A typical phrasebook, useless as they often are*, will tell you that "cam on" (usually written without diacritic marks) means thank you in Vietnamese. It's okay when you're a foreigner and you come out with "Kam Awn," folks in Vietnam will understand what you're trying to say, even though it doesn't sound anything like the actual Vietnamese phrase. Any phrasebook worth the ink on its pages will at least give you a semblance of the pronunciation. The mouth forms a phrase that sounds more like "gham euhn," which is closer. But without the diacritics, or knowing how to pronounce the proper tone, it's still not going to sound right.
The first word has two different tonal pronunciations. The first is cảm, with a questioning tone. The second is cám, and the voice lifts with a rising tone. I can't get a good explanation for when to use either one, and my resident translators can't say. Wiktionary is no help either. But I found a text that lets me hazard a guess. Cảm ơn stands alone, while cám ơn is used with further words, such as kinship terms, according to the phrasebook Hoàng Yến Tiếng Việt. Take this explanation with a grain of salt.
Either way it's pronounced, the Vietnamese word for thank you seems to be a loan word from Chinese, according to Wiktionary. Both cảm ơn and cám ơn are based on the characters 感恩, which together mean something akin to a feeling of mercy or charity. Whether the Vietnamese word for thank you is a loan word or not, there is one thing I know for sure. I've heard from three sources that the Vietnamese rarely ever say thank you. Instead, gratitude is implied through the choice of words. It's the same as in English, in which a person can express thanks without saying it.
My sources also tell me that the words for thank you are used rarely because they express the deepest and most sincere appreciation. Just think in terms of a debt. When you're indebted to someone for a deed they've done for you, you're obliged to pay them back. The Vietnamese expression for being indebted is "mang ơn," which means to carry a debt to be repaid. When you say "cảm ơn" to someone, you're expressing that you're carrying an emotional debt, a debt that can never be repaid. This is the magnitude of the Vietnamese expression of thanks.
This magnitude is an aspect of thank you that phrase books always seem to leave out. Instead, the books encourage foreigners and tourists to throw the word thank you around like it was meaningless. Thank you for the fast food. Thank you for bus ride. Thank you for giving me the receipt for the groceries I paid for. The word seems trite and commonplace with overuse. The Vietnamese seem to understand this, and so reserve the word for the most special occasions. The locals seem to accept our tendency for overuse. They will even say it to us because they realize we expect to hear it.
It's not that the Vietnamese never say thank you. They place such an extensive emphasis on it that if you ever heard it said you would know the enormous emotion that was there. This emphasis made me wonder about my own use of the phrase. I wonder, how do you state true gratitude if the words are the same ones you would say to the bus driver when hopping off the bus? I throw the word thanks around a lot. I wonder if it's maybe too much. I wonder if thank you, like sorry, loses its meaning if spoken out of reflex and not from the heart. This amazing lesson is one of the ways my trip here has changed me for the better, by helping me understand how to be truly grateful.
* Before I came to Vietnam, I thought I would need a phrasebook to help me get by on my own. While browsing the local quirky used bookstore, I found one--a knock-off version of a popular brand of pocketsize phrasebooks. I flipped it open, and couldn't believe what I saw. It was a list of phrases one would need when buying or selling narcotics. Select phrases included "do you have any clean syringes for sale?" and "this is for personal use," and "I'm having an overdose." The funny thing is, none of the phrases were written in tones, which means you'd probably never be understood. Good luck getting poison control to take care of your OD when you're saying "These shoes don't fit like last year."
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Friday, July 22, 2011
Cute Cannibal
Xuxifarm's mascot is quite the Happy HannibalThursday, July 21, 2011
Return from Vĩnh Long
We had slept at Lữ's cousins' house on our last night in Vĩnh Long. In the morning, I noticed that the countryside sun seems to rise earlier than in the city. A hundred miles away in Saigon, the streets lay quiet in the still shade cast by tall buildings. Yet in Vĩnh Long the sun was already high in the sky and the world was vibrant and alive. The sun shone down on palm leaf-thatched houses and fruit orchards, and caused the chalky-brown river to sparkle. Neighbors gathered to gossip around the vegetable cart in the lane between the houses and the river bank. A flat barge covered in a blue tarp chugged downstream. Standing in the center of the barge, a little girl in a pink shirt and capris stretched her arms over her head and waved to the world.
The sun hid behind the clouds. Somewhere in the distance, three white, waggle-tailed ducks waddled their way into a lush paddy. Mudskippers, with googly, frog-like eyes, poked their heads from their bankside holes and skipped across the surface of the water in the irrigation ditches in the orchard. The wind carried signs of rain, and soon the world was awash in curtains of water that beat down on tin roofs like billions of angry feet. Almost as soon as it began, the rain let up, and the sun shone again on the glistening verdant countryside.
We said our goodbyes to Lữ's cousins, hopped on scooters, and sped off to Dì Tư's house. There, we had left some belongings that we needed to pick up before we left. And Dì Tư had some fruit for us to take back with us. Mike and Lữ groaned. We'd have to carry the fruit by hand from shuttle to bus to shuttle to taxi and then up the two flights of stairs home. How bad could that be? I thought to myself, it's just a little fruit. Just a little fruit turned out to be two-dozen coconuts, a jackfruit the size of a five-gallon bucket, and a burlap sack full of pomelo, longyans, limes, green-skinned oranges, and the 25 pounds of rambutan we had picked from the orchard. We stacked it all on the side of the road in front of Dì Tư's house, waited for the shuttle to the bus station, and wondered, how are we going to eat all this fruit before it spoils?
The shuttle pulled up, and through the window the passengers gawked at our pile. The seven passenger van was already carrying eleven people, so the matter was not only the fruit, it was the question of how we were all going to fit. We found a way, and within a few miles, squeezed an additional two people into the van. We were packed in like clowns. The driver passed Lữ our bus tickets, and the man next to me said he overheard her name and was related to her family somehow. He was a tiny man, with receding gums and ears that stuck out at ninety-degree angles. He, Mike, and Lữ held a brief conversation that petered out shortly after the man said he had fought with the Việt cộng during the war. I spent the rest of the trip with my camera behind my head, trying and failing to capture a picture of the 15 people squished into this 7-passenger van.
Our fruit bounty,
all we could carryWe got to the bus station. Mike and I unloaded our mammoth stock of groceries. The man who said he was related to Lữ joined us to grab his own bags. Mike smiled at him and cracked a joke about the imperialist Americans. The man laughed, dug into his satchel, and fished out two mangoes that he handed to us before he left. Not that we needed any more fruit. When we finally got home, we piled it all high on the table to marvel at what we were faced with consuming. Five days later, we still have a large bowl of rambutan, eleven coconuts, four pomelo, enough limes to make a pint of juice, and one of the mangoes. The fruit is a delicious reminder of our time in Vĩnh Long. It was nice to bring home a piece of the countryside--as much of a piece as we could carry.
The sun hid behind the clouds. Somewhere in the distance, three white, waggle-tailed ducks waddled their way into a lush paddy. Mudskippers, with googly, frog-like eyes, poked their heads from their bankside holes and skipped across the surface of the water in the irrigation ditches in the orchard. The wind carried signs of rain, and soon the world was awash in curtains of water that beat down on tin roofs like billions of angry feet. Almost as soon as it began, the rain let up, and the sun shone again on the glistening verdant countryside.
We said our goodbyes to Lữ's cousins, hopped on scooters, and sped off to Dì Tư's house. There, we had left some belongings that we needed to pick up before we left. And Dì Tư had some fruit for us to take back with us. Mike and Lữ groaned. We'd have to carry the fruit by hand from shuttle to bus to shuttle to taxi and then up the two flights of stairs home. How bad could that be? I thought to myself, it's just a little fruit. Just a little fruit turned out to be two-dozen coconuts, a jackfruit the size of a five-gallon bucket, and a burlap sack full of pomelo, longyans, limes, green-skinned oranges, and the 25 pounds of rambutan we had picked from the orchard. We stacked it all on the side of the road in front of Dì Tư's house, waited for the shuttle to the bus station, and wondered, how are we going to eat all this fruit before it spoils?
The shuttle pulled up, and through the window the passengers gawked at our pile. The seven passenger van was already carrying eleven people, so the matter was not only the fruit, it was the question of how we were all going to fit. We found a way, and within a few miles, squeezed an additional two people into the van. We were packed in like clowns. The driver passed Lữ our bus tickets, and the man next to me said he overheard her name and was related to her family somehow. He was a tiny man, with receding gums and ears that stuck out at ninety-degree angles. He, Mike, and Lữ held a brief conversation that petered out shortly after the man said he had fought with the Việt cộng during the war. I spent the rest of the trip with my camera behind my head, trying and failing to capture a picture of the 15 people squished into this 7-passenger van.
Our fruit bounty,all we could carry
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Coconut Cracking
A coco-nundrum:what's the best way to get into a coconut and still conserve an attractive serving container worthy of a tropical beach tiki-bar?
There are many ways of getting into a coconut, and the following method is not the fastest or most efficient. However, this approach produces a special presentation. The husk becomes a table-ready container. The aperture is wide, so you can add ice cubes or dig around with a spoon to gather the delicious meat contained therein. The product is the iconic coconut served at tiki-bars, still in its husk, and adorned with swizzle sticks, pineapple wedges, and little paper umbrellas. Here is how it's done:
Stem-side goes down.
To cut a flat bottom, make a horizontal hack near the stem.
Twist the blade to pry the husk away from the nut.
Continue to remove the husk until the bottom is flat.
Repeat the process on the other side. Make shallow cuts to avoid breaking the hard inner nut.
Shave the husk to expose the crown of the inner nut.
Give a deft whack along the edge of the crown. Turn the coconut and whack the opposite side. Repeat as needed.
Once the crown breaks, pry the broken piece away from the nut, insert a straw, ice, pineapple juice, lime, etc., and enjoy.Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Chôm Chôm - Rambutan
Clusters of rambutan fruitIn the morning after we arrived in Vĩnh Long, Dì Tư took us for a walk to the rambutan orchard near her house. But first, we had to cross the river to get to a river island where the orchard is. We made our way to the dock for a ferry that shuttles people back and forth. The ferry pulled in, the metal ferry gangplank slid up the concrete dock, and we boarded. The ferry backed out from the dock, turned around, and chugged through the malty-brown water for the island. The current was strong, and the ferry aimed far upstream to compensate. We got to the other side and disembarked. After meeting a friend of Dì Tư, we took to the sidewalk for the orchard.
On the way we passed a cornucopia of fruits hanging from trees: enormous jackfruit, globular pomelo, green-skinned oranges, clusters of longyans, various types of bananas, and coconuts at the tops of palm trees. Tunnels dug beneath the sidewalk channel water from the river into canals between the fruit trees. The verdant quality of the forest is matched by its productivity. It's hard to imagine anyone going for want of food in the delta.
The bamboo toolSince we've been home, we've been slowly making a dent in our harvest. We've been eating it every day, and have given away grocery bags brimming with rambutan to more than four people, and we still have enough to fill up a kitchen sink. Also we found out, during one of Lữ's trips around Vietnam, that the seed of the rambutan is edible. Not only is it edible, it's really tasty, with the consistency of a giant fresh unroasted peanut, and the flavor of coconut. And tonight, Lữ made chè with rambutan, jackfruit, dragonfruit, avocado, yogurt and condensed milk over ice. It was divine. I'm not sure we'll get tired of the rambutan before we run out, but I'm happy to find out.
Drained
Every once in a while, I catch myself writing about writing, which is unfortunate, because the purpose of this blog is to write about travel. But I haven't written much about travel the last couple days--or anything for that matter--despite the incredible trip I went on this weekend. In a strange turn, I find myself writing about, well, not writing.
The lapse is not for want of ideas. This weekend inspired several topics for riffing. But I faced trouble with technology mid-trip. Blogging for me is not a simple process that requires a single piece of hardware. To make my posts visually appealing, I like to bury thumbnail-sized preview images in the text. This fastidious method demands a multi-step process that requires a proper internet browser. All I brought with me on the trip was the phone, and it doesn't make the grade.
Before the trip to Thailand, I had solved the line break problem, which was caused by posting through email, by using an HTML email client to eliminate character limits. But still, using the phone caused me a slew of hangups. Email doesn't seem capable of labeling posts or adding large, hyperlinked photos. Also, I can't caption more than one photo per post, and the images show up small. A simple workaround to these problems would have been to log onto the blog's dashboard through the phone's browser and encode the images through HTML. But this workaround requires the image URL, and the feeble little browser on the phone won't let me get at it. No matter what, a laptop is required equipment. Leaving mine at home made no difference. Even if I had brought it, I need internet access with the laptop to get the URL's. We had no wi-fi in the countryside places where we stayed, and I deleted my tethering application sometime during one of many software resets on that brick of a phone.
Another setback to posting over the weekend in Vĩnh Long was the lamentable lack of batteries. I could have spent more time at least taking notes and drafting outlines if I wasn't worried about running out. The phone is good for short posts, but longer ones burn up power, and I have a tendency to spend four or five hours alone just writing a single post, not including the time-consuming challenge of coding pics.
Besides blogging, I need batteries because the phone is my link to the outside world, a way for me to contact Mike or Lữ if I get lost, a camera, and a Vietnamese-English dictionary. I need battery power, and I run out quickly and often. What's worse, I didn't bring a portable charger this weekend.
To get me through, I leeched battery top-ups from Lữ's computer. But she didn't bring her charger either, and it wasn't right of me to sap her battery when she needed it too. I held off on nicking a recharge until she'd used as much power as needed to share her beautiful photos to her little cousins.
I learned something about myself in those moments when I was low on batteries. I felt a bit like I was stranded on a lifeboat at sea, and the red, blinking power meter was a steadily dwindling supply of drinking water. I can imagine that people adrift on meagerly-stocked lifeboats tend to reevaluate priorities. I realized I'm beginning to get a little technology dependent. Once, I thought any kind of dependency was a bad thing, a limitation, a liability. There's too much we're dependent on as it is; just look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the pyramid describing growth toward self-actualization.
Though the phone, the battery is linked to various levels of the pyramid. I looked down at the blinking red light asked myself, what do I do when the phone dies? How can I manage if I can't take pictures of my travels? Or look up a bus route? Or translate, "I'm lost, could you help me find my way?" How would I get by without immediate access to the omniscient modern day oracle, Google, for song lyrics, engine schematics, and snakebite remedies? And how on Earth did people ever manage once upon a time without the internet, without the cell phone, without being perpetually plugged in with one another? I can't remember. And I don't think I'd want to go back to those liberated times, when there wasn't so much need for a battery.
I find my own psychological batteries are a little drained at the thought of catching up all the stories from the weekend. This trip was a cartwheeling escapade of experience: country living, scenic beauty, natural splendor, exceptional hospitality, and incredible food. All of it deserves riffing. I suppose if I had enough batteries in my phone to post just a few paragraphs each day over the weekend, at the very least I would have less to catch up on now. At least I've got a wall outlet and stories to tell. And I have a feeling, once I'm all caught up, my own batteries will be more or less recharged. Lesson learned. Have charger, will blog.
The lapse is not for want of ideas. This weekend inspired several topics for riffing. But I faced trouble with technology mid-trip. Blogging for me is not a simple process that requires a single piece of hardware. To make my posts visually appealing, I like to bury thumbnail-sized preview images in the text. This fastidious method demands a multi-step process that requires a proper internet browser. All I brought with me on the trip was the phone, and it doesn't make the grade.
Before the trip to Thailand, I had solved the line break problem, which was caused by posting through email, by using an HTML email client to eliminate character limits. But still, using the phone caused me a slew of hangups. Email doesn't seem capable of labeling posts or adding large, hyperlinked photos. Also, I can't caption more than one photo per post, and the images show up small. A simple workaround to these problems would have been to log onto the blog's dashboard through the phone's browser and encode the images through HTML. But this workaround requires the image URL, and the feeble little browser on the phone won't let me get at it. No matter what, a laptop is required equipment. Leaving mine at home made no difference. Even if I had brought it, I need internet access with the laptop to get the URL's. We had no wi-fi in the countryside places where we stayed, and I deleted my tethering application sometime during one of many software resets on that brick of a phone.
Another setback to posting over the weekend in Vĩnh Long was the lamentable lack of batteries. I could have spent more time at least taking notes and drafting outlines if I wasn't worried about running out. The phone is good for short posts, but longer ones burn up power, and I have a tendency to spend four or five hours alone just writing a single post, not including the time-consuming challenge of coding pics.
Besides blogging, I need batteries because the phone is my link to the outside world, a way for me to contact Mike or Lữ if I get lost, a camera, and a Vietnamese-English dictionary. I need battery power, and I run out quickly and often. What's worse, I didn't bring a portable charger this weekend.
To get me through, I leeched battery top-ups from Lữ's computer. But she didn't bring her charger either, and it wasn't right of me to sap her battery when she needed it too. I held off on nicking a recharge until she'd used as much power as needed to share her beautiful photos to her little cousins.
I learned something about myself in those moments when I was low on batteries. I felt a bit like I was stranded on a lifeboat at sea, and the red, blinking power meter was a steadily dwindling supply of drinking water. I can imagine that people adrift on meagerly-stocked lifeboats tend to reevaluate priorities. I realized I'm beginning to get a little technology dependent. Once, I thought any kind of dependency was a bad thing, a limitation, a liability. There's too much we're dependent on as it is; just look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the pyramid describing growth toward self-actualization.
Though the phone, the battery is linked to various levels of the pyramid. I looked down at the blinking red light asked myself, what do I do when the phone dies? How can I manage if I can't take pictures of my travels? Or look up a bus route? Or translate, "I'm lost, could you help me find my way?" How would I get by without immediate access to the omniscient modern day oracle, Google, for song lyrics, engine schematics, and snakebite remedies? And how on Earth did people ever manage once upon a time without the internet, without the cell phone, without being perpetually plugged in with one another? I can't remember. And I don't think I'd want to go back to those liberated times, when there wasn't so much need for a battery.
I find my own psychological batteries are a little drained at the thought of catching up all the stories from the weekend. This trip was a cartwheeling escapade of experience: country living, scenic beauty, natural splendor, exceptional hospitality, and incredible food. All of it deserves riffing. I suppose if I had enough batteries in my phone to post just a few paragraphs each day over the weekend, at the very least I would have less to catch up on now. At least I've got a wall outlet and stories to tell. And I have a feeling, once I'm all caught up, my own batteries will be more or less recharged. Lesson learned. Have charger, will blog.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Arrival in Vĩnh Long
On Friday, we took a trip to Vĩnh Long to pay a visit with Lữ's aunt and cousins. The ride into the Mekong Delta took four hours, but went by quickly, in part because we transferred from mode to mode of transportation. We started off in a taxi, which scuttled through Saigon's crowded streets to the bus ticket office. Our $4.50 tickets in hand, we boarded a mini-bus headed for the Saigon bus station, waited a while, then hopped on a touring bus.
The view through the bus window presented images of tin-roof shacks built side by side along the banks of malted milk-colored rivers, thatch-roof cafes with woven hammocks swinging in the shade, fruit stands with cultivated varietals of bananas and coconuts, as well as rice paddies, lotus ponds, and miles of flat land. I said it looked as flat as Kansas, and Mike said there's nothing in the universe that's that flat.
We got to Vĩnh Long after dark, with a final transfer to a shuttle bus that whisked us through the darkness along a narrow two-lane road, past silhouettes of palm trees, gated walls, and houses with vast front doors opening into living rooms with brightly lit, incense-smoky altars facing the entrances. Our shuttle stopped and unloaded us into the heavy tropical night air. Travel-weary and loaded down with gifts, we trudged along the road's shoulder, lit by pools of light that splashed from headlamps of scooters and trucks that honked and whooshed past.
We got to the locked iron gate in front of the house. Lữ's aunt, Dì Tư, is the third child; her short name means fourth aunt on her mom's side. Lữ called through the gate and her aunt rushed from the house so excited to see us that she forgot her slippers and ran barefoot across the courtyard to unlock the gate. She whisked us out of the dark and into her one story concrete house.
The home was light and airy. All the doors and windows were open, including a metal door the length of the living room wall, where geckos stalked moths drawn to the fluorescent light on the wall. Pencil-scrawled artwork by Dì Tư's grandchildren adorned the yellow-painted walls at waist height. Dì Tư's husband sat on the patio beyond the giant metal door, smoked cigarettes, and talked in a husky voice about how he helped prepare funeral honors for U.S. soldiers killed in the war. Dì Tư talked with Lữ, who told me that her aunt's heart was heavy because I'm so skinny. She added that we would be eating dinner soon, and that Dì Tư had saved some coconuts from her tree because she heard I love them. Outside, fireflies blinked in the darkness, and the full moon crawled into view through coconut palm leaves.
On full moons and new moons, many Buddhist Vietnamese avoid eating meat all day. Lữ had called ahead and asked Dì Tư if she would prepare us a chay meal. We sat down at a metal table in the kitchen, and pushed aside an enormous basket brimming with mangosteen and rambutan to the edge of the table. Dì Tư placed three whole green coconuts pierced with straws on the table, followed by plate after plate of food: chewy mushroom jerky strips, stewed bitter melon, pickled mustard greens, mushrooms and root vegetables in gravy, grilled tofu, and shredded papaya and pomelo rind wrapped and cooked in a banana leaf. We tucked in for a marathon of eating.
As we feasted, Dì Tư, Mike and Lữ chattered in Vietnamese. Dì Tư sat across from me, and occasionally made a gesture in my direction or patted the table in front of me. Mike or Lữ responded and then translated. "She says you have a kind appearance." I nodded deeply and gratefully, my mouth full of rice and chay. Dì Tư continued, pointing at Mike and then back at me. "She says you look more kind than your brother." I looked over at Mike, whose smile made him seem all the more mature and reserved. "She says Mike looks intelligent, and you look kind." Well, you can't have everything. That was one of those moments when I wished I was better at laughing at myself.
Having never met me before, Dì Tư barraged me with questions. Through the family grapevine, she knew I wasn't married, and wanted to know if I had a girlfriend. My translators said "no." She said, that's why he's so skinny. Why doesn't he have a girlfriend? I couldn't answer. "He's always been passive when it comes to girls," Mike suggested. Does he want a Vietnamese wife? "He says no."
Dì Tư leaned toward me, swatted at me with her fingertips, pointed at me and spoke at length. You need to find a wife, because she will feed you and make sure you get a haircut and a shave. I asked, "why do people think that men are so in need of girlfriends?" Because men can't take care of themselves, was her response.
I, the skinny, shaggy-haired, and scruffy-faced one, sat on her kitchen chair and looked at the bowl in my hands. I had already refilled it twice and filled it another two times before dinner was over. I was still shoveling food into my face long after Mike and Lữ had moved on to the mangosteens and rambutan. I realized that if I ever had a Vietnamese wife, my rapid metabolism would commit her to a lifetime of scrutiny by people who doubt her ability to cook.
Yet Dì Tư looked happy as a cat as I methodically and rhythmically teased bite after bite of delicious chay cooking into my mouth. She said, he is an easy eater. "It means you'll eat anything," Lữ said. To which she added, "it'd be nice if you would actually gain some weight. She's saying it's my fault you're so skinny."
I appreciated the fact that no one was trying to get me married off, but felt a little sorry for my unkempt and malnourished appearance. We followed up dinner with sugary-sweet longyans, gigantic rambutans, and many mangosteens. After dinner, we took bucket showers and dropped mosquito nets over our beds. Dì Tư and her husband laid out a mattress in the kitchen so I could have my own room. I made plans with Mike to drop by the market for a haircut and a shave in the morning before we went off to meet Lữ's cousins on the other side of Vĩnh Long. And, silently, I pledged a belly-building diet of bacon and steroids.
The view through the bus window presented images of tin-roof shacks built side by side along the banks of malted milk-colored rivers, thatch-roof cafes with woven hammocks swinging in the shade, fruit stands with cultivated varietals of bananas and coconuts, as well as rice paddies, lotus ponds, and miles of flat land. I said it looked as flat as Kansas, and Mike said there's nothing in the universe that's that flat.
We got to Vĩnh Long after dark, with a final transfer to a shuttle bus that whisked us through the darkness along a narrow two-lane road, past silhouettes of palm trees, gated walls, and houses with vast front doors opening into living rooms with brightly lit, incense-smoky altars facing the entrances. Our shuttle stopped and unloaded us into the heavy tropical night air. Travel-weary and loaded down with gifts, we trudged along the road's shoulder, lit by pools of light that splashed from headlamps of scooters and trucks that honked and whooshed past.
We got to the locked iron gate in front of the house. Lữ's aunt, Dì Tư, is the third child; her short name means fourth aunt on her mom's side. Lữ called through the gate and her aunt rushed from the house so excited to see us that she forgot her slippers and ran barefoot across the courtyard to unlock the gate. She whisked us out of the dark and into her one story concrete house.
The home was light and airy. All the doors and windows were open, including a metal door the length of the living room wall, where geckos stalked moths drawn to the fluorescent light on the wall. Pencil-scrawled artwork by Dì Tư's grandchildren adorned the yellow-painted walls at waist height. Dì Tư's husband sat on the patio beyond the giant metal door, smoked cigarettes, and talked in a husky voice about how he helped prepare funeral honors for U.S. soldiers killed in the war. Dì Tư talked with Lữ, who told me that her aunt's heart was heavy because I'm so skinny. She added that we would be eating dinner soon, and that Dì Tư had saved some coconuts from her tree because she heard I love them. Outside, fireflies blinked in the darkness, and the full moon crawled into view through coconut palm leaves.
On full moons and new moons, many Buddhist Vietnamese avoid eating meat all day. Lữ had called ahead and asked Dì Tư if she would prepare us a chay meal. We sat down at a metal table in the kitchen, and pushed aside an enormous basket brimming with mangosteen and rambutan to the edge of the table. Dì Tư placed three whole green coconuts pierced with straws on the table, followed by plate after plate of food: chewy mushroom jerky strips, stewed bitter melon, pickled mustard greens, mushrooms and root vegetables in gravy, grilled tofu, and shredded papaya and pomelo rind wrapped and cooked in a banana leaf. We tucked in for a marathon of eating.
As we feasted, Dì Tư, Mike and Lữ chattered in Vietnamese. Dì Tư sat across from me, and occasionally made a gesture in my direction or patted the table in front of me. Mike or Lữ responded and then translated. "She says you have a kind appearance." I nodded deeply and gratefully, my mouth full of rice and chay. Dì Tư continued, pointing at Mike and then back at me. "She says you look more kind than your brother." I looked over at Mike, whose smile made him seem all the more mature and reserved. "She says Mike looks intelligent, and you look kind." Well, you can't have everything. That was one of those moments when I wished I was better at laughing at myself.
Having never met me before, Dì Tư barraged me with questions. Through the family grapevine, she knew I wasn't married, and wanted to know if I had a girlfriend. My translators said "no." She said, that's why he's so skinny. Why doesn't he have a girlfriend? I couldn't answer. "He's always been passive when it comes to girls," Mike suggested. Does he want a Vietnamese wife? "He says no."
Dì Tư leaned toward me, swatted at me with her fingertips, pointed at me and spoke at length. You need to find a wife, because she will feed you and make sure you get a haircut and a shave. I asked, "why do people think that men are so in need of girlfriends?" Because men can't take care of themselves, was her response.
I, the skinny, shaggy-haired, and scruffy-faced one, sat on her kitchen chair and looked at the bowl in my hands. I had already refilled it twice and filled it another two times before dinner was over. I was still shoveling food into my face long after Mike and Lữ had moved on to the mangosteens and rambutan. I realized that if I ever had a Vietnamese wife, my rapid metabolism would commit her to a lifetime of scrutiny by people who doubt her ability to cook.
Yet Dì Tư looked happy as a cat as I methodically and rhythmically teased bite after bite of delicious chay cooking into my mouth. She said, he is an easy eater. "It means you'll eat anything," Lữ said. To which she added, "it'd be nice if you would actually gain some weight. She's saying it's my fault you're so skinny."
I appreciated the fact that no one was trying to get me married off, but felt a little sorry for my unkempt and malnourished appearance. We followed up dinner with sugary-sweet longyans, gigantic rambutans, and many mangosteens. After dinner, we took bucket showers and dropped mosquito nets over our beds. Dì Tư and her husband laid out a mattress in the kitchen so I could have my own room. I made plans with Mike to drop by the market for a haircut and a shave in the morning before we went off to meet Lữ's cousins on the other side of Vĩnh Long. And, silently, I pledged a belly-building diet of bacon and steroids.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)