by Kim Thuy
đòn gánh
the yoke
LA PALANCHE was a resounding success across the province, so much so that a producer suggested a television cooking show. I wanted to broaden the experiment we’d worked on with Philippe, so Julie invited chefs to revisit or to reinvent our Vietnamese recipes on screen, with me. These collaborations confirmed for us that mainly we were creating the same balance of tastes in the mouth but by using ingredients specific to each chef’s region. The osso bucco was brightened up by gremolata, while the lemongrass beef stew was served with pickled daikon for its slightly bitter taste. In traditional Québécois cuisine, beef meatballs are cooked in a brown sauce whose consistency and colour resembles the one based on soya and fermented black beans that garnishes grilled Vietnamese meatballs. In Louisiana, fish is coated in Cajun spices to blacken it, while the Vietnamese use lemongrass and minced garlic.
Of course, certain tastes have an exclusive identity and well-defined borders. For instance, none of the chefs I met knew what to do with the cartilage in chicken bones, while people in Bangkok go into ecstasies over those breaded lumps. It would be cruel of me to impose fermented shrimp paste, intensely mauve and aromatic, on my guest chefs, as it would be to feed them green guavas drenched in salt with very hot peppers. Salmon, however, grilled or fried, goes well with a salad of green mango and ginger. Like friends of long standing, fish sauce goes perfectly with maple syrup in a marinade for spareribs, while in a soup made with tamarind, tomatoes, pineapple and fish, celery is a worthy substitute for the stems of elephant ears. The two vegetables absorb the flavours and carry the broth into their porous flesh as submissively as a servant, at the same time as present as an aspirate h. Oddly enough, the leaf of the elephant ear, unlike its porous stem, could provide shelter from rain because it is impermeable, like the leaves of water lilies and lotus blossoms. Julie, charmed by the two facets of those plants, had a pond dug in the restaurant’s backyard for floating tropical flowers. As soon as the first bud appeared, Maman would recite a popular traditional song that every Vietnamese knows by heart:
Trong đầm gì đẹp bằng sen,
Lá xanh, bông trắng lại chen nhụy vàng,
Nhụy vàng, bông trắng, lá xanh,
Gần bùn mà chẳng hôi tanh mùi bùn.
What is lovelier than the lotus in the swamp,
Its green leaves compete with white petals, with yellow pistils,
Yellow pistils, white petals, green leaves,
Near to the mud but without its stench.
thơ
poem
WE PRINTED HUNDREDS OF copies of both versions of this poem to offer to our customers, who came to bask in the garden on canvas beach chairs. Students, often aspiring writers or poets, would meet on the patio under Maman’s giant squash plants, to write side by side, exchange one word for another, and reassure those who panicked over the blank page. Unobtrusively, in the privacy of that urban oasis, books were launched and texts regularly read by their authors on nights when the moon was full.
cao su
rubber
AT THE SAME TIME, La Palanche was winning over Paris, where many readers had a close relationship with Vietnam. For some it called to mind a grandfather who’d lived there at the time of French Indochina, others remembered an uncle or a distant cousin describing the plantations of “the wood that weeps,” the rubber tree that bled latex by the ton. Vietnamese revolutionaries had shattered the romantic image of hectares covered with lines of those tall, upright trees by lifting the curtain of mist that hid the sweat and the lowered heads of the coolies.
In the pale blue eyes of Francine, a reader I met at the Paris Salon du Livre, no architecture could compare with that of the Grall Hospital in Saigon, where her father, like a demigod, crossed the broad verandas that surrounded the patients’ rooms. He’d been the chief surgeon there but never had a chance to go back before he died. In spite of everything, Vietnam was in his heart until his final breath, because it was there he had abandoned the wet nurse who’d brought Francine up for eight years and the handicapped children from the orphanage he’d built like a nest, like a challenge to fate. He had battled human tragedy by making children believe that Santa Claus existed and that he was so eager to give them their presents, he’d forgotten to exchange his velvet outfit for something more tropical.
Francine had grown up among them, an older sister to the youngest and a little sister to the bigger ones. She helped feed the small children, patiently holding spoonfuls of rice, and others had taught her how to count on the Chinese abacus. At nap time, her mother played the piano to lull them to sleep. In return, the orphanage staff sang traditional nursery rhymes to put Francine’s little brother, Luc, to sleep while their mother baked cakes to celebrate Twelfth Night or the arrival of a child. When the South lost the war against the North and tanks entered the city, Francine’s family had boarded the last plane leaving Saigon, with no time to drop by the orphanage. After that, no one could come to terms with the hasty, forced departure except Luc, who was only thirteen months old at the time and did not remember that in the past he also answered to the name Lực, the “strong and all-powerful” little man in his Vietnamese circles.
nhà hàng
restaurant
FRANCINE WAITED UNTIL the Salon closed to invite me to Luc’s restaurant. The address was one of those mythic places that have come through history, including the Second World War, when floors were painted black to conceal the mosaics from the eyes of Nazi soldiers. Saigon too had survived various cataclysms, human nature’s specialty. I confirmed to her that the city had changed a lot, that some streets even had new names. The former rue Catinat, with its luxury boutiques, had become Đồng Khởi (Revolutionary Movement), and the Café Givral, where thin slices of cantaloupe were sold for high prices, had been demolished to make room for a modern building with coloured neon lights and multi-level parking.
However, I also reassured her: the Hôtel Caravelle had kept its name, the Notre-Dame church still stood out in the heart of downtown Saigon—motorcycles drove around it at every hour and at insane speeds—and she would recognize the many roundabouts, including the one at the Bến Thành Market. I made a basic map of the fifteen hundred stands overloaded with candied fruits, shoes, dried octopus, fresh vermicelli, rows of fabric. Just as in her memory, merchants still defend every square centimetre available in the narrow, bustling aisles, deafening but so alive. The two of us were immersed in nostalgia, so enamoured of our own memories of the place that Luc’s arrival at the table made us jump.
“I’ve read your book,” he told me, holding my hand for too long.
bàn tay
hand
THE MISTAKE FOLLOWED FROM that second-too-long when my fingerprints had time to become imbued with his. Could I have done otherwise? I had the hand of a child and his was a man’s, with a pianist’s fingers, long and enveloping, whose grip commands and reassures. If my jaw had not been locked and my arms linked, I might have quoted these lines by Rumi that had suddenly appeared in my head:
A fine hanging apple
in love with your stone,
the perfect throw that clips my stem.
Julie had chosen those lines for the invitation to an orchard picnic with her circle of adoptive parents. I’d copied the words onto ivory paper thirty times or so, dipping my pen in an inkwell as I’d done when I was little. I searched for a long time before I found the mauve of my childhood, the mauve of every Vietnamese student during the best years of our lives. In hard times, we would write the first draft in pencil, the second in ink, in order to reuse the notebook. We were graded as much on form as on content, because calligraphy translated idea and intention as well as respect. All those years of training when I had a mauve ink stain on my fingers had left me with fine and steady handwriting that I like to use now and then so I won’t lose flexibility in the downstrokes and lightness in the upstrokes. So I memorized those words and the precise image of the apple that has
come away from the branch at the shock of a stone against the stem. The blotter that absorbed excess ink sometimes depicted, accidentally, the shape of the apple or the apple tree but never that of the stone or the throw. I was far, then, from imagining that one day I would feel like that apple caught up by a hand in the middle of its fall.
cẩm thạch
jade
I DIDN’T SLEEP AT ALL that night because, on the ceiling, a film of the minutes I’d spent in Luc’s presence ran over and over in a loop, sequence by sequence, each shot frozen in a still. I needed to know exactly what had sucked me in and projected me into that state of weightlessness. In my mind I re-examined each of the tessera in the Briare enamels that decorated the bar with a lush landscape, where morning glories were entangled with climbing roses. Was it the naive pink plumage of the cockatoos in the midst of the leaves in the mosaic that had intoxicated me? Or was it the shininess of the copper pan the server was using to prepare the crepe Suzette that had dazzled me? Or the jade green of Luc’s eyes?
Colours, like numbers, come to me first in Vietnamese. Moreover, we are not in the habit of distinguishing people by the shade of their hair or the colour of their eyes since Asians have just one tone: from very dark brown to ebony. So I had to keep revisiting the image of his face in close-up to identify the exact colour of his eyes, because blue and green are designated by one word in my mind: xanh. His xanh represented not blue, then, but green, the green of the waters of Hạ Long Bay or a dark and aged jade green, that of bracelets women wore for decades. It was said that the tones of jade become more intense with the years, that the tender pistachio green grows deeper until it is the shade of a young olive or even an avocado, if the skin of the wrist can give it a patina. The closer the tints are to lichen, fir, bottle green, the greater the value of the bracelet. At times, then, the mistress of the house would ask the maid to help her age the bracelets by wearing them on her arms. The fragile appearance of jade forces movements to slow down, imposing elegance on gestures even when the hands are chapped or darkened by coal.
Probably that is why Maman put a jade bracelet on me when I was still very young. At the time, I didn’t need to soap my hand or to squeeze my palm as do most women who choose to wear the stone, which some people claim is more precious than diamonds. Today, it surrounds my wrist without slipping because the bone has grown to fill the entire rigid circle. Barring some exceptional circumstance, that bracelet will follow me to my final destination. In the meantime, it is my aide-mémoire because it doesn’t absorb the heat of flames and is never scratched. It reminds me to be solid and, above all, smooth.
yêu
love
I HELD THE BRACELET tightly like a lifeline during my sleepless night, because I was dizzy at having accepted Luc’s invitation to see him the next day and also to hear him play clarinet that same evening, without hesitation, without Francine, without fear. I followed his voice just as my grandfather had followed the traces of my grandmother, two people who had never known me.
Maman told me that this father, who sounded strict, had asked to be buried with a ceramic jar that he kept with great care in his cupboard. It contained some earth he’d taken from the footsteps of his wife the first time he’d seen her. He had used a leaf of a plane tree to take the entire print in one go. His hands were shaking because he had come close to never finding her. A soccer match that had gone overtime made him miss the first appointment, arranged by the matchmaker. He had arrived an hour late to a closed door and some deeply offended people. He had left with no regrets, until the moment when he saw my grandmother’s conical hat cross the barnyard. It was a hat like any other, the kind worn indiscriminately by women and men of all ages: ivory, slightly worn, the summit pointing skyward. Yet the strip of cloth on hers, which went under her chin to keep it in place, had ties that hung down on either side. These strips seemed to react differently to the wind, which rendered the hat remarkable and her, his future wife, unique.
In my case, it was Luc’s hand straightening Francine’s collar over her scarf when he came to say hello. It was his twisted face on stage and his bursts of laughter with his musician friends in the light of bare bulbs. Or maybe it was nothing in particular.
thang
staircase
LUC HAD CLIMBED the four floors two steps at a time and arrived at my door instead of being announced by the hotel’s reception desk. That morning, he had texted me: “Do you know the word apprehension?” I didn’t know the meaning of the word and didn’t know that I was already inhabiting it.
There are words whose meaning I try to deduce from how they sound, like colossal, disconnect, apostil, others by texture, smell, shape. To grasp the nuances between two related words, to distinguish melancholy from grief, for example, I weigh each one. When I hold them in my hands, one seems to hang like grey smoke while the other is compressed into a ball of steel. I guess and I grope and the answer is as often the right one as the wrong. I constantly make mistakes, and until now the most surprising had to do with the French word rebelle, which I thought was a derivative of belle: to be belle again, because beauty is acquired and then lost. Maman often told me that in case of conflict, it’s better to hold back than to insult someone, even if that person is the one at fault. If we taint the other, we soil our mouth, because we must first fill it with anger, blood, venom. Starting then, we are no longer beautiful. I thought that the re in the word rebelle opened the possibility of a redemption, the one that would let us regain our beauty from before.
I was often wrong, so that time I dared not guess the meaning of the word apprehension. I only felt fear when I opened the door to my room.
mặt trăng
moon
HE STOOD IN THE hotel corridor for several breaths before he knocked. In one hand he was holding a coat and in the other, two helmets. Still today I try to remember his first words, in vain; at that precise moment, I was probably somewhere else, maybe on the moon. Vietnamese mothers tell children that a woodcutter lives there, sitting under a banyan tree, playing a flute to entertain the moon fairy. Chinese women show the shadows that form the silhouette of a rabbit preparing the recipe for immortality; Japanese women sew for their daughters hagoromo, feathered robes like those worn by the fairy who has departed the Earth for the Moon, leaving behind her a besotted emperor. He asked his army to take him to the summit of the highest mountain so that he could be closer to her.
Luc took me into those fairy tales by covering me with his down coat, its sleeves coming down to my knees. “I beg you, please don’t protest,” he said, bending down to do up the zipper. I locked the door behind us with the vertigo of an astronaut. I’d read that they sometimes suffer from vertigo in space because they lose the notion of up and down. Worse than that, I had also lost left and right.
thoát
freed
I CLIMBED AWKWARDLY ONTO the scooter behind him and we drove across Paris to his mother’s residence. She wasn’t expecting us. She no longer expected anyone. She didn’t sing now and didn’t care about the person she saw in the mirror. I wondered if she was approaching the state of nirvana, where the soul quietly leaves the body, free of all desire, insensitive to all suffering. Just as Luc was asking me if I was frightened, she placed her hand on my head and started to stroke my hair, slowly, constantly. All around, the walls were covered with photos, including one of her in a bright red T-shirt with a royal blue heart on the chest, sitting at the piano with, in the background, dozing children temporarily freed of their lame bodies.
mồ côi
orphan
HER HANDS WERE WEAK NOW, but they still expressed so much gentleness, perhaps because her gnarled fingers had written hundreds of letters to her orphans, never discouraged though she had yet to receive a reply. All through his childhood, Luc had to share his mother with those ghosts that haunted her. At first, she stopped every Vietnamese woman she ran into on the streets of Paris to ask if she knew the orphanage. If by misfortune the person had lived in
the same district, she would be invited over and asked a thousand questions. One day, a lady had told her that the house had been confiscated and redistributed to five families. The children had been chased away when the property was first being divided. Before the lady could describe the silence that reigned in the neighbourhood during the operation, Luc’s mother had stood up from the table. As of that day, she had refused to speak to any Vietnamese, for fear of encountering another one who would confirm the dark destiny of the children. She had also kept Francine and Luc away from possible contact with them.
cá kho
caramelized fish
FRANCINE CAME TO ME excitedly, like a little girl disobeying an outmoded and emotionally restrictive prohibition unjustly imposed by her mother. The week before we first met, in the window of her local bookstore, the cover photo of La Palanche—a terracotta bowl half sunk in embers and containing a caramelized fish steak—had moved her to tears. The aroma of fish sauce had struck her as if she were still standing in the kitchenette of the orphanage just as the cook was pouring some into the piping hot mixture of sugar, onion and garlic. That same day, Francine had given the book to Luc. Like her, he had smelled immediately that violent and inimitable aroma that their mother preferred to any other. She fixed that dish at least once a month, with blanched cabbage or sliced cucumbers and steamed rice. As soon as he was able, Luc escaped from the house when cá kho tộ was being prepared. He didn’t know which he hated more, the smell of cooked nước mắm or the atmosphere surrounding this dish that was so heavy with obsession and dependence.