Hàng Ngày

This weekend is “Slow Food Nation 2008″ in San Francisco, and by a little nudging from my roommate and a little curiosity of my own, I have taken part in several of the events aimed at slowing down food production and processing, reconnecting people to their food, and promoting wholeness and enjoyment through eating. It’s a fairly simple concept (eat food, feel healthy, save the world) but what’s been interesting to me is witnessing the people who are involved in this movement. It reminds me a little of my activism days in college, but less militant, and more peace-loving.

Today I went to a speaker’s panel entitled “Edible Education.” The focus was on bringing healthy food and food and agricultural education to the nation’s schools, promoting the slow food movement by indoctrinating the youngest generation with healthier values. The speakers ranged from Alice Waters, the pioneer of the Slow Food movement, to a guy named Van Jones, who started an organization called Green for All, with the purpose of making working class and low-income people the focus of the green movement in American. They talked about a lot of issues related to food, agriculture, and education in America. The question that I found the most interesting and provocative was: How do we inspire young people to become farmers? How do we recreate the image of farming as a respectable, educated position?

I was thinking about this on my way home, and stopped to get a coffee and sit with my thoughts. When I walked into the coffee shop, there behind the counter was a friend of a friend who I’d met at one of these Slow Food events the night before. Coincidence? Maybe. So we talked for a good long while about farming, and she told me she wants to farm, but she also doesn’t want to miss out on the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the city. She wants both! I found myself thinking the same thing: wouldn’t it be nice if we could live in two worlds simultaneously and just go back and forth as we pleased? Maybe this is a defining characteristic of my generation, I thought: globalization, which is to say the tug of war between globalization and localization that is caused by the increasing ease of global connectivity and the increasing desire for people to build community where social networks have been on the decline. We want to both have access to tropical fruits like mangos and bananas from around the world, but also to get to know our food growers, and it’s not really possible to do both simultaneously. If someone has a great solution, enlighten me please!

And then, I thought, “Good lord, how can people talk and think about food all the time like this?! It makes me crazy! Can’t we talk about something else, please?!”

During my “staycation,” as my roommate Hilary so aptly named this week off work with nothing to do, nowhere to go, and no one to answer to, I have become sickeningly…domestic. Yesterday, after a short stop at the main library and a Vietnamese sandwich shop, I headed over to Marin County on bike. A little over an hour later, I was biking through a cool, one-way tunnel and emerging in the scenic Marin Headlands. After several hours of biking, walking, wave-watching, napping, reading, and otherwise lounging about, I headed back to SF. This is basically what it was like (didn’t take the camera, so this photo is taken from another site):

When I got home, Hilary and I decided to make “bánh dẻo,” Vietnamese sticky moon cakes with mung bean filling. This is something that had been on my list of experiments for a while, and I was happy to have a partner in crime. Almost every step of the recipe we followed had either Hilary or I looking puzzled at the developing result of our culinary efforts. (Who ever thought stir-frying cooked, mashed beans with sugar could yield such a delicious, sticky paste filling?) After a fatal mistake of adding the flour to the syrup instead of the syrup to the flour for the outer pastry, we ended up with more of a liquid than a dough. What to do? Turn on the heat, of course, and cook it until the liquid evaporates. And guess what? It worked! Minutes later we were rolling the sticky dough around the filling and laughing at how disgusting the pastries looked. See for yourself:

We gave up for the night.

This morning, I set out on another bike errand: this time to the yarn store. Inspired by Hilary’s knitting, and itching to do something mindless but methodical with my hands, I decided that I would follow my G’ma’s tradition of knitting and start on my Christmas presents. “Imagiknit” in the Castro was one of the most overwhelming stores I’ve ever been in. It reminded me of the wholesale bead stores on Broadway and 28th in New York that I used to visit during college, with walls after walls and racks after racks of beads in thousands of colors, shapes, sizes, and materials. I spoke with the woman at the counter who informed me that wools were in one room, cottons and synthetics in the other, and the yarns were ordered from thin to thick in each room respectively. That helped absolutely zilch in my selection effort. After picking out a pink heather wool yarn and some needles, Kurt showed me how to turn my skeins of yarn into balls by mounting the skein onto an umbrella frame without the fabric and winding it around a wooden dowel with a hand-crank. I finally got the hang of it after making several knots, forcing Kurt to assist me with exasperation.

After getting my yarn, I set out on my last errand. I was determined to make the blob-like “bánh dẻo” look more appetizing by finding something to imprint their surfaces with a pattern or picture, as they are shaped in Vietnam. I went to several Chinese housewares stores in the mini-Chinatown near my house with no luck. I almost resigned myself to buying disposable jello molds (at least they’d look a little less blob-like), until, lo and behold, at the last store, I heard one of the storekeepers, an elderly man, speaking Vietnamese to one of the customers. Sweet! When he was finished talking to the other customer I sidled over and told him I was trying to make “bánh trung thu,” and did they sell the molds? He directed me to a dusty old box on a bottom shelf, where there were half a dozen different wooden molds to choose from.

When I got home, I got to work molding the still sticky and soft “bánh dẻo.” Now they look like this:

Much more professional, huh?

After meeting some friends for a drink, biking home, and eating dinner, I decided to relax with a little knitting, which looks like this:

So, now all I need is to find a millionaire husband, and I’m set for house-wifedom. I could get used to this…

I’ve been tutoring a Vietnamese family in English since May through an organization called Refugee Transitions. The family members I tutor are a group of four siblings in their late forties and early fifties, and specifically wanted a teacher who spoke Vietnamese because their level is so beginner, so they were matched with me. They live in an outer district of San Francisco, about a 30 minute bike ride from work in the opposite direction from my house, and I meet them for two hours every Friday evening after work. Since the beginning they’ve essentially adopted me into their family. Every time I go, they give me some sort of food to take with me (“because it’s so late, and you haven’t eaten dinner, and it’s still very far to your house!”) When I told them I would be gone for a month, traveling to Vietnam, they gave me a red envelope with $1 of lỳ sì for good luck. I was so excited to see them this afternoon, as the tutoring is one of the highlights of my week.

They were waiting at the door when I arrived, and seemed just as excited to see me as I was to see them. I asked jokingly if they’d forgotten everything I’d taught them during my long absence and they just smiled and giggled. We sat down to work and spent the first hour struggling through all we’d learned in our first two months together: Hello! How are you? What is your name? Where are you from? Where do you live? Are you married? How old are you? It took some time, including a lengthy explanation of the use of “he” and “she” but finally they seemed to be getting it. I moved on to a listening passage that would bring all of these questions together, asking them to “fill in the blanks” on a piece of paper.

As I went along, two of them seemed to more or less be getting it, but Ty, the oldest (at 52) wasn’t writing anything, just staring at the paper blankly, even on the second and third readings of this simple paragraph. I had noticed before that she struggled with writing and reading, and was obviously the weakest of the four siblings in her language ability, but this was even more extreme. I stopped and asked her what she was doing, and she told me she couldn’t even hear anything I was saying. I knew this couldn’t be true, as we’d just gone over it, and I asked her to follow along slowly as I read aloud. I tried again, and nothing. I realized then that she didn’t even know how to follow the lines of print on paper. She could hear me and understand, but she couldn’t match what she heard with the scribbles of lines, dots, and dashes that were printed on the paper. As I struggled to show her how to follow each word with her finger as I read along, her two younger siblings waited patiently.

When I took a break for a second to try to think about what the problem might be (Is it possible she has a learning disability? Does she just not know how to read? I know she hasn’t had much schooling…) her brother Minh interrupted my train of thought,

“For old people like us, it’s hard to study at all. We try so hard, but we forget everything immediately. It’s not like young people, who pick things up quickly. In America, you have laws about school, and education is mandatory. If you don’t send your kids to school then the police come after you, but not in Vietnam. In Vietnam it’s different. There’s not enough money for school, and the oldest children have to drop out to take care of the younger ones. There’s not enough money and too many children. Sister Ty only studied grade three, she never had the chance to learn to read. It’s not like America where there are opportunities.” He seemed almost near tears with these words, I had never seen him so emotional, and I didn’t know how to react. His sister took over from there, continuing, “Even if we did go to school, no one could concentrate. It was so far to go in the countryside, we were so tired when we got there, and we had to work as well. Sometimes there were only two meals a day, sometimes only one, and we had to work hard for that, and no one could think about studying. We really are trying hard to study our best now, but now we’re so old. We really want to learn English. We’ve been here three years and hardly know anything. We rarely go outside our home and all we have is each other. Sometimes we cry together because we are so depressed.”

I was speechless looking at their faces. Not because I couldn’t find the right Vietnamese words but because I couldn’t find the words. I eventually summoned a few words of encouragement in studying and offered a few lines of understanding (although I don’t understand at all, could not possibly empathize). We continued studying although a little more solemnly than before. I realized that their task of learning English enough to communicate with the outside world at 46, 50, and 52 respectively, and my task of teaching it to them, are extremely painstaking and lengthy.

On the bus on the way home, I continued thinking about what Minh and Ngo had said. Their words reminded me of the pain that so many people leave to come to the US and find more freedom, a higher standard of living, or better futures for their children. But they also sounded so hopeless, like their lives were over here in this basement in the Outer Mission, and they were content to let it be that way. I don’t see that kind of hopelessness in Vietnam, even among people who are considered quite poor, and I wonder, what price are they paying for their “higher standard of living” and being closer to their niece and nephew? I wonder whether they wouldn’t rather return to Vietnam? And how many immigrants like them are living behind closed doors and in the confines of in-law apartments in this city and others throughout America? So many. I knew this before, logically, rationally I knew this. But sometimes I guess it takes someone a little closer to you showing you the reality before you can accept it.

My work allows, no that’s wrong, requires me to have a foot in two worlds: one in the US, based in San Francisco, and one in Vietnam. This is one of the “perks” of the job. For me it seemed a perfect way to maintain both my relationships in the US and those in Vietnam. I now realize that I also naively thought that having a foot in both worlds would allow me to maintain my lives in both worlds. Maintain relationships, I can do (it’s particularly easy when I don’t have any relationships to speak of in San Francisco, ha!) but live both lives, I can not.

The past five weeks of my life were spent away from my life in San Francisco, and I didn’t miss it one bit. The transition back to Asia was flawless: it was if I had never left in some ways, just changed my job and location. My language skills were a little rusty but picked back up after a very short period of time. My friends were still there, and despite the rapid construction and development, many aspects of my life in Vietnam were still in place. I still felt comfortable in Vietnam. At the end of the trip, I found myself thinking, “Ah, it will be nice to get back home to…oh wait, home is not in Vietnam anymore.”

When I returned to my life in the US it was also as if nothing had changed much. I have a new roommate, the television in our apartment is gone, and the weather is a little sunnier and warmer than when I left. But my bike ride to work is the same, my routine is the same, my job is back to what it was before I left, and I wonder to myself “Was I ever really in Vietnam?” My brain is still there, I still long for the noise, the traffic, the energy of Vietnam, the smells and sights, my friends, the lifestyle, even the squat toilets and the showerheads on the wall, the old ladies at coffee shops with betel nuts wedged between their gums, the kids playing da cau in the streets, the heat, the rain.

I guess this is what it’s like to lead a duel life: feeling of disconnection to both lives, a hovering between two quasi-realities that can never become realities without a conscious choice of one or the other, exactly the choice I have been trying to avoid for the past four years.

What a fitting last morning in Vietnam. I awoke to the sound of a torrential downpour and immediately jumped out of my bed and clambered down the steep, narrow staircase of Tyler’s house to make sure that my bags, carelessly left on the living room floor the night before, were not soaked from the imminent flooding. Lucky for me, Tyler’s home doesn’t flood when it rains. Natural reaction, right?
Tyler and I went around the corner for a hearty breakfast of bò né. For those who have not lived in Vietnam and had the opportunity to savor this delectable fusion treat, bò né means strips of steak and onions, thinly sliced, and served to each customer on an individual cow-shaped metal plate, sizzling with hot oil, butter, and meat grease. You eat bò né with bread, tomatoes, cucumbers, and a touch of hot sauce, dipping the fresh fluffy baguette into the smooth, savory goodness of the meat grease. For a former vegetarian, this meal is a bit of a mental challenge (why do they have to serve it in a plate shaped like a cow??) but it is one of Tyler’s favorite meals, and definitely a local specialty that I did not want to pass up for my last meal.
While we were eating it began to rain again, a steady downpour with no end in sight. Rather than be late for my flight, I decided to brave the rain with my luggage, and set out of the alleyway with my bright green umbrella, dragging my suitcase behind.
I decided to take the bus, as I’d seen the sign saying “Tan Son Nhat” on the bus stop sign on Tyler’s street. The bus barely stopped when I flagged it down, and I hopped on with my suitcase still dangling in the doorway as the bus sped away through the rain. I was surprised to find that after about 15 minutes, the bus slowed, made a “K” turn, pulled up to the curb, and turned off. Everyone rose to exit the bus. We were not at the airport. I asked the ticket-saleslady where we were and why we were not at the airport. She laughed at me and said “We are in Tan Son Nhat neighborhood. This bus does not go to Tan Son Nhat airport! You have to take Bus 152. It’s there across the street.” I asked her how far it was to the airport, and she told me it was very far, about 1 kilometer. Now it was my turn to laugh. I thanked her, lugged my suitcase out the door, and began walking the short distance to the airport, jumping puddles and trying to maneuver my falling-apart umbrella so that I didn’t hit any power lines. A fitting last transportation experience in Vietnam.
The check-in and customs process was completely painless, easy, and quick. The customs official even smiled at me. I flinched a little as he authoritatively stamped my visa with the red ink words: “hết giá trị.” Expired. So long until next time.