With the update of DVAN and diaCRITICS’s site, we also added a Bookshop.org page! Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org is an online bookstore with a mission to financially support local, independent bookstores. Check out DVAN’s Bookshop page to see our shelves of Vietnamese diasporic literature, ranging from Vietnamese American fiction to young adult and children’s literature. We’re especially excited to have shelf of cookbooks created with the help of Monique Truong.
In this essay, Truong discusses the recipes and stories cookbooks carry—for food is more than just nourishment for the body, but it what sustains a culture.
– Eric Nguyen, editor in chief
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Culinary prejudice seems to me stronger than political prejudice and even than race prejudice . . . . The mind can understand and admit different ideas. The heart may even open to friendship and love. But when the stomach contracts at the mere mention of a drink or a dish that it detests, there is nothing to do about it . . . . [T]o like the cuisines of other peoples you have to be able to put yourself almost in their skin.
~ Tao Kim Hai’s “A Universal Tongue” in Gourmet, September 1946
I’m not sure I fully agree with Tao Kim Hai’s hierarchy of prejudices, but he’s absolutely right about the visceral, intimate nature of culinary tastes and preferences. What for Tao reads as an imperative—put yourself almost in their skin—is to me more of a possibility, a quasi-transformational act that may explain why my three novels have each emerged from books about cooking or eating: The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, The Man Who Tasted Shapes, and La Cuisine Creole, respectively. I see my characters and imagine their stories by first encountering what may have been in their kitchens, bowls, and mouths.
I’m just beginning such a journey with Tao, thanks to a recent introduction to his writings by author and illustrator Lucey Bowen, who over the years has doggedly attempted to piece together the fragments of his life story, before and after his unlikely appearance on the pages of Gourmet, the monthly food and culture magazine that defined America’s culinary aspirations from 1941-2009. According to Bowen, Tao was the venerable magazine’s “first voice from Southeast Asia.”
Born in 1905, when present-day Vietnam was a part of French Indochina, Tao Kim Hai left at the age of 18 to further his studies in Europe, where he would remain for the next 22 years, eventually marrying a French citizen and becoming one himself. In September 1946, the publication date of “A Universal Tongue,” the first among a handful of Tao’s essays for Gourmet, he was 41 years old and had been living in the U.S. for about a year and a half, with an address at East 17th Street in New York City, which he shared with Ruth Barber, an American woman who was conspicuously not his wife. Barber and Tao would eventually marry, and he became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1958.
I don’t know how long my travels, literary and alimentary, with Tao will be, but it does feel fated that we’ve met.
Bowen had graciously offered him to me as an example of a diasporic Vietnamese writer who “made no apologies” for the food of his homeland. She was responding to my doleful Facebook post:
I’m thinking about refugees and how we write about the foods of our country of origin. How we often apologize for our hard-to-find ingredients or for the funk that makes them so damn tasty. How we think it necessary to convince readers that our cuisine is “easy” and “simple.” How we adapt until we forget ourselves.
I was depression spiraling because I’d spent days rereading the English-language cookbooks written by Vietnamese diasporic writers, living in the U.S.
The earliest example in my collection is Vietnamese Cookery (Charles E. Tuttle, 1968) by the Honolulu, Hawaii-based Jill Nhu Huong Miller; and from the post-1975 refugee-resettlement era, there’s The Classic Cuisine of Vietnam (Barron’s, 1979) by Guildford, Connecticut-neighbors Bach Ngo and Gloria Zimmerman and Flavors of Southeast Asia: Recipes from Indonesia, Thailand & Vietnam (101 Productions, 1979) with its Vietnam section authored by Lan Cao. Her bio situated her in Raleigh, North Carolina, along with a husband and two children, so I knew she wasn’t the same Lan Cao who would go on to write Monkey Bridge, the first Vietnamese American novel (in English), published by Viking in 1997. I emailed the latter Lan just to double-check and to introduce her to her namesake and published predecessor.
To varying degrees, tucked into the pages of the early cookbooks was so much shame: for the “very fishy odor” of “fish’s gravy,” which was how imported bottles of fish sauce were sometimes labeled, according to Miller, and which led Cao to suggest that it could be “replaced with salt or soy sauce . . . if you find its pungency objectionable;” for monosodium glutamate, aka MSG, which Miller assured readers was included “sparingly” in her recipes and, according to Cao, could “be omitted without any fear of ruining the dish,” thus absolving readers of their anti-MSG sentiments; for “citronella root” (lemongrass), which Miller vetted for readers by stating that it was “usually well liked by foreigners, as well as by Vietnamese;” and for the litany of all the ingredients that could be omitted and substituted into oblivion.
Along with their culinary apologia, albeit conscious or subconscious, there were also poignant notes of homesickness and nostalgia. In Miller’s list of ingredients “exotic to non-oriental” cooks, she shared that “it was quite a search” to find the English translation for an item that turned out to be “borax” (nb: not considered food safe) and that translation “finally” came courtesy of a Vietnamese architecture student at the University of Washington, whose full name she then included: Nguyen van Hung.
I could instantly see the handwritten letter that Miller airmailed to him or, if she were under a publisher’s deadline, hear her expensive long-distance phone call to him: “Anh ơi, what’s the translation for hàn the?”
Imagine having to reach out to someone so far away to ask about what was once a minor detail of your everyday life but now has become a mystery to you. I’m tearing up as I write this, because I don’t have to imagine Miller’s displacement and isolation, as seven years after the publication of her book, I along with so many other South Vietnamese refugees would experience for ourselves the not-knowing, the reaching-for, and the deep, outsized gratitude for that one acquaintance or friend who could serve as our witness and source.
Here’s the headnote for Cao’s “Beef and Rice Noodle Soup” recipe:
Pho is a northern Vietnamese specialty, usually eaten for breakfast or as a snack. Most people don’t prepare this soup at home because the taste is much better when it is prepared in large quantities. There are many “soup stores” in the cities and towns that specialize in serving pho. These stores are as popular as hamburger stands are in the United States. This recipe will serve 12.
Look at how the stylistic convention of Cao’s new country has required the italicization of the word “pho,” designating and transforming what was once a quotidian bowl of soup into something foreign and apart from the rest of her text. I can see her trying to reclaim its ubiquity and normalcy by emphasizing pho’s “popularity,” analogizing its purveyors there to those that sell hamburgers here. Of course, the hamburger is not simply a favored national fare. It’s synonymous worldwide with the United States. So, if I were to follow Cao’s rhetorical lead to its implied but unstated conclusion, this is perhaps what she may have wanted to convey: Pho is Vietnam. What follows the headnote isn’t a recipe but an incantation, an evocation, an attempted reconstruction of another land and life, and if you omit or substitute one of its ingredients you’ll create something else, something new, maybe something good though there’s no guarantee.
On the dust jacket of Ngo and Zimmerman’s cookbook, the brief bio for Ngo included a condensed story about the happenstance of refugee flight and showed readers the very moment when her own recipes became imbued with such weight:
In April of 1975, Bach’s husband returned home one day to announce that they were leaving Vietnam in 30 minutes. In the rush of packing, Bach simply threw her things into her suitcase, when she arrived in California, she discovered that she had packed her recipes, but no clothing.
Ngo wasn’t the only Vietnamese refugee whose exodus included their recipes, as Andrea Nguyen would later confirm in 2006 in the introduction to Into the Vietnamese Kitchen, the first of her many excellent cookbooks:
My parents had purposefully packed light to avoid suspicion, bringing along only their most precious yet practical belongings. Two small, black leather suitcases held identification papers and a change of clothes for each of us. My mother squeezed her best jewelry, a couple of important photos, a bottle of water, two packets of dried instant noodles, and a small orange notebook filled with her handwritten recipes into her handbag.
For me, all cookbooks are “precious yet practical,” and those by diasporic Vietnamese writers are even more so. Whether their volumes are focused on Vietnamese foodways or not, their life stories, experiences, memories, and desires are part of every page, sometimes half-hidden, sometimes in plain view, and always deeply revealing.
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For further readings on the narrative possibilities and implications of cookbooks by diasporic authors, Associate Professor Anita Mannur suggests the following: “Recipes for Reading Recipes?” and “Quieting Noisy Bellies: Moving, Eating, and Being in the Vietnamese Diaspora,” by Delores B. Phillips, “The Gastropoetics of the South Asian Diaspora” by Parama Roy, “Culinary Eros in Contemporary Hispanic Female Fiction: From Kitchen Tales to Table Narratives,” by Maite Zubiaurre, and Mannur’s own Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture.
Contributor’s Bio
Monique Truong was born in Saigon and currently lives in New York City. Her first novel, The Book of Salt, was a New York Times Notable Book. It won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, the 2003 Bard Fiction Prize, the Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award, and the 7th Annual Asian American Literary Award, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and Britain’s Guardian First Book Award. She is the recipient of the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship, Princeton University’s Hodder Fellowship, and a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship.
