How a Restaurant Menu Taught Me the True Essential Ingredients of a Good Book
When I used to coach humans living with fearful dogs, I would often ask whether the dog would eat in the presence of the stimulus in question. It’s not a perfect stress test. There are many reasons a dog might not be tempted by a treat, but the test is quick and easy to administer, and the results easily read and often informative. In the presence of a threat, resources are directed towards fight or flight mechanisms; appetite is suppressed.
Testing of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems was likely not at the forefront of my parents’ minds when they opened a Vietnamese restaurant in Queens, New York in 1978. Likely, the decision had more to do with the fact that Marie and Long were raising seven children.
Little did they know that, as their patrons were eagerly downing Imperial rolls and bánh cuốn, that these patrons were also rewarding their brains with a dopamine hit, this while listening to cassettes of Vietnamese cải lương and gazing upon the page-sized, hand-traced maps of Vietnam that adorned all the menu covers, each inlet and rocky point of the extended country documented. Long insisted that the menus reflect the colors of the flag of South Vietnam. The menu was printed on yellow paper, the map traced in red marker. At the top, in large block letters: Viet-Nam Restaurant.
Back in Vietnam and in the Philippines, Marie had assisted in kitchens that served then President Ngô Đình Diệm. Though Marie did not document her recipes, she carried many of them around the world with her, including that for stuffed, boneless chicken. Her technique of deboning an entire chicken excluding the tips of the drumsticks, while keeping the breast intact to be stuffed, astounded many, as did the stuffing itself, which, early on, included chicken liver pâté, and later, mung bean noodles, mushrooms, and ground pork. As access to ingredients increased, Marie would reach deeper into her mental catalog of recipes. Her thin, crisp bánh xèo, in which she managed to cook shrimp to tender perfection, while retaining the snap of fresh beansprouts, have spoiled me forever. Reminiscing about these flavors and textures sends me into a reverie, and, judging from the warm, fuzzy feelings, my system is being flooded with happy hormones.
My maternal grandfather was a fisherman. My mother grew up on a boat on Tonlé Sap in Cambodia, handing out cigarette rations and collecting chits for borrowed tools. For her, moving to bustling Saigon after marriage was a monumental change. Little did she know that this move was simply an amuse-bouche. After that, she would move to the Philippines, then India, back to Vietnam, and, finally, to the United States.
As word spread about Marie and Long’s Vietnamese restaurant in Queens, critics from The New York Post and The Daily News would visit. Marie would move on to cook in the West Village in Manhattan. She would be featured in The New York Times and Gourmet Magazine. She would cook for the likes of Cindy Crawford, Mick Jagger, Julia Child, and Robert De Niro. All restaurant patrons would have to pass alongside her kitchen to get to their seats in the dining room. At least for a moment, they might be reminded that their evening was in the hands of a diminutive woman from the other side of the world, a woman displaced due to war. Richard Gere never failed to acknowledge Marie’s starring role in his evening, stopping to press his palms together and bow his head to her on the way both into and out of the restaurant.
These days, given our divisive politics and myriad global struggles, how many of us find it difficult to connect with our family members and neighbors, let alone beyond? What can an individual, a tiny cog in this immense world, do to broaden our circles and affiliations, create intersections, and cultivate feelings of belonging in others, which we know well are the bedrock of social stability?
By some estimates, at the time when Marie and Long emigrated from Vietnam to the United States, there were fewer than 1,000 Vietnamese in the U.S. Marie and Long were strange birds in a foreign land, a land whose name was — to Americans — that of a war. And Marie and Long had the audacity not only to anoint their restaurant with that same name but to emplace a map of that land where many teenage American had lost their lives on the front of every single menu.
Marie and Long reclaimed “Vietnam” back from the headlines and re-rooted the name in a graceful stretch of land, in a place that a family of chess and stickball players, a disco dancer, a phone operator, a chef, and a gardener once called home, a land to which all patrons of Viet-Nam Restaurant had now sprouted a connection. How many times was the name “Vietnam” invoked by patrons not in the context of war but with warmth and longing? I have to believe that it was not sheer luck that enabled all nine members of the family to escape unscathed by any serious episodes of racially motivated violence at the restaurant.
While I was working on my new poetry collection Precedented Parroting, I spent a reasonable amount of time procrastinating and scrolling on Instagram. Before I placed the collection with a publisher, I was already dreaming of a book cover. I imagined it would include work by Yen Ha, an architect, artist, and writer. I did not know Yen, had never met her. My introduction to her artwork was via her Instagram page. There, I learned that in the early part of the pandemic, while we were all suffering from social isolation, Yen mailed out hundreds of original, postcard-sized works to family, friends, and anyone who requested one. If I were to build an intentional community, I would certainly want such a person in it. When my poetry manuscript found a home, I sent my editor, Jim Johnstone, curator of the Anstruther Books imprint at Palimpsest Press, a link to Yen’s website and asked what he thought. Unsurprisingly, he was all in. Yen had never had her art on a book cover. Happiness is not a zero-sum game. It was a win for all three of us.
I share these stories not because I have an answer to the alarming degree of polarization and dehumanization and genocide that we are witnessing, but because I wake in the dead of night, heart beating like I’ve raced across a field, searching for cover, only to find another — more open — field. And I am not a rabbit. Nor a displaced Gazan seeking flour and finding gunfire. Rather, in my belly, beside abject grief, sit pasta, greens, and tofu. My body rests on flannel sheets. Still, the heart beats. We cannot live like this, our bodies primed for both fight and flight, unable to calm our beating rabbit hearts. Unable to help those actually pursued like rabbits.
As Diane di Prima writes, “NO ONE WAY WORKS, it will take all of us / shoving at the thing from all sides.”
We must harness everything we have, everything we do. We must use every part of our books as bridges, leave no margins. We must build belonging. Whose art will grace the cover? Whose heart could use some grace in the acknowledgments? Under whose auspices and with what other writers will we read? Where will we eat cake? All of it matters. We must pursue every bridge-building opportunity a book offers and make use of these as if our lives depend upon it. Because they do.
