiled for my big finish.
“And here it is all done, a delicious plate of Crab Sautéed in a VietnamEazy Secret Sauce. The next time you think Vietnamese food is hard? Think easy. I’m Kieu and I look forward to making your next culinary adventure VietnamEazy.”
2
Virtues
FEMININE SALAD
Gỏi Phụ Nử
For this recipe you will need carrot, garlic, bean sprouts (washed and crispy), crispy shallots (store bought or freshly fried), roasted peanuts, chicken breast, herbs (mint, fresh basil and perilla leaves), chili paste (Sambal Oelek brand) and fish sauce.
3-5 Servings
DRESSING INGREDIENTS:
6 tablespoons fish sauce
6 garlic cloves
6 limes, juiced
1 cup water
4 tablespoon sugar
1/2 to 1 tablespoon chili paste
Combine fish sauce, minced garlic, all but a small amount of the lime juice, and the water and sugar in a saucepan and place over medium heat. Stir well and cook until just before boiling point is reached. Allow the dressing to cool, then pour it into a small serving bowl. Add a finely chopped piece of garlic and stir in the leftover lime juice and ½ tablespoon of the chili paste. Taste and add more chili paste if desired.
SALAD INGREDIENTS:
1 tablespoon olive oil
1/2 cup carrot
1 pound bean sprouts
1 pound cooked and shredded chicken
1/4 cup fresh basil
6 perilla leaves
1/4 cup mint leaves
2 teaspoons roasted peanuts
Optional: crispy fried shallots
DIRECTIONS:
Boil chicken breast until firmly cooked and then allow to cool before shredding into thin noodle-like pieces. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Chiffonade basil, mint and perilla leaves and combine with carrots and bean sprouts in a large salad bowl.