APIAnionated: Across the Vietnamese bakery’s counter
Soft cinnamon bread, mini palmiers, coconut and chocolate macaroon cookies resting on shelves of dark wood that span almost the entire width of the small, dim but welcoming Vietnamese bakery. Meat pastries — bánh patê sô — sit warmly in a little silver oven on the long counter’s left corner, instantly bringing to my mind the image of my mom standing in the kitchen, brushing egg yolk on her pastries. I quietly read aloud some of the pastry labels and thrill at seeing words like “lá dứa.” Above the shelves and printed in Vietnamese letters of white, gold and red, their menu items of traditional coffee and sandwiches promise the taste of a homeland we have never been to.
One woman stood behind the cashier, another in the open doorway of a kitchen behind her. My siblings, cousin and I were in desperate need of bánh mì — Vietnamese sandwiches of meat and pickled veggies — for our road trip to the Oregon coast. This tiny bakery was not our first choice, but walking into that dim room lined with trays of Vietnamese and French pastries along a rustic and chipped counter was like walking into something so familiar. Looking up at the menu, murmuring the words for meatball and shredded pork and feeling them slipping off our tongues slipped us into old moments of road trips to other sandwich shops. A stoic expression on her face, the woman behind the cashier listened as my cousin and I attempted in our mother tongue to order an iced coffee and four sandwiches. The reply we received was taciturn and completely normal — as defined by our memory of how a middle-aged Vietnamese woman tended to act toward strangers. “Cảm ơn!” I thanked her with a smile when she handed back my credit card. My eyes slid over the open kitchen doorway to see the other woman skillfully brush sauce and place colorful vegetables on French bread. Over the food her hands moved efficiently, and the shop’s silence lightened with the swoosh-swoosh of her plastic gloves. In our small circle we stood and waited until the first woman presented my cousin with his iced coffee. He too thanked her in Vietnamese.
Something somewhere inside her must have changed or been confirmed then because she began to speak with us in a voice that washed away the silence of the room. She was recommending food and addressing us as “con,” a pronoun that indicates kinship between an adult and a younger person. In that moment time and space seemed to narrow down to a single point just large enough for us, the two ladies and their bakery to reside in. What existed then was neither the homeland of Vietnam nor our home in the States, but an interim sphere comprised of all our separate histories connected by those small words of recognition. Walls had collapsed and a door opened to receive those longing to be at a home away from home. Suddenly, the woman talking to us sounded like the church ladies selling pandan waffles, who sounded like my aunts. To her, who did my siblings, cousin and I sound like?
How do the people of my motherland sound? They can’t sound like my mother who, on a grocery trip in Vietnam, was pointed out instantly as a Vietnamese come back from the States because of how polite she was. Isn’t that incredible? A stretch of time in another land can cause such an altering, and yet all my life it was my parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents, the families I sat with every Sunday at our Vietnamese Catholic church who defined the essence of a people oceans away — if I close my eyes I can trace it with ease: those family parties so boisterous the walls seemed to shiver with our laughter, the kitchen island like a buffet at which the kids loitered and listened to the adults chatting; I see the traditional café with its tables occupied by middle-aged & elderly men, or even better, they’re crouching on the side of the grocery store, a cigarette in one hand and a cà phê sữa đá in the other. I see their tanned, hard faces and smell the smoke that my grandpa once blew.
Interchangeability is not the same as reminiscence, but when the setting of your existence is a bridge between the place you’ve left behind or never known and the place now accepted as home, the empty spaces belonging to loved ones sometimes are temporarily filled in without your consent. At the word “con” a transformation takes place: I am once again twelve years old, the little niece of my aunt and the little grandchild of my grandpa. Opposite me the adult, for just a moment, becomes my protector; the world is safe there in the arms of that word, and that permanent loneliness derived from pieces missing in your inheritance softens. It would be silly of me to think that the woman behind the counter could replace any of my aunts, but hearing her voice suddenly turning a kind of friendly I could only ever associate with Vietnamese folks, it wasn’t hard to imagine it coming from the people in my life. To me they all carry my missing pieces — in the way they talk and laugh, raise their eyebrows, work with a practiced speed. With our broken Vietnamese that can sometimes make our family guffaw or the excitement in our eyes as the woman handed us the bag of bánh mì, I can only hope that we’re carrying something for them too.
This piece is published in a series responding to APIAnionated’s Spring call for pitches: personal essays that share your experience unravelling a loose thread of your personal history with objects — a rabbit hole down your mother’s letters, heirlooms lost and found, documenting activism through protest signs, etc.
