Ốc - They Carry Their Homes

I took a walk in the rain at the outskirts of town tonight, on roads that made me wonder, what was I thinking when I decided to take this walk? Through ankle-deep, murky curb runoff, over bridges with crowded oncoming scooters and no pedestrian walkway, across a tollbooth as uniformed guards with blinding flashlights harassed hapless truckdrivers. Tired of my taxing trek, I found a bus stop and waited for a bus, on the corner of a moonlit grassy field that once was natural flooded swamp, but has been drained to support commercial development. When the rains come, animals, which once called the swamp home, emerge under the cover of darkness. They hop and creep and crawl and splash, just like they used to before the land was drained.

From the bus stop, I saw three men skulking about in the vines and tall swampgrass. With dim flashlights, they probed the damp vegetation, and intermittently reached out to pluck something the size of a stone from the lush greenery. I snuck in to get a closer look at the bags, saw the form of a conical spiral pile, and realized that the plastic-sandaled men were hunting for snails. I gestured to a guy with a distended bag, smiled, and pointed at the bag with an open palm. He said ốc, ốc, ốc, ốc, rapidly as if he had just stubbed his toe. I think I made him nervous.

I pantomimed eating by drawing my five fingertips toward my mouth as if taking a bite of food. He nodded, which seemed to affirm my guess that he and his companions were gathering edible snails. I could be wrong, since he didn't say the word for yes, that's correct. But I'm pretty sure he was going to eat them. Or perhaps he was going to sell them to one of the numerous late-evening sidewalk cafes that specialize in snails, clams, and fertilized duck eggs, all served with bottles of beer. Finding enough snails to make a meal, or to sell for a decent profit, is a lot of work. Losing ground to development must make it even harder. It seems that the animals weren't the only ones that were left high and dry when the swamps were drained.

The word for snail is ốc. This is confirmed by several people. Interestingly, the word ốc according to Google seems to mean "house," probably because the little guys appear to carry their houses around on their backs. I thought I'd double check with Lữ, but she's not convinced that ốc means house. Whether Google is right or not, snails certainly do carry their homes on their backs.

Either way, it was interesting to see people foraging for dinner in an urban greenspace, just a few feet from bustling trucks and honking scooters at a busy intersection. I don't think I'll have the same luck if I try to forage for dinner in Central Park. And, what would I eat, anyway?

Pl-ice-tic Skating

Skating on synthetic ice is kind of... nice

"Where else can you get bit by a mosquito when ice skating," Mike said, chuckling as he glided by me, a little wobblier than I'm used to seeing when he has skates laced to his feet, but skating nonetheless, on a giant sheet of white, slippery plastic.

We checked out the synthetic ice skating rink, on the third floor (what we would call the fourth floor) of the public sports and rec complex near our apartment. The rink is a jigsaw puzzle of white polymer tiles. Loud techno-pop and air conditioning turned way down greet you when you walk in. The place is full of local kids who go there to learn figure skating, play co-ed hockey, or hang out and flirt with each other. You have the odd adult who chooses to skate laps in a single lane like it was a pool and not a circular rink, who is more of a hazard than anything else. And you have Mike and I, who are perhaps the only people there who know what it's like to skate on real frozen water.

The ice is fake, but the skates are very real. The blades are sharpened metal. The hockey skates are just like the ones we'd use on ice. The figure skates have been slightly modified; the serrated toes are ground smooth so they don't tear up the plastic.

While I wouldn't say that the sensation of real ice is successfully replicated, the synthetic rink isn't bad. Two factors contribute to a reasonably similar skating experience. The rink is lubricated to reduce friction. I think they use some sort of silicone grease. It gets all over everything, and it's kind of gross to touch, but it's not smelly.

However, some friction is still necessary to create the illusion of real ice. The friction heats up the blade. Skate from one end to the other and the blades are too hot to touch. The hot blades literally melt the plastic, increasing the skate's grip. I lost grip and fell a couple times. I could blame my blades for not being hot enough, or blame the nasty grease on the rink, but instead, I'm just gonna say, if you're not falling, you're not trying hard enough.

We ran into a Vietnamese-American, who is somehow involved with either the activities at, or the development of the sports and rec complex. He told us that this is the only synthetic ice rink in Vietnam, until a new one opens at the Vincom Center in about 10 days. He also told us that a mat gets rolled out onto the plastic rink on Sundays, and the rink gets converted into an archery range. You know that's where we'll be.

Renew, Reuse, Recycle

Hand-made fine tuners

Lately I've been learning to play a traditional Vietnamese musical instrument, a two-stringed bowed instrument called đàn nhị. I like it, and I want one of my own. But finding a model like the one I've been learning on has been sort of a challenge. My teacher's fifty-year-old đàn nhị is heavily customized. It has different strings, a different base, and much different accessories than the ones in the stores.

The most significant difference is the fine tuners on my teacher's đàn nhị, which hang from ends of the two wooden tuning pegs. When I was in the music store, I asked the storekeeper if she sold any of the fine tuners. But she never even heard of them. So I went to my teacher to find out what they were called. And they don't have a name. Because they're unique. The guy who made them was a friend of my teacher, the same guy who bolted a piece of metal and wood to the base of the đàn nhị to give it more height and weight. Since the teacher's friend passed away, no one makes those tuners anymore.

People make things here. And they repair things when they get broken. For a place that has street sweepers on hand 20 hours a day to sweep up the styrofoam, plastic bags, and empty bottles from the sidewalks and streets, I'm not sure I'd call Vietnam a throw-away culture. People in a throw-away culture buy cheap things and use them until they break. They throw the broken things out and replace them with new things entombed in packaging and shipped from far, far away. In a throw-away culture, to be "green" and "environmentally friendly" is considered hip and trendy, yet it's more of a marketing gimmick than a lifestyle choice.

Coconut lacquer vase

On a walk through Saigon, I pass by cobblers with pants smeared in black glue, who tack new rubber soles onto piles of old shoes. In a market, vendors shovel crepe-mix and rice into bags using modified plastic bottles; the tops of the bottles are cut away at an angle, turning them into rather effective scoops. And coconuts are recycled, too. After the juice has been imbibed, the husks are dried and used as fire-fuel. And the hard shells are crafted into wine bottles or lacquerware.

I've been told that cars here do not depreciate in value like cars do in the states because the ones here aren't easily replaceable. An imported car has a 100 percent import tax tacked on the price tag, and to the best of my knowledge, Vietnam has no domestic car. So, instead of buying a new car every five years, people keep fixing their old ones.

One time, I saw a guy scraping hard white meat from a brown coconut into fine shreds. Considering the glut of coconuts we enjoyed a while back, it would have been nice if we had some alternative to spooning the meat out in clumsy chunks. We could have pressed the shreds to extract the coconut cream, or mixed them with black sesame to pile onto rice crêpes and roll into homemade bò bía ngọt. I thought of the held-held tool the guy used, and Lữ seemed to remember it too, so we began a hunt to find one and buy it.

When we made bánh tét last week, we learned the sticky rice is mixed with shredded coconut. There was a lot of sticky rice, and the pile of empty husks told us there was a lot of shredded coconut. Lữ asked her cousin how she shredded them all, and she showed us a tool, which was homemade, that far exceeded our needs. It was a cut and bent piece of iron the length of an arm. The tool had a serrated edge on one side and a tripod on the other that rests on the ground. The person places a bowl under the edge and sits on the tool. As the person rotates the coconut around the serrated edge, shreds drop into the bowl below. Lữ's cousin, as generous as she is a phenomenal cook, offered us her coconut shredder to take home. Her polite insistence made it hard to decline the offer, but the tool is as big as some garden equipment, and it far surpasses our needs.

So we went to the market and asked the vendor for the handheld variety. They didn't have one. In fact, they didn't even know what we were talking about. You would think in a country that makes so much use of coconut, that the vendors would know the tools, which would be available everywhere.

Well, they are available anywhere, in a sense. I just saw one tonight. It was a steel bar the length of a pen, with a bottlecap bolted on at one end. No one here would think of sell something that can be slapped together in minutes for free using scraps from a garage. Vietnam, while I wouldn't give it that trendy label of "green," can offer many lessons of how to make things last, and how turn trash into treasure. For now, though, I don't trust my instrument-making skills. So if I want a đàn nhị that doesn't sound like a cat in heat, I'll have to buy one. And, maybe one day, I'll make the fine tuners myself.

Loanwords from French... On Loan

We were ordering food at a restaurant, and I found a word on the menu that looked a little familiar. I think it was "Alcart." I asked what it meant. Mike laughed at me. "À la carte."

It had occurred to me that the Vietnamese language is full of various words from other languages. For example, the Vietnamese word for t.v. is tivi. Since I don't know French, I probably run across these loanwords all the time and don't even know it.

I thought it would be fun to browse through the internets and find some interesting Vietnamese loanwords. Thought it would make a good blog post. Then I stumbled on this blog on French loan-words. And I realized my post on loanwords would only stack up if I found another thousand words that weren't already posted. So that blog's prolific author is "loaning" us this list, as it were.

I don't know Chinese either, and I've heard, from a semi-reliable source, that Chinese words constitute about 60 percent of the Vietnamese vocabulary. A post on Chinese loanwords would be similarly interesting. Due to the variety of Chinese dialects, to include the ancient language of the first 1000 years or so of Chinese occupation, those loanwords are tremendously complex. For now, I'm thinking about a post on that subject sometime. But if I come across a source as comprehensive as the one on French loanwords, it might just loan us the information, too.

Wow, getting other people to write my posts is... kind of lazy. Hope this doesn't come back and bite me in the butt. Never a borrower be, quoth the bard.

Luxury and Sadness

Shortly after introductions, the Vietnamese people I meet are usually concerned that I'm not married. They ask why, and since my vocabulary is limited to the words for hug, fifteen, and pomelo, it usually falls on Mike or Lữ to field an explanation. I'm somewhat grateful that my siblings haven't yet resorted to using canned answers. "It's funny you should ask that, you see, my brother isn't married because..."

"...he's been widowed seven times." or,
"...he's saving himself for the princess of Monaco." or,
"...physical contact causes him to lose bowel contol."

I imagine the asker's reaction to one of these statements might be encouragement, a pat on the shoulder, and positive thoughts. "Don't worry, you'll find someone." People's reaction to the truth is much more grim. One time, Mike told someone that I have high expectations, to which the response was, "oh, no wonder he's single."

The first follow-up question (directed at my translator) is often: how does he eat? The idea that a man knows how to feed himself causes further bewilderment. What we have here is a cultural dissimilarity. In the states, every man knows how to find sustenance. He just opens a can of tomato soup, pops a frozen waffle in the toaster, and calls it dinner. Men in Vietnam seem equally incapable in the kitchen, but they stubbornly refuse to subsist on the American male's scavenge diet of chocolate chips, jarred olives and dry cereal. Instead, as I've been told, Vietnamese males live at home until the moment they get married. Then they grab what they can carry from their room in their parents' house and make a run for the new home before starvation sets in. This procedure safely guarantees the men will never need to bother with learning how to peel a potato or to boil water. He simply trades his mother's cooking for that of his wife.

The Vietnamese people I meet seem to doubt I'm capable of so much as lifting a spoon to my mouth, much less cooking for myself, when you consider how often people comment on how skinny I am. But comments on your deviations from beauty standards are not meant to be rude. On the contrary, these comments on your weight and skin just mean people care about you. The other day after the bánh tét rolls were wrapped and boiling, I sat down to lunch with the ladies in the kitchen. One of them said to another, "you're getting fat." I didn't catch what the second lady said, but the first lady went on: "and you've gotten really black*; what on earth are you doing in the sun all day?" These comments aren't meant to be, or perceived to be offensive. They're just observations, and it's up to the listener do decide whether it's a bad condition or not.

I wouldn't be so skinny if I only had a wife, they say. As if marital status could change the fact that I have the metabolism of a teenager with a gut full of tapeworms. I'm not sure why I'm so skinny, but I blame genetics, and not for want of nutrition. I've always seen myself as a voracious eater. But Lữ recently has begun to tell people that I only eat a lot when food is put within line of sight, and otherwise, I eat rather little. This comment induces further pity for my perceived state of emaciation. And the solution, they say, is to marry, since a wife will fatten me up good and proper.

To kindly help get me a wife, they ask me two kinds of questions. One question is, do you want a Vietnamese wife? This question is sometimes obscured with the more indirect phrasing: do you like Vietnamese women? The other question is, do you want to live in Vietnam? This question is less direct than the first. Interestingly enough, it's also asked almost exclusively by women, whereas the first question is most often asked by men. There seems to be a significant difference here. To the men, all that matters is that the wife is desirable. The women, however, are concerned with whether my wife would be taken away from Vietnam or not. They seem to understand the personal hardship of separation more than the men do.

Women being taken away from Vietnam is a modern epidemic. The cliche is of the old western bachelor who flies to Southeast Asia to find a wife to bring home with him. This cliche is not without merit, but like most cliches, it paints a narrow picture. Many Asian foreigners also take Vietnamese brides back to their countries. The first time I heard of this was in Taiwan, when our teacher told us how Taiwanese bachelors with low prospects would travel to Vietnam in search of wives. What the teacher didn't know was that one of her students was half Chinese, half Vietnamese, and he was not too amused by the teacher's disdain for the practice. And a generation of the One-Child policy in a country that exceedingly values male children has resulted in many thirty-something men in China with a serious lack of marriage options. So they come to Vietnam to fill the gender gap. Most of the marriages between foreigners and Vietnamese women are voluntary to an extent. But many women, and even children, are kidnapped and sold to be brides. There must be a sense that Vietnamese families suffer from losing their daughters. The women I talk to seem particularly sensitive to this.

Assuming the foreigner presents himself honestly, to marry a foreigner isn't necessarily bad. But going back to the husband's country means she leaves behind her home, her family, her community, the life she knows, the language she speaks. Her connections will fizzle and fade. She won't be able to find that certain brand, or regional specialty. She won't be able to have conversations like, "you're getting fat," without inadvertently offending someone's western sensibility. Going back to the husband's country must create an awful feeling of disconnectedness. Mike summarized this idea in a phrase that means the Vietnamese in America are living in luxury, yet living in sadness.

I asked Lữ why someone would choose a life of sadness over a life rich with close ones and cultural comfort. She said, so they can send money and support to their family at home. Marriage has a different meaning here than it does in the states. It's not about the relationship between the two people, but how the couple fits into the larger family group. Often, the family pressures the woman to marry a foreigner in the hope that she'll send money back home. A marriage that benefits the larger family group will be imposed on her, not a marriage based on mutual admiration, the joy of togetherness, and a deep connection.

I respect the sense of familial responsibility that could compel a woman to marry a man she doesn't love so she can provide for her family back home. But the sorrow that separation brings her would weigh on me, as would the idea that her reasons for marriage were familial pressure. There was another question someone asked me in the kind attempt to find a way to fatten me up. It was, would I find it easy to be married to a Vietnamese woman? The answer is, it would be as easy, or as hard, for me as it would be for her.

What began as a post ripe with levity has descended into alarming gravity. This all unraveled from the oft-asked question of why I'm not married. I suppose the best thing to do while I'm in Vietnam is to wear a ring and have my siblings tell people I have a wife back in the states, and she's a great cook. I'm just skinny 'cause I'm allergic to food.

* In this sense, black means tanned, and tanned skin is devalued. In my experience, Asian cultures associate skin tone with socio-economic status. Darker skin indicates low-class outdoor work, like gardening, street-sweeping, and construction. Lighter skin is associated with higher class. As a result of this distinction, the markets are saturated with skin-lightening products, and the sweltering streets are stocked with women in full-body clothing--face included--to hide their skin from the sun. It's like they're wearing UV suits.

How to Roll and Bind Bánh Tét

photo by Lữ Như Tiên

In what may be my longest photo-layout yet, I thought I'd share a how-to for rolling and tying bánh tét. When you're an expert at making this classic dish of sticky rice and filling, the whole process takes just a few minutes.

Besides the ingredients, the necessary equipment is banana leaves, string or grass cord, and a giant kettle with a lid for boiling these sticky rice cakes.

Recipes for the rice and for the fillings vary. Unfortunately, I don't have one for the coconut rice, the mung bean and porkfat filling, or the bananas in syrup that you see here. I might make them a repost later on if I can track them down.

Of course, if you really want to do this dish right, you're gonna need to invite about a dozen friends and family to come over and participate in the process. After all, isn't that how food is supposed to be?
 

Banana leaf goes smooth side up.

A bowlful of coconut rice is next.

The rice gets spread evenly...

...into a square-shape.

Here goes the mung bean filling...

...or the banana, as you like.

The roll gets, er, rolled.

The center gets tied.

Two leaf strips cap the roll.

Then it's tied on both ends.

Long grass ties a package knot.

The first ties are replaced.

Ties are equally spaced.

The excess sticks out the top.

The longest strand of grass...

...wraps the rest of the excess...

...all the way up until the end.

The excess is tied off, and done!

The rolls boil for eight to nine hours.

They do look prettier once they're cooked.

photo by Lữ Như Tiên

Đám Giổ

Wikipedia, you've failed me, and you shall be punished. I came to you for information about the Vietnamese death anniversary. You told me the event is called giổ, and Wiki-cited compound words include: ngày giỗ, or day of the death; đám giỗ, or death anniversary ceremony; and bữa giỗ, or death anniversary feast. But you are wrong, Wiki. I just talked with Lữ, and she said the lone term giỗ means to console, not death anniversary, as you have so erroneously claimed. She said the term for the death anniversary is đám giổ, and Wiki is fail. That's okay, you reader-edited encyclopedia, you're not the only fail. The modern day omniscient oracle, Google, translated đám giổ to mean feast. Not death anniversary feast--just plain ol' piles-of-food feast. Google, go stand in the corner next to Wikipedia. Update: we just found out that the word for console is not giỗ, but dỗ, and the two words sound the same when spoken with a southern accent. The bottom line is: no one ever says giỗ for the death anniversary. Everyone says the words đám and giỗ together.

On Sunday morning, Lữ's cousins held a đám giổ at their house to honor the late mother of the husband. As far as the Wiki compound words go, the đám giổ truly was a celebration. More than sixty guests showed up. Ironically, I was told that it was a small gathering, and not a lot of people had been invited. And with a team of serious cooks working overtime to make a mountain of food, it truly was a feast.

Bánh bò nướng

On each table were plates that spilled over with golden, crispy bánh xèo crepes stuffed with clams, shrimp, and beansprouts; bowls of simmered chicken and curried beef with carrots cut like flowers; roasted pork with caramel-colored crackling skin; stacks of white, scissor-cut rice noodles; green leafy veggies and fragrant mint basil by the pile; loaves of sliced baquettes; wheels of red watermelon; leaf-wrapped rounds of yellow and maroon bánh tét slices; and one of my all time favorites: bánh bò nướng, a baked white sugar cake with a moist spongy texture and a fermented fruit flavor, which to Mike's and my surprise was supposed to be eaten with bites of roast pork. This repast of epic proportions was served at 10 a.m., just in time for second breakfast.

There is an order to service. The first to be served were the spirits of the ancestors. The cousin's husband placed the most attractive plates, one of each dish, onto the altar. Then he poured wine into cups and set them next to the dishes. And he lit incense. Whispy coils rose as it burned, and its smoke filled the breezy, sun-drenched room with a scent of reverence and remembrance. Meanwhile, Dì Tư's husband went through the tables, lighting more incense and pouring wine three times into a glass on each table. Ater the spirits were given enough time to eat their fill, the plates were taken down and placed on one of half a dozen tables.

Second to eat are (almost) everyone else. The tables filled in, hands cracked open cans of root beer and poured it over ice, and mouthfuls of glorious food traveled from serving dish to bowl to mouth, while occasionally making a brief stop at a dipping plate for a splash of soy sauce with garlic and chili, or for a dash of nước mắm. The men shouted and pointed and grabbed select bits of food and dropped them in Mike's and my bowls. In particular, the Vietnamese get a kick out of serving the steamed and dressed heads of chicken to folks like Mike and me. And Mike and I get a kick out of letting folks, like our tablemates, watch us eat chicken heads.

The middle age men at our table drank wine while they ate. The oldest men teetotaled, which may explain how they were able to live so long. During the meal, a man who wasn't exactly eating with us hovered over our table, cracked jokes, poured lots of unfiltered rice wine from a plastic pitcher, and passed the glasses around the table. The wine was served in the same shot-sized glasses in which tea was served before the meal. Nobody had their own glass--they were shared. The last person to have a drink passed the refilled glass off to the next person, who typically downed the wine in a gulp. Mike lifted a communal glass to eye level and said hey, alcohol kills germs, right?

After everyone else had eaten, the women who had made all the food in the first place finally sat down to put what was left of the food into their bellies. To me, Lữ's cousin seemed the lead cook in this whole affair. But she never even had a single bite of her own food. Nearly everything that came out of her kitchen, besides bread, noodles, or rice, had some sort of meat in it, and she's vegetarian this month. This happens to be the seventh month in the lunar calendar. In addition to the days when the moon is new or full, practicing Buddhists take the seventh month to eat vegetarian, an act which invests in good karma for the spirits of ancestors.

Which brings us back to the issue of not accepting whatever "fact" you read on the internet. In a post a couple days ago, I said we're currently in the sixth month. Sorry. I miscalculated and reported an error, based on a previous error from July. Now, Riffing Indochina is going to stand over there in the corner with Wikipedia and Google.