Food has become a staple in Regarding Stories. It is not hard to find food-related imagery in novels, which is probably due to my selection bias on books. The titles chosen so far are written by contemporary women writers about various forms of relocation and adaption. The authors and their fictive personas share in common their geographical mobility; they differ in their circumstances and identities.
Butter Honey Pig Bread portrays adult immigrants, Older Sister, Not Necessarily Related explores the experiences of transracial, transnational adoptees, whereas Ru sheds light on the perspectives of refugees.
Kim Thúy delineates refugee literature from immigrant literature in her interview with Maclean’s:
“Refugee and immigrant are very different. A refugee is someone ejected from his or her past, who has no future, whose present is totally empty of meaning. In a refugee camp, you live outside of time – you don’t know when you’re going to eat, let alone when you’re going to get out of there. And you’re also outside of space because the camp in no man’s land. To be a human being you have to part of something. The first time that we got an official piece of paper from Canada, my whole family stared at it – until then, we were stateless, part of nothing.”
In the context of refugee experience in Ru, what role does food play?
Nguyen An Tinh (with a dot under the i) in Ru is described as a person known to “try as much as possible to acquire only those things that don’t extend the limits of my body” (41). She elaborates:
“In fact, I’m always glad to move; it gives me a chance to lighten my belongings, to leave objects behind so that my memory can become truly selective, can remember only images that stay luminous behind my closed eyelids. I prefer to remember the flutters in my stomach, my light-headedness, my upheavals, my hesitations, my lapses … I prefer them because I can shape them according to the colour of time, whereas an object remains inflexible, frozen, unwieldy.” (Thúy 100)
This leaves us with lyrical preservation of memories. Very often, they touch upon food.
Rice
Thúy’s debut novel documents her fictive character’s safe passage across the ocean. In Thúy’s subsequent novels, she would dip into more diverse experiences that she learnt and felt the obligation to write, “I can’t not,” said she in the same interview with Maclean’s.
Here is a piece of finally settling into a safe haven, a place to call home and to recuperate. It might be a cliché to state that food nourishes the body as well as the soul, but it takes Nguyen’s words to put it in context:
“The town of Granby was the warm belly that sheltered us during our first year in Canada. The local cosseted us one by one. The pupils in my grade school lined up to invite us home for lunch so that each of our noon hours was reserved by a family. And every time, we went back to school with nearly empty stomachs because we didn’t know how to use a fork to eat rice that wasn’t sticky. We didn’t know how to tell them that this food was strange to us, that they really didn’t have to go to every grocery store in search of the last box of Minute rice. We could neither talk to nor understand them. But that wasn't the main thing, There was generosity and gratitude in every grain of the rice left on our plates. To this day I still wonder whether words might have tainted those moments of grace.” (Thúy 21)
The mix of humour and bittersweetness delivers hope. It keeps the past adversities at bay. With this gratitude, the family would continue to reciprocate the grace and generosity they have received.
Toast
A mundane breakfast scene shows how the Nguyen’s adapts and develops roots.
“The trace of the red and yellow stripes of a Pom sandwich-bread bag is burned into one side of our first toaster. Our sponsors in Granby had placed that small appliance at the top of the list of essentials to buy when we moved into our first apartment. For years we lugged the toaster from one place to the next without ever using it, because our breakfast was rice, soup, leftovers from the night before. Quietly, we started eating Rice Krispies, without milk. My brothers followed this with toast and jam. Every morning for twenty years, without exception, the youngest breakfasted on two slices of sandwich bread with butter and strawberry jam, no matter where he was posted – New York, New Delhi, Moscow or Saigon.” (Thúy 109)
The family’s first toaster becomes an emotional anchor.
“During my latest visit to him I discovered that he keeps our old stained toaster in a cupboard. It’s the only trinket he has carted with him from country to country as if it were an anchor, or the memory of dropping the first anchor.” (Thúy 109)
Butter
The title of this post puts together the pantry staples of rice and bread and butter, but with a plot twist. Ru suggests a rather unexpected pairing of rice with butter – which seems to be a collective memory for Vietnamese from a certain era. The preferred butter is of Bretel brand, a salted butter packaged in tins imported from France.
In search of a little more on Bretel Butter, I stumbled upon a blog titled Viet World Kitchen by Andrea Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American home cook who gives a charming account on the nostalgic value of the luxury in a red can.
“My father has always been into butter, something that I picked up from him. For Vietnamese people of Bo Gia’s generation, the benchmark brand of butter came in a stout red can with gold lettering. Beurre Bretel (bơ Bretel, “buh Bruh-tell”) was highly prized for its super rich, umami-laden flavor. In a tropical country where water buffaloes far outnumbered dairy cows, the imported French butter was considered an expensive, luxury food.”
Her inherited sentiment is similar to what is portrayed in Ru. Nguyen recalls her father’s Sister Five devoting her life in taking care of her bedridden grandfather.
“At mealtimes, a servant would sit behind him to keep him rice, a mouthful at a time. His favourite meal was rice with roast pork. The slices of pork were cut so finely they seemed to be minced. But they weren’t to be chopped, only cut into small pieces two millimetres square. She mixed them with steaming rice served in a blue and white bowl with a silver ring around its rim to prevent chipping. If the bowls were held up to the sun, one could see translucent areas in the embossed parts. Their quality was confirmed by the glimmers that exposed the shades of blue in the patterns. The bowls nestled gently in my aunt’s hands at every meal, every day, for many years. She would hold one, delicate and warm, in her fingers and add a few drops of soy sauce and a small piece of Bretel butter that was imported from France in a red tin with gold lettering. I was also entitled to this rice now and then when we visited.” (Thúy 67)
This is more than nostalgia, the rose-tinted lens and distance that render things romantic. This seems to be a small piece of constancy that the family holds on to amid all the turbulences and separations. There is resilience in a simple ritual of serving a simple meal.
“Today, my father prepares this dish for my sons when he’s given some Bretel butter by friends coming home from France. My brothers make affectionate fun of my father because he uses the most outrageous superlatives to describe the tinned butter. I agree with him, though. I love the scent of that butter because it reminds me of my paternal grandfather, the one who died with the soldier-firemen.” (Thúy 68)
Food is a bridge between host and root cultures. It is a vehicle for emotions, sent from the person who prepares it to the one who consumes it. It is a portal to memories. Food is home, right where you are.