My first phở related memory was not the most pleasant. As a child, my younger brother and I were fond of the Pot Noodle brand of instant snacks. The premise was simple, you added boiling water, emptied the sauce packet, waited a few minutes, stirred, and scoffed it down without burning the inside of your mouth. On this particular dark day, our mother decided instead of cooking the Pot Noodle with plain boiling water, she devilishly decided to use hot phở stock. If there’s a memory that encapsulates my childhood relationship to the food I grew up with this would be that. Whilst we were upset, I am sure my brother cried, we also laughed at the travesty of our situation. We craved hot greasy chips, we longed for juicy burgers, we desired chicken nuggets, not the meals our mother lovingly made.
Growing up I took for granted that I was able to have Vietnamese food cooked for me daily. I didn’t appreciate the lengths my mother would go to, hunting down ingredients, and trying to recreate the dishes that she had come to love and perfect. Being able to source key ingredients was never always as easy as popping to the ‘world food’ aisle in your local supermarket. Jack Shieh, director of Vietnamese Mental Health Services, spoke of when he was first resettled in Peterborough in the late 1970s, they were unable to get rice, thus they would make trips to London to pick up this essential grain that forms the backbone of a simple family meal. It was only when they made friends with the local Chinese takeaway, they were able to procure a local intermediary. The proprietors of the takeaway would pick up extra supplies on their trips to London on behalf of Jack.
It took me leaving home and moving out for university to appreciate piping hot chả nems (spring rolls) or a bowl of steaming bún bò Huế (a spicy rice noodle and beef soup from Huế) my mother would make for me when I would visit home. I would sometimes get my mum to make gà luộc (boiled chicken), then shred them into single servings, which I would take back to my term-time accommodation and stash away in the freezer, later to be retrieved on lazy nights.
When I lived in Hanoi I never got bored of eating out, neglecting my kitchen and allowing dust to accumulate on porcelain bowls. During this time my Vietnamese food lexicon grew immeasurably feeding my inner gluttonous self, I ate and drank things I didn’t know existed and struggled to pronounce. I owe a lot to the food and places where it was served, it became spaces of learning, Vietnamese language, culture, and customs were enjoyed alongside a cold glass of bia hơi (beer), a bite of nem chua (fermented pork rolls), or plate of đậu phụ chiên xù (fried tofu)…
When I returned to live in the UK, my partner and I would frequent Centre 151, a Vietnamese refugee community centre, every Saturday for a year. They had a lunch club and each week they served a different noodle soup. We would join the table occupied by the men who were about my parent’s age, they would spend their lunch regaling us about stories of their youth, their escapades, or recent visits to Vietnam, whilst we slurped down our warm bowls of soup. One vivid story they retold, that in their day many Vietnamese foodstuffs were in short supply, a bowl of phở would consist of only boiled bone broth, bánh phở (phở noodles), some MSG but no meat, which was nicknamed the phở không người lái (pilotless phở). If you were lucky you would get two tiny strips of pork. It was during this period enterprising Chinese vendors in Hanoi decided to add bánh quẩy (fried doughsticks). A tradition that still sticks today and is rarely seen outside of Hanoi. It was something I only came across when I lived there, getting to know the city one warm bowl at a time, ever since, I always try to have them with my phở.
When Asia Art Activism came into being in the summer of 2018 the first event we held at Raven Row was a food potluck. Over the years food came to be an important occasion for AAA associates and friends to convene, whether that be a dumpling-making session, warm hotpots on dark winter days or an impromptu shared lunch. When Annie Jael Kwan, Howl Yuan, and myself, conceived the Rock the Hotpot idea, it got us giddily and excited. We were able to stimulate our intellectual curiosity whilst stuffing our faces. We wanted to centre food in discussions of locality, migration, identity, and community. Food has always been an important part of our identity, it shapes how we greet one another, how we bond, but it is also an extension of community and hospitality. The poem below encapsulates the shame in not being able to share a meal with a friend when they come to visit.
Bạn đến chơi nhà by Nguyễn Khuyễn
Đã bấy lâu nay bác tới nhà,
Trẻ thời đi vắng, chợ thời xa.
Ao sâu, sóng cả, khôn chài cá;
Vườn rộng rào thưa, khó đuổi gà.
Cải chửa ra cây, cà mới nụ,
Bầu vừa rụng rốn, mướp đương hoa.
Đầu trò tiếp khách, trầu không có,
Bác đến chơi đây, ta với ta.
A friend comes to visit by Nguyễn Khuyễn
It’s been a while since you’ve visited me,
The young are away, and the market is far.
The pond is deep, the water choppy, and difficult to fish,
My garden is large, and chickens are hard to catch.
The vegetables are young, aubergines are yet to harvest,
The gourds are in infancy, the marrow has just flowered.
For guests who visit, not even a betel nut I can offer,
Friend you have come to my home, it is just you and me.
It must have been the first time, or one of the first times I had cooked phở, it was for two friends who were living in London. I took a whole duffle bag of ingredients to their flat, a whole chicken, pork bones, spring onions, coriander, spices, MSG, chicken powder, nước mắm (fish sauce), and I even brought a large pot. When I opened the bag, to my horror, I had forgotten the key ingredient, bánh phở. My friend said not to worry, we could go to her local Vietnamese restaurant, which she frequented often, they would sell us uncooked bánh phở. We took a short walk from the flat to what appeared on the outside, not your typical restaurant, it didn’t sit on a high street, nor did it have large windows where it could entice hungry tummies from the street to be coerced in, and the entrance was protected by green metal railings you would typically see in English public parks. When I asked the waiter, they said they couldn’t sell me one measly packet of bánh phở in that shy manner; maybe I would have had better luck if I had spoken Vietnamese. Alas, we ended up using miến (mung bean noodle) from a local shop. It was many years later that I would know that the restaurant was An Việt, a place I would come to know intimately, albeit after its restaurant closed doors.
It was not until my partner and I got our flat that I was faced with the real possibility of not having regular phở unless I made it. The first few times I made it with beef bones and oxtail I was not happy with the result, it was too bland, too fatty, when I added MSG, salt, and nước mắm, it made it too one dimensional. Andrea Nguyễn, who wrote The Pho Cookbook (Ten Speed Press, 2017), suggested adding a pig’s trotter for extra viscosity, but that didn’t solve it either. I added sá sùng (peanut worms), then the next time I doubled them, the time after that I threw in some dried shrimp too. I tried making it in the pressure cooker a handful of times but apart from making the meat soft and it was still unsatisfactory. Over time I removed the oxtail and beef bones, swapped them out for pork bones and once I settled on brisket I never went back. I started saving chicken thigh bones to add extra oomph to the stock. Sometimes we would use beef rib when we had it. But what is most important I gave it time, time to respect the dish, to learn what we liked, because it also had to make my partner happy too. I also learned to give the dish a delicate touch, to let it bubble away gently. I learnt that it is about taste and adjusting, taste and adjusting.
Going back to the time when I lived in Hanoi, I would travel far and wide to try new or different places. Dragging my cousin or friends out on my sojourns across the city, when they decried they were not hungry, I rebutted, “you don’t need to be hungry to eat”, twisting their arm into joining me. Many times I wouldn’t bother with the company, I would make the trip alone, satisfied in emptying another bowl.
The Covid-19 pandemic brought a shuddering halt to the things we took for granted. Our Rock the Hotpot inception was put on hold. I was unable to make my yearly trip back to Vietnam, meaning that my supplies of hard to get ingredients, Vietnamese coffee, sá sùng , quả sấu (dracontomelon), chả cốm (pork patties with young rice), rượu nếp (rice liquor), and more, have all emptied. The lockdowns, the bare supermarket shelves, the closed restaurants, and our socially distant relationships suddenly gave a new perspective to the times we sat and shared food and drink.
For a long time, I was never happy with my phở, I could never quite get the balance right, that salty, umami, sweet, and meatiness working and complimenting each other. I kept on complicating it, getting more and more ingredients, getting different kitchen utensils, cooking it for longer each time, sure I was only one missing jigsaw away from getting the perfect phở. Cooking during Covid-19 induced isolation made me realise that nourishment or taste was not the reason why I eat, sure I could share meals with my partner and a recent young addition to our family, our son, but I also missed my friends, my family, I missed making connections around the dining table.
I bought different cookbooks hoping they would illuminate the secret to the perfect phở. Yet what I found was something more interesting. Many of the cookbooks were by diasporic Vietnamese living in the West. Flicking through some of the earlier ones, what struck me was how isolating it must have felt to be cooking in the diaspora in the pre-digital age, the act of recreating their favourite meals must have been quite the endeavour. Or how difficult it is to find the necessary ingredients, many of them list endless substitutes, others are almost apologetic for the “exotic” add-ins. Diasporic cookbooks rarely are simply a collection of instructions and an accompanying list of ingredients. But rather they entangle the author’s identity with their cooking practices, how their sense of belonging to various sites and spaces is negotiated through food.
Cường Phạm works between sound and community, sometimes they intersect, sometimes they don’t. He finds himself trying to constantly negotiate and situate himself in relation to cultural identity, movement, sites of community and geographical spaces. He holds a Master’s in Southeast Asia studies at SOAS, where his thesis explored the Vietnamese diasporic experience through hip-hop. Through his work at the grassroots, he has co-curated ‘Record, Retrieve, Reactivate’ (An Viet Foundation) and ‘Resettled Spaces’ (Lien Viet) which explored the history, memory, and language of the East and South East Asian migration experience. He is currently in the process of setting up an archive of British-Vietnamese documents, photos, and other artefacts relating to the British-Vietnamese experience. Under the handle phạmbinho he also hosts a monthly show NTS, an independent online radio platform. In which he, and occasional guests, attempts to musically reframe ‘Asia’ as a contested paradigm. He has also appeared on BBC Asian Network, Netil Radio, Dublab, no10.as, DSTRACKTD, A:\files, Vinyl Factory, he has performed at Tate Modern and alongside collectives/labels Eastern Margins, Chinabot, Rumah Fest and Nhạc Gãy and has/had other projects with SOAS, AAA Radio, and East Asian Ticket Club x Royal Court, Arts Catalyst, and Chisenhale Gallery. Cường is also an associate of Asia-Art-Activism, and he recently co-curated the online programme ‘Till We Meet Again IRL’.
World Wide Wontons 