5 posts tagged “vietnam”
[Drumroll please...] Ok, here it is... the recipe some of you have been waiting for. Ba Ngoai's Soup bap cua. I've probably only waited so long because I didn't want you all to know how easy it is to make. It's much easier to solicit oohs and ahhhs when you think I've been slaving over the stove all day.
Ba Ngoai didn't really measure things, she just knew what tasted right. I'm the same way with this recipe, so you'll have to bear with me and taste as you go to get the right proportions. Well, here goes:
Ingredients:
1 cab crab -- get the expensive kind (I think it's "lump" crab)
2 cloves garlic, minced
~ 1/2 onion, diced
1 can cream-style corn
~ 1/2 can whole corn kernels (according to taste - the kernels sweeten the soup)
1 can asparagus tips
1 big can low-sodium chicken broth
Sautee the garlic in butter. Once the garlic flavor is infused into the butter (you'll smell it, but before the garlic is burnt), remove the garlic (as much as you can, anyway). Sautee the onion in the butter. Once the onion is translucent, add the crab, and sautee until well coated and everything's mixed together well.
Add the remaining ingredients to a large soup pot, and fire it up. Add the crab, onion, and butter mixture to the soup. Bring it to a boil, then lower the heat to simmer. As it simmers, remove the foam that comes to the top.
That's it! Easy, you can make it ahead, you can freeze it, and it tastes great. It's a good comfort food to give to someone who needs some food they can store. Hope you enjoy.
I've started and stopped this post a few times now. I wanted to find just the right words, but in the end, decided that insufficient words would be better than none. It's been a couple of weeks since my grandma, Ba Ngoai, passed away. This post is more for me, really, than anyone; it is to help me focus on remembering her life--the joy and influence she spread--and to share this incredible story with friends.
I've written about bits of her past before. You might have come to understand what a funny woman she was. Or maybe how hospitable she was, or stylish, or that she was a good cook. She was all this and more. She could as easily be described as a matriarch. A leader. A survivor. A lover. A believer. This is how I know her life....
Ba Ngoai [that's Grandma in Vietnamese], or Day, was born in 1927. I don't know what Day means in Vietnamese but it always seemed like a perfectly fitting name to me, since she always had a sunny disposition, joking about everything. She was born to a well-respected country doctor and his wife. He was well-educated, but not wealthy, since some of his patients could only pay him in chickens.
At a party, she met my grandfather, Phuoc. His name also seems rather fitting.
My grandfather was fabulously wealthy. He was not only a cousin of the king of Cambodia, but the biggest movie producer in Vietnam. My grandparents married for love, which in those days was pretty rare. Ba Ngoai had 12 children. Six of them survived; some died in childbirth, one drowned at the age of two.
The family lived in a mansion in Saigon, with a full staff. They had plantations in the central highlands of Vietnam. As a child, my mom enjoyed an unlimited expense account at the fancy department store in a fashionable district of Saigon, and she had afternoon tea and swam in the pool at the Hotel Continental. Ba Ngoai wore the most fashionable clothes, both in the Vietnamese traditional style modern European styles. Her clothes were tailored. My mom recalls wistfully one of her chemises that had diamonds on the shoulder straps, so you could see them sparkle underneath a lacy shirt.
It was pretty typical during that time, in Vietnam, for men of wealth and power to have mistresses, and my grandfather was no exception. My grandma, though, was the exception... she wasn't going to live with that, so they divorced. My grandfather had good attorneys on his side, and the divorce settlement shows it. The alimony he paid my Grandma, including child support for six children, equaled less than half of the lowest-paid maid's salary. At least the maid's salary was supplemented with room, board, and a clothing allowance, though.
After the divorce, Ba Ngoai's life changed drastically. She worked. She owned a couple of restaurants, and ran a plantation. If you've ever seen the movie Indochine, it was much like that. I don't know how hard this new life was for her, because she never mentioned it to me. This new life of work may even have been more satisfying to her. I don't know where she learned to run businesses. Actually, she did tell me once, that when she was young, money came and went quickly. She said that when she first had money, she didn't know how to manage it, so she just spent it. After she lost it the first time, she got some back, so she bought some houses, figuring that if the money was gone again, her family would still have some place to live. So I guess she learned through mistakes. Those houses are still in her name in Vietnam, and her distant family members are still living in them today.
All this isn't to say that she was without flaws. It is easier for me, perhaps, to appreciate her sunny, loving qualities as a granddaughter, not having had to live through the hard times... my mother, for example, might have wished for more of my grandmother's time or attention. Sometimes the grandparent-grandchild relationship is less contentious than, for example, the mother-daughter relationship. I guess my point is that I don't want to diminish the complexity of her life by putting her on a pedestal. I also want to learn from my ability to appreciate my grandma's qualities and apply it to other relationships in my life. But no matter which way you slice it, Ba Ngoai sure did accomplish a lot while maintaining a great sense of humor.
During the Vietnam War, Ba Ngoai owned a restaurant in Can Tho, in the Mekong delta region, where my father (an American soldier) was stationed. Ba Ngoai used to feed him. When she was telling me about my dad, she was laughing, telling me how he wouldn't touch a drop of alcohol until he turned 21.
Later, my parents' marriage helped my grandma, aunts and uncle get out of Vietnam after the war. She literally left with the shirt on her back, clutching the kids and an American marriage certificate on the helicopter. I get the feeling, from not oft-discussed stories, that my Grandma saved my dad's life and he, hers. She moved to North Carolina after the war, starting again with nothing. She worked and got some government assistance, and sent money home to her family in Vietnam. She didn't have much, but her family in Vietnam had even less; they had barely enough to eat. Her brother, who was the mayor of Saigon, was sent to a Communist "re-education" camp.
My childhood memories of my Grandma center around her being a family matriarch. With six kids constant fighting is pretty common, I'm sure, and she was always trying to bring everyone together. She tried to get my mom not to worry so much. She held huge Tet (Chinese New Year) celebrations at her house. It was like half of Orange County visited her cramped apartment in the projects. She'd always have an entire roast pig, egg rolls, the works. She passed down the meaningful traditions of paying respects to our ancestors and our elders.
I am extremely blessed that I also got to know Ba Ngoai as an adult. Surprisingly, it was mostly through hospital visits, because that was when I was alone with her so she had to speak English. (She would usually speak a few lines of English, and rely on my aunts or mom to translate the rest to me in Vietnamese). It was then that I came to see her depth. She wasn't just a happy-go-lucky person, a grandma who ran off to Vegas on the senior citizen bus every chance she got, she was wise. Grandmas are supposed to be, I guess, but she could cut to the chase just by looking into your eyes.
At one hospital visit, we talked for hours. I hoped afterwards that she knew how much I appreciated that visit and how much I learned from her, how much of her spirituality I share. I was going to try to tell her that when paying my respects to her at the next Tet. When I kneeled before her at Tet, and started to tell her, not even two words out of my mouth, she stopped me. She just looked me in the eye, and said, "I know. You don't have to tell me because I already know." At that moment I knew we were on the same plane.
And so it is, her extraordinary life, come to an end. I couldn't have dreamed of a better model to understand the beauty and meaning of life.
One day, my mom went over to visit Ba Ngoai [remember, it sounds like "Ba why"] at her house in Huntington Beach. She walked inside, and found Grandma sitting at the table with six strangers, these middle-aged American guys, laughing up a storm. This is how it happened.
Earlier that day, Ba Ngoai was shopping at the Ranch 99 Market. If you've never been to one, it's a big Asian grocery store. Ba Ngoai saddles up to the fish counter to place her order, and beside her are six American guys, in their 50s and 60s, pointing at different things and trying to figure out what and how to order. (All the signs are in Vietnamese or Chinese). She asked them what they were doing.
The six American guys were G.I.s in the Vietnam War. That day, they were having a reunion, and they decided to cook some Vietnamese food for the occasion. They'd never done it before, so you gotta admire them for their sense of adventure. Ba Ngaoi loves G.I.s--she has fond memories of cooking for them at her restaurants in Vietnam. Plus, my dad was a G.I. Ba Ngaoi decided that there was no way these old American G.I.s could possibly cook themselves a proper Vietnamese meal. So after lots of shushing and insisting and prodding, she told them to come over to her house, where she'd cook their reunion dinner.
Ba Ngaoi finished buying her Vietnamese ingredients, and everyone followed her home. And of course, she cooked them a big meal. Big meal, seven people, really tiny kitchen table in a really tiny apartment. So they all huddled around, shared some stories, and that's when my mom walked in... to find Grandma as the center of it all.
My grandma isn't feeling well lately, and since she's been on my mind so much lately, I've decided to blog some stories about her. I guess this is sort of my way of saying a prayer. She's had such a colorful life thus far that it's easy to tell her stories, and I figure I ought to write them down somehow, before I forget the details.
This is my grandma on my mom's side, my Vietnamese grandma. We call her Ba Ngoai (sounds like "Bah Why", at least in my Americanized accent).
Ba Ngoai was born in Vietnam, one of many (12, I think?) children to middle or upper-middle class farmers. She married at 17 or 18. In a day of arranged marriages, hers was actually a 'romantic' marriage. Although many years and six children later, that romance ended in divorce--but that's another story altogether.
At this time, Vietnam was still a French colony. Saigon was the 'Paris of the Orient.' Ba Ngoai married into a heap of wealth, and as a wife, it was her responsibility to run a large household, including managing the staff, hosting dinner parties, and the like. Her husband was a big movie producer, and also a cousin of the king of Cambodia. She wore beautiful clothes, some French, some traditional Vietnamese style. Her French outfits were dresses and skirt suits, the kind worn with matching gloves, shoes, and a hat. Her Vietnamese outfit was typically a custom-tailored ao dai ("ow yai").
It was Ba Ngaoi, as well as Catholic boarding school, that taught my mother her impeccable European manners. Not just "don't talk with your mouth full," or "avoid discussing politics" -- but dip your soup spoon away from you so it doesn't look like you're gobbling, never abbreviate on formal correspondence, and keep a charger at everyone's place setting so there's never empty space in front of your guests.
You would think that a woman trained in such formalities would be uptight. But believe me, that's the last word you'd use to describe Grandma. It could be that she eventually lost all her money, when leaving Vietnam behind. She literally just brought what was on her back, and four kids, on the helicopter (two were already in the U.S.). It could be the divorce she went through much earlier. Or it could be the minimum-wage jobs she had in the U.S. to support her kids and her family back in Vietnam. But somehow, I don't think it was any of that--I think she's always had this fun, crazy spirit inside her. It's complemented by a deep spirituality, but my grandma is always seen laughing, tickling babies, and breaking the rules.
For instance...
Ba Ngaoi used to run Chinese card games out of her house in Huntington Beach. Her house is in kind of a little Vietnamese-American ghetto. Or "enclave" if you prefer. She'd have these old cronies over, women she knew from Saigon. (As later stories will reveal, Ba Ngaoi has contacts everywhere). These aren't the delicate old ladies you might think of -- these are old ladies with half their teeth that roll their own cigars. Seriously. She'd make them food and run the card games, and take some money out of the pot for the house. I guess she was fairly experienced at it, because after her divorce, she ran a restaurant in Vietnam. These little old ladies, Grandma included, would be laughing, swearing, and playing cards into the late hours. I could never figure out how to play that card game... all the cards have Chinese characters on them (which I can't read) and the game is some sort of strategic war game.
Well, that tells you a teensy bit about Ba Ngaoi's multi-faceted personality. I'll save the rest for the next story.
Show us change.
Submitted by quornflour.
Change: This is a Coca-Cola machine in a centuries-old temple of learning in Hanoi, Vietnam. (The Temple of Literature).
