About a week ago I was feeling rather scrooge-like about the Christmas season. Sure, I sent Christmas cards (yours’ should arrive any day), but overall I was being Blue-Christmasy. Then I woke up one morning and it dawned on me that the only way I could feel happy about Christmas was to throw a big old American Christmas party. (I don’t know how these ideas come over me...)
I called 5 of my closest Vietnamese teacher friends and told them they were invited to Madeline’s Christmas Extravaganza!!!
When that invitation seemed to cause some confusion, I said "I'm cookin' food. Wanna come?" They all said yes and asked if I would be cooking Vietnamese or Western food. When I said Western they told me that they had never eaten Western food and they couldn’t wait to try it.
And with that I suddenly became responsible for an entire Hemisphere’s culinary reputation.
Backstory: I grew up with a mother who could cook really well, which meant I never learned to cook myself. Why would I try to make dinner when hers’ would taste so much better? I then went to college and lived in New York, where most of my meals consisted of Alan’s salads from the deli across the street and Lean Cuisines from the freezer. I was busy. And lazy...
Then I moved to Vietnam, and suddenly wanting to eat meant needing to cook. What an archaic idea.
The first month in Hai Duong I just ate a lot of noodles. I lost weight, which would have been fantastic if I wasn’t also lightheaded and involuntarily shaking all the time. Finally, pale and hungry, I enlisted the help of Mrs. Thu. She took me to the market and helped me buy a chicken... A whole chicken. With feet. And a head. Then she took me back home and tried to leave....“But I don’t know what to do with it!!” I blurted out desperately, holding up the plastic bag, now dripping with blood.
“Oh. Did your mother always butcher the chicken for you in America?” She asked.
I didn’t have the heart to tell her, “No, Purdue did,” so I just said “Yes.”
Mrs. Thu came to my room and somehow managed to use my fruit knife to butcher the entire chicken. She’s an amazing woman. Then she left and I started to cry.
Since then, things have definitely improved. 3 weeks ago I figured out how to hard boil eggs. It gave me a feeling I imagine is akin to how the cavemen must’ve felt upon discovering the wheel: pure enlightenment, but also slight stupidity that it took so long. I now eat an average of 3 hard boiled eggs a day, sans yolks.
I’ve also learned some other valuable lessons in the kitchen. Like did you know that when you boil a chicken, the water becomes chicken broth? And chicken broth can help you make anything! And if you put tomatoes in hot water for just a few seconds, when you pull them out you can easily remove their skin. Online it says this is called “blanching.” Also, if you are using garlic, you can press the clove under a large knife and it breaks the inside and makes it very easy to “mince.” (That’s another word I found online.) Lastly, I have discovered that using the appropriate knife is imperative--and fun! Knives are very cheap here. You just pick them out of the knife bin at the market and someone wraps them in newspaper and sends you on your way. I’ve taken to buying knives like I’ve taken to buying jeans: obsessively.
I’ve also taken a liking to tofu. A stick of tofu, about the size of a stick of butter, costs 1,000 Dong--less than $0.06. At first, I was adverse to tofu. As a daughter in a family of deer hunters, the prospect of eating tofu had always made me feel like I would bring shame upon my father’s house. I had similar feelings before I started eating Sushi. I would take one look at the yellowtail sashimi and hear Dad’s voice saying, “Where I come from, we call that bait.” I have since moved passed these feelings.
A testament to how much my culinary experience has improved in Vietnam can be seen in that I now LOVE going to the open air market. It’s about 2 Km away, and I ride my bike there at least twice a week. I have certain ladies who I always buy from, and I love how happy they look each time I arrive. This may be because they know they can charge me twice as much as they do anyone else, but I like to think they just think I’m pretty. They’ve also started throwing in freebies--an extra tomato here, some lemon leaves there. And as I walk through the market, carefully inspecting the produce as if I actually have any clue what to look for, I can hear all of my most vital stats buzzing through the air in Vietnamese:
“American.” “23.” “Teacher.” “Not married.”
There is also always a great deal of slapping. I used to think people were mad at me; now I know that the aggressive whacking is just their way of saying, “Good to see ya again, White girl!”
(Me at the chicken counter with some students)
Back to the Christmas party: I decked out the apartment in tinsel and wrapped small gifts for all the ladies. I also played Christmas music and bought snow themed plates and bowls. My attempt at eggnog failed, but I did buy wine. I started drinking at 3, when I burnt the first round of onions. The meal was simple: garlic bread, buttered green beans, and spaghetti with a tomato, mushroom, and chicken sauce. Kind of Chicken Marsala-ish. The ladies arrived, said my flat looked clean “for me,” and sat down for the meal. The one unavoidably Vietnamese aspect of the meal was that we sat on the floor. I don’t have a table, and they’re used to sitting on the floor anyway, so we went with it. I lit candles, too, kind of like an advent wreath. However, unlike my mother, I didn’t make everyone sing “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” I thought that would be just a bit too much.
Everyone loved the food, which I think surprised them as much as it did me. They again asserted that Vietnam would make a good wife out of me yet. Well, one can only hope. I didn’t come all this way for nothing.
After the meal, they helped me clean up and wash the dishes. They also asked if I’ve been missing America because of Christmas, to which I gave a resounding, “Yes.”
I really have been. A lot. Knowing that there is a big, fluffy blizzard at home has made me pine for the East Coast even more. This is made easier only by the fact that I feel so blessed to have the teachers I work with as friends. The day before the dinner, I sent Mrs. Thanh, who is 8 months pregnant, a text message reminding her that the party started at 5pm. She wrote back, “It will be a very special dinner in my life.” That put on a lot of pressure, but I also found it to be something of an honor. It was a very special dinner for me as well.
Oh, and this is Minh. Huyen's daughter, and the guest of honor.
