by Kim Thuy
muối
salt
WITHIN A FEW MONTHS, those clients who’d come on their own in the beginning began to turn up with a colleague, a neighbour, a woman friend. The more people waiting in the entrance and then outside on the sidewalk, the more nights I spent in the kitchen. Fairly soon, clients stopped ordering soupe tonkinoise in favour of the plat du jour, even if they didn’t know what was on the menu before they arrived at the restaurant and read the blackboard hanging in the window. Just one dish per day. One memory at a time, because it took me a lot of effort not to let my emotions overflow the plates. And yet every time the salt shaker fell accidentally and covered the floor with white grains, I had to restrain myself from counting them, as Maman always did when her daily ration was limited to thirty grains. Fortunately, the growing number of clients kept me from losing my focus.
hồn nhiên
spontaneous
VERY SOON, I COULD no longer count the number of plates to wash. My husband hired a young Vietnamese man. He came equipped with a high-volume smile. Before he said a word, we could hear his good humour burst out in his stomach like popcorn. I couldn’t help laughing hard, so hard, when he pulled on the yellow rubber gloves he’d taken from his pockets, shouting: “Ta-dah!” I didn’t think I could be capable of producing such a reverberating, spontaneous sound. He quickly became my little brother, a ray of sunlight that never faded, even when life presented nearly insurmountable hardships. Whenever he had a spare moment, he would be studying. He repeated chemistry formulas, his head in a fog of steam from the dishwasher. He posted the periodic table of the elements on the tile wall. He wrote the definitions of words in the margins of pages in novels he was reading for his coursework. In spite of all his efforts, he repeatedly failed his philosophy and French exams. It was his last chance to pass when I met him. I spent many nights reading his homework and correcting his essays.
lỗi
mistakes
AS SOON AS I KNEW how to write, Maman insisted on a dictation every evening, power failure or not. She read to me from Maupassant by the light of an oil lamp the size of a drinking glass. We took turns having the light from the flame. After each sentence, I had to perform a logical, grammatical and syntactical analysis. Before she went to bed, Maman put the book back in its metal box and buried it in its hiding place. It was the biggest secret, because foreign books were prohibited, especially novels and, more specifically, the triviality of fiction.
sét
lightning
THANKS TO THAT COACHING, I was able to draft the ten questions that my sun-brother had been given by his philosophy teacher. He would have to answer just one, but he wouldn’t know which before the exam. I wrote ten answers for him, which he learned by heart, because my explanations in Vietnamese didn’t help him. So this was how he obtained his diploma and got a job while continuing to give me a hand on weekends. One night he told me that earlier that day in his factory, a girl who’d recently been hired had come and stood close to him. Without turning towards me, he dropped a big kettle into the sink to imitate the electric current that had shot through his body from the top of his head to his feet. He threw up his arms, hands clad in yellow gloves, and took root in the ground as if he’d been struck by lightning. I stood there flabbergasted before his trance state, thinking he was acting delirious and crazy. But he was just in love. I didn’t know that condition to be able to identify it, to recognize it. Still, I was carried away in the wake of his euphoria, playing Cyrano de Bergerac to help him court that girl whom I barely knew.
thêu
embroidery
HER NAME WAS BẠCH, she was Vietnamese, she’d arrived a short time before and was sad to leave her village at the southern tip of Vietnam. She lived with an aunt in a Montreal suburb, in a big, dust-free house where every room had its designated slippers and each cutting board a specific use. The aunt had sponsored Bạch and her family of six. She would have preferred to stay in Cà Mau with her friends, embroidering tablecloths for export. Her aunt, though, had persuaded her parents that they must relinquish their life that held no promise, sacrifice their own generation so the next one could be educated. And so Bạch found herself in a factory that made electronic scoreboards. She soldered circuits with ease because her fingers had already been trained to fill space with a needle, stitch by stitch.
My sun-brother started by bringing her whatever I had in the kitchen: slices of manioc cake, fried rice with crab, or chicken with ginger and shiitake mushrooms. He came running to me, shrieking with the intense, immortal happiness of youth, when he managed to escort her back to her aunt’s for the first time. Eventually he succeeded in asking for her hand in marriage. I don’t know if she agreed because he saved her the four hours of bus trips every day or because she had decided to let herself be loved. But the wedding went ahead.
mâm
trays
I VOLUNTEERED TO HELP with the preparations for the engagement party because my sun-brother’s father worked sixty-hour weeks at a factory that made brake pads and another ten hours delivering pizzas, while violent migraines and painkillers reduced his mother to the state of a drunken reed, constantly disturbed by drafts. Sometimes the mere breath of a murmur on her cheek was enough to rattle her and cause the map of her life’s journey to appear on her forehead. It was unthinkable, then, to use her living room for wrapping the gifts in the traditional translucent red paper to take to the bride’s house, since the sound made by every fold, every movement, would be enough to slash open her skin. To spare her the crackling, rustling and commotion, we chose the restaurant dining room as headquarters.
hạnh phúc
happiness
ON THE EVE OF THE engagement party, the room was aglow with red—not the red of love but that of luck. Superstition dictated that each gift be wrapped in that colour, which represents good fortune, because all newlyweds need a lot of luck to find the balance that allows two individuals to build a single shared life, one that will support others in turn. We wish them not love but happiness in duplicate: the word is written twice, one linked to the other, mirrored, cloned. Since no one dares take a risk, each tray of gifts, without exception, is covered with bright red cloth, embroidered with the word happiness, not plural but doubled.
Luckily, newlyweds don’t burden themselves with the worries of those who have lived the ordeal before them. They are just here for the party and they believe that happiness inevitably comes with marriage, or the opposite.
trầu cau
areca nuts
TO CONTRIBUTE TO THE NEXT PART, to the natural cycle of life, my husband had mobilized clients who were friends to form the delegation that would carry the platters of gifts on the morning of the ceremony. The lacquered suckling pig had been entrusted to the strongest, while the others divided up the platter of boxes of tea, bottles of wine and biscuits. The cousins were responsible for the jewels, the small teapot filled with rice alcohol, and the platter of betel leaves and areca nuts. Today, very few Vietnamese still chew areca nuts, but all the same they symbolize the beginning of an encounter. Less than a hundred years ago, the Vietnamese received their guests with a mother-of-pearl wooden box containing a cylindrical mortar for crushing the nut before it was rolled up in a leaf lightly covered with lime. Regular users say the mixture provides the same stimulation as coffee, while those with weak hearts talk about dizzy spells or even intoxication. The effect is achieved by slow chewing, which colours the saliva red—the red of drunkenness, the red of love—because this red tells the story of an eternal union.
According to legend, twin brothers were in love with the same girl. The first married her. The second, choked with sorrow, left the village so his brother wouldn’t notice. The broken-hearted brother walked until he was exhausted, until he was transformed into limestone. The other twin took the same road in search of his brother. He dropped dead of fatigue next to the rock and metamorphosed into a betel palm. His wife followed his tracks and in the same place was turned
into a climbing vine with heart-shaped leaves, wound around the trunk of the palm tree that shaded the rock. I have often wondered how that love triangle had been able to become the symbol of a happy marriage, because the end proved so sad. I think we misunderstood our ancestors. They placed the platter of betel at the head of the procession because they wanted to warn the newlyweds of the danger of impossible loves, not the opposite. Or did they want to warn us that love can kill?
lạytổ tiên
bowing to the ancestors
THOUGH THE COUPLE BOWS LOW, noses to the ground, the ancestors hanging on the wall above the altar will never give them the true reason. They will be content to watch the incense sticks burn and to observe the transmission of rituals from one generation to the next. They know that one day the mothers-in-law will no longer offer earrings to their new daughters-in-law. Already, hardly anyone remembers that at the engagement party the mothers insert into the brides’ earlobes gold balls that represent buds. At the marriage, the mothers-in-law replace them with earrings in the shape of full-blown flowers that symbolize the blossoming of the bride, her defloration.
tiễn đưa
saying farewell
FROM MY IN-LAWS, all I got was an envelope that must have been worth its weight in gold because the papers in it offered me another elsewhere and an unknown life with a stranger. Since I had neither father nor ancestors, they’d thought it best to avoid ceremony. I left for the airport with no convoys of cousins and friends, unlike the other passengers. There were hundreds outside the airport, children, old people, tears, promises, all tangled up in emotions. In those years, people went away with no hope of returning. They only promised not to forget. Unlike other Vietnamese mothers, who counted on the loyalty and gratitude of their children, Maman wanted me to forget, to forget her because I now had a chance to start again, to go away with no baggage, to reinvent myself. But that was impossible.
gia đình
family
WHEN VIETNAMESE PEOPLE MEET, native village and family tree are the two subjects that open most conversations, because we firmly believe that we are what our ancestors have been, that our destinies respond to what we have done in the lives that came before us. The oldest knew my grandfather by name or in person, that man I had never met. The younger ones remembered Maman’s brothers and sisters and knew that I didn’t resemble them. They envied my slender legs, but they feared the scandalous story hinted at by my overly pronounced curves. Only those Québécois clients who had adopted a child in Vietnam dared to approach me with a neutral gaze, to offer me a blank page.
tình bạn
friendship
JULIE WAS THE FIRST to stick her head into the opening through which I delivered the plates. Her smile stretched from one side of the aperture to the other. The enthusiasm of her greeting was like that of an archaeologist upon discovering a trace of the first kiss. Promptly, before even a word was uttered, we became friends and, with time, sisters. She adopted me as she’d adopted her daughter, without questioning our past. She took me to see movies in the afternoon, or we would watch classics at her place. She opened her refrigerator and had me taste its contents in no particular order, according to her mood of the day: from smoked meat to tourtière, ketchup to sauce béchamel, and including celery root, rhubarb, bison, pouding chômeur and pickled eggs. Sometimes Julie would come and cook with me. I would show her how to keep sticky rice in superimposed layers of banana leaves by squeezing them firmly but without smothering the rice. It’s always a fragile balance, one that fingers can feel better than words can explain.
At the end of every January, we had to prepare several dozen of the treats because my husband wanted to offer them to his friends and his distant relatives for the Vietnamese New Year, as his mother used to do in her village. The scent of banana leaves cooked in boiling water for many hours reminded him of the days before Têt when the whole neighbourhood spent the night feeding the fire under cauldrons full of rice rolls stuffed with mung bean paste, smooth and as discreetly yellow as the moon.
Julie came to our restaurant often. She invited her friends for lunch, organized monthly meetings of her book group, and reserved the entire restaurant to celebrate family birthdays and wedding anniversaries. Every time, she brought me out of the kitchen to be introduced to her guests, embracing me with her whole body. She was the big sister I’d never had, and I was her daughter’s Vietnamese mother.
yến
swallow
ONE NIGHT, SHE PLACED a key on my kitchen counter while I was using tweezers to remove the minute impurities in the fine filaments of a swallow’s nest, making sure it was perfect without wasting a single drop of the soup. My husband had bought that precious find, which was traded for thousands of dollars a kilo, from a vendor of medicinal and Chinese herbs. He maintained that the swallows showed a patient and infinite love for their fledglings because they were the only birds that built their nests using only their saliva. And so to eat those nests would give us a better chance of becoming parents in turn. I didn’t have time to explain to Julie how rare that potion was because she insisted on dragging me towards the exit and had me put the key in the lock next door. And so our adventure began.
xích lô
rickshaw
JULIE HAD BROUGHT ARCHITECTS and decorators to turn the space into a culinary workshop. She had asked her husband, who often travelled to Asia on business, to look for a used bicycle-powered rickshaw in Vietnam, and he’d sent her one whose metal structure was partly rusted and whose saddle was bent out of shape by sweat. On the wall, she had mounted two long wooden panels engraved with two lines of Chinese characters that echoed each other, as was done at the entrance to old mandarin residences. She had ordered from Huế some conical hats adorned with poems inserted between the braided latania leaves and sixteen bamboo circles to be offered as gifts at the opening. At the back of the restaurant, she’d built a large bookcase. Cookbooks and photos were arranged on the shelves, standing at attention, obedient and upright as the children in the schoolyard who sang the national anthem every morning in front of the apartment where Maman and I had lived. Julie held my hand and walked me along the wall, preventing me from falling to my knees when I saw the last shelf, where she’d placed a row of novels of which I’d only ever read a page or two or sometimes a chapter, but never the whole book.
A great many books in French or English had been confiscated during the years of political chaos. We would never know the fate of those books, but some did survive, in pieces. We would never know what road whole pages had travelled, only to end up in the hands of merchants who used them to wrap bread, a catfish or a bunch of water spinach. No one could ever tell me why I’d been so lucky as to turn up those treasures buried under piles of yellowing newspapers. Maman told me that the pages were forbidden fruits fallen from heaven.
From these precious harvests, I had remembered the word lassitude from Bonjour tristesse, by Françoise Sagan; langueur from Verlaine; and pénitentiaire from Kafka. Maman had also explained the meaning of fiction with this sentence by Albert Camus in L’Étranger, for it was unthinkable to us that a woman could show desire: “In the evening, Marie came looking for me and asked if I wanted to marry her.” And then there was Marius; without knowing the beginning or the end of his story in Les Misérables, to me he was a hero because one time our monthly ration of a hundred grams of pork had been draped in these words: “Life, hardship, isolation, poverty, are battlefields that have their heroes: obscure heroes sometimes greater than the illustrious ones.”
tự điển
dictionary
THERE WERE MANY WORDS whose meaning Maman didn’t know. Luckily, we had ready access to a living dictionary. He was older than Maman. The neighbours thought he was crazy because every day he stood under the rose apple tree, where he recited words in French and their definitions. His dictionary, which he had held close to him throughout his childhood, had been confiscated, but he went on turning the pages in his head. I just h
ad to say a word to him through the fence that separated us and he would give me the definition. And one time, he had given me the rosiest of the rose apples from the bunch that hung just above his head when I gave him the verb to sniff.
“Sniff: to breathe in through the nose in order to smell. To sniff the air. The wind. The fog. To sniff the fruit! Sniff! Rose apple, in Guyana known also as love apple. Sniff!”
After that lesson, I never ate a love apple without first sniffing the glossy, fuchsia-pink skin, its innocent coolness nearly hypnotic. And it’s why I quite naturally chose that fruit out of the dozens of other exotic fruits made of plaster that Julie had arranged on a big plate in the middle of the reading table. I brought it to my nose and its sweetly fresh perfume seized me as if its white flesh were tender and real. Julie burst out laughing. “If you want to smell something real, come here.”
She opened the glass door of a big cupboard holding dozens of small glass bottles filled with spices: star anise, cloves, turmeric, coriander seeds, powdered galangal … The inevitable bottles of fish sauce were there too, along with vermicelli and rice wrappers.
For months, Julie toiled in the workshop non-stop, but also with me, on me. She persuaded me to organize a series of Vietnamese cooking lessons and tastings. I went along with her because her enthusiasm was irresistible.