Apothecary

My mom has been complaining that her hands and feet have been getting ice-cold this winter season, so to remedy this, she went to a "thay thuoc bac," an Apothecary of Eastern Medicine. After taking her pulse and asking some routine questions about her ailments and symptoms, he scribbled some Chinese characters onto a ledger and passed the note to his behind-the-counter assistants, who proceeded to gather the ingredients from little drawers containing different kinds of dehydrated flora, tree bark, and fungi. These get weighed on a little scale according to the apothecary's prescription, and my mom left with a bundle of individual packets wrapped in white butcher paper.


At home, she cooks up these ingredients seeped in water, in an earthen pot with a handle and a spout. After extracting the medicinal juices, she'd hunt through the moist remnants for the dehydrated Chinese apples. These are add-ons to most prescriptions to sweeten the medicine, and my mom likes to eat them. She'd usually find three and pull the soft, sticky, date-like flesh from the center seed with her front teeth.

The smell of Chinese herbal medicine used to be extremely unpleasant to me, and it's been a long time since my mom has prepared the bitter, black liquid to drink. However, since she started again recently, I've been finding the smell to be rather bearable when I come home at night. It's this heavy, earthy scent of tree bark and roots, tinged with a bitterness that hits the back of your throat. The earthen pot emits steam from its spout so that the aroma penetrates the entire house; for the time that it is cooking, the medicine seems to seep into my clothes, my hair, my bones.

I guess you can say it's a acquired scent. Standing in the dark at my front door, struggling to pluck my house key from my keychain, I can already smell the heady medicine eeking from the crevices. When I push open the door, I am engulfed in light and smell, greeted by the familiar sight of my dad sitting on the sofa, reading the latest Vietnamese newspaper, and my labrador trotting up with a tail-wagging hello. The smell of herbal medicine hangs thick and heavy. Reluctantly dredged up from the memories of my olfactory sense, its thin curlicues of smoke wrap around me and pull me in, like an insistent, irresistable siren's song that calls me home.

Thanksgiving

We never have a turkey at a Luu-style Thanksgiving dinner. Instead, we get together to prepare traditional Vietnamese food. This year, we had:

1. Vietnamese crepe stuffed with sliced pork, shrimp, enoki mushrooms, and bean sprouts, eaten with fresh greens including butterleaf lettuce, mint, cilantro, and baby Chinese mustard leaf.
2. Oven-roasted chicken.
3. Vinegar-poached, deli-sliced beef and calamari with vermicelli rolled in rice paper.
   
   Mmm, now that's the stuff. Ah, the chopsticks. Where the heck would we be without chopsticks??
   
   Preparing food: a tradition often passed along from mothers to daughters, special recipes and secret tips and tricks for making it come out "just right." The smell of warm food wafting from the kitchen, the sound of shrimp sizzling in a pan's hot oil, the sight of steam lifted from the bubbling pots to the overhead fan--these are the things I associate with home, and comfort.
   
   Here's my mom serving up some crepe:
   
   
   
   

Got nuoc mam? Shown here with pickled leeks. Because no Vietnamese house is complete without it.

I am grown now. I spend more time away from home--at work, with my boyfriend, juggling a social life and a career as I unfurl my wings in the corporate world and seek to soar. But when I am in my mother's kitchen, spending time plucking greens for our dinner, mixing sauce, seeking cooking advice for a particular dish, and sharing gossip and laughs with her for a rare day completely in her company, I am my mother's little girl again.

Monkeys

The little boy with the missing front teeth and the grimacing smile is Tung. This photo was taken at someone's wedding--you could tell by the flowers decorating the front of the car. His mother told me that he was ever the monkey; true to his Chinese zodiac sign, he couldn't resist making faces at the camera. He dared such feats as jumping from rooftop to rooftop, once hanging on to a clothes line to keep from plummeting to a pulp three stories down. Not that I was ever the angel (I'm a monkey, too), but you'll note by comparing my earlier pictures that I was much cuter.

I'll be going to Viet Nam with Tung, his mother, grandmother, and aunt. His maternal side originally came from Quang Ngai, a village in Central Viet Nam. We'll be landing in Saigon in the south and making our way gradually north until we hit Quang Ngai. Only 3-and-a-half more weeks until we leave. We've booked our tickets since June. Now it seems like the trip is just around the corner. How fast time flies.

Memories

I remember fleeting images playing on the edge of my unconsciousness--the unlifting darkness, the damp cold tinged with the sticky, salty sea air, the sour smell of vomit, the sound of moans and groans. I was drugged when my parents took me out of Viet Nam on the night of our immigration by boat. We were to sail to an island we referred to as "Galang" and wait for our immigration papers to arrive before we could safely take a plane from the Singapore airport to complete our journey to America, where my maternal grandparents waited.

The entire journey took over two years. I could just imagine how terrified my parents were every step of the way, never knowing whether everything would work out according to plan, whether all three of us would end up alive, and together. As soon as we got on the boat to begin our sea voyage, the women and children were smuggled under deck. A lot of us got seasick in the belly on that ship--some, like my mother, had never braved the open seas.

She had told me stories of the immigration, how she sewed gold and jewels into the lining of her shirts to keep them safe, how, on occasions when she had to part ways with my dad, there was the fear of never being reunited, how she had to barter back her wedding band when they stripped everyone of jewels during one of the "routine" security checkpoints. In America, where I'd grow up to sneak out of the house, play hooky from school, and meet boys in secret, I would still never experience an adventure remotely close to what she put herself through to ensure my freedom and liberty.

My parents had to leave practically all of their possession in Viet Nam, so I only have a handful of black-and-white photos of our past. Now I am a photo nut, taking pictures of routine outings from some subconscious desperacy to preserve the moments, knowing that so much of the early years are forever gone.

There is one picture that I took with my parents. They sat me on the ledge of a dragon-shaped boat and stood on either side of me. I don't remember where this was taken, or when. Apparently, bell-bottoms were in.

In another photo, I was standing among red flowers in the night, holding a pink balloon on a stick. I was wearing overalls in both pictures--my mother must have thought those were cute. She said she always bought the latest fashions for me.

Selective memories flash through my head like glimpses of windows on a speeding train. I can recall textures, sounds, colors, smells. That we had stairs in our house because I'd use the banisters to pull myself up when our family dog would tug at the hem of my clothes and implore me to play some more with him. That on hot days, my nanny would fan me to sleep as I irritably rolled from one side to the other, searching for a cool spot on the two enormous body pillows that flanked me. That we had tiles in our house, not carpet, and I'd move from one tile to another and let the coolness seep through my bare feet. That my nanny would feed me a breakfast of noodles before leading me by the hand to see my parents in their general store, and that I'd demand for her to roll the noodles around the chopsticks before I'd eat them. My indulgent mother, chasing me through the streets while trying to get me to take another bite of my dinner of rice and bananas (the only thing I'd eat). The fishing nets for sale at my parents' store, different colors and sizes. The taste of a lychee, half-peeled for me to slurp up its cool, sweet juiciness. The leathery, moist skin of a freshly-washed rambutan. I have no pictures to aid recollection, just the memories themselves, stories from my parents, and the power of my imagination to make those stories come alive.

Some family or friends had said that our old house was confiscated by the government after we left and was converted into a travel agency. I don't know if it's still that, or if it underwent a second reconstruction since then. I wonder what I'd find when I once again pace the streets of my childhood, whether I'd be walking the same streets of Saigon or completely different ones. I wonder what new memories I would make, what new photos I would preserve for future generations.

Beginnings

This week I celebrated my 28th birthday. I have been away from Viet Nam for 24 years. Today I started making my packing list. Among the essential items are stomach medicine and a traveler's wallet, to be worn around the waist and under the shirt, like a tucked-away fanny pack. Indigestion and theft: two things that make me the most apprehensive about revisiting my homeland. But despite these worries, I'm excited about my trip and happy about my decision.

I was only 4 when my family left by boat. My entire education was based in the United States; I never officially learned to read or write in Vietnamese. I speak it well enough because I use it at home to converse with my parents, but my mastery over the language extends to only the conversational level. I can never express myself in flowery poetry or deep literary prose as I can in English. It feels like a handicap, and I experience the same frustration as I do when trying to express myself in a language I have barely begun to learn. I taught myself to read and write by picking up my parents' Vietnamese magazines and newspapers. Tripping and stumbling over the words with their attached tonal accents, I struggled to wrestle meaning out of them.

The Vietnamese language is marked with tones--lilting-high, like a songbird in flight; deep-base low, like the rumbling of an ancient volcano; flat and neutral, like the stretch of a plateau. A word can have a variety of meanings, all dependent on its accents. Such a language with a heavy reliance on meter seems naturally conducive to poetry.

Now, I spend more hours at work than I do at home, just as how in my college years, I spent more time around my peers at the university than in the company of my parents. It takes a social interaction with another Vietnamese--booking tickets through my agent or making an appointment with my optometrist's secretary--to reawaken me to how much of my language I have forgotten. This year, I want to go home again . . . and by doing so, I hope to remember.