Through my adolescent years, I had become addicted to the flavour of Tet that spread from Chi Thoi's kitchen. It was deeply embedded in my heart and surfaced with intense passion with the onset of spring.
When the coldest day of the year had gone past, the rain had been reduced to the merest drizzle, the chill in the air lost its bite, when small buds sprouted on Uncle Tam's golden apricot tree, Chi Thoi began preparing for Tet.
From this side of the tea-tree fence separating our houses, I watched as she bustled about, busy as a bee, frequently returning home with heavy baskets. Mother muttered: "What a good girl! If only Tam...." - she stopped short, looking at Uncle Tam who sat listless, warming himself in the sunlight. She shook her head.
"Will it be a great sunny day tomorrow, Mr. Tam?" - Chi Thoi addressed him over the fence. Uncle Tam looked at the sky and hummed: "If it rains, I don't care. When I dry my vegetables for pickling, the rain should stay clear of me!" She smiled and got down to making the pickled vegetables. I almost did not have the heart to eat it when I saw her carving out the papaya so carefully. Leaves, a pine tree, peach blossoms, a pomegranate - exquisite figurines carved out of carrots or kohlrabis.
One year, when uncle Tam gave a wrong weather forecast, Chi Thoi dried the vegetables on a gloomy day, and it turned stale. Her distress was so evident that Uncle Tam sat up until midnight fanning live coals for her to dry the vegetables. The pickled vegetable that year was not as white as she wished, and she called it the "ailing" pickled vegetable.
For me, Tet was not a three-day festival. It was a prolonged affair that included the days of making and eating the sweets made by Chi Thoi. I rushed to her house as soon as I returned from school. Invariably, she was sitting in the kitchen, peeling tamarind, kumquat and ginger, and simmering them in sugar, her hair tousled and body smelling of preserved fruit. After finishing my homework, I went again to watch over her sweets and wait for the scrapings. No other jam could be tastier. Their essence seemed to be concentrated in sugar lumps and crumbs at the bottom of the pot - slices of coconut, pungent ginger, crispy sweet potato, soft lotus seeds.... Sometimes, I dozed off on her shoulders while waiting. Even in sleep, I felt the warmth and sweet fragrance envelop me on late winter nights.
Uncle Tam was broken-hearted when Ha, his sweetheart, suddenly got married. He often mumbled some verses or sat silent as the grave. But it was not advisable to get him to talk about it. He would go on and on about the story and his memories. And the only person patient enough to listen to the love story for a thousand times was Thoi.
Chi Thoi was the eldest of three daughters. She was not very beautiful, but her hair was more beautiful than anything seen on girls advertising shampoos. I liked to see her in a silk blouse with her hair tied with a black velvet ribbon. It was said that in her school days, so many young men were willing to die for the silky hair, and it was a puzzle that she remained single until today. That hair had always been washed with soap berries. When she stood drying her hair, the fragrance of grapefruit flowers spread all over the area and enchanted everybody. I watched her drying her hair through the fence. Even uncle Tam watched it, but when I asked him if it was beautiful, he would talk about other people's hair. Then, for no reason, Chi Thoi cut short that beautiful hair, the most beautiful hair in all of Hue. I felt sad. I picked up the black velvet ribbon she had thrown away and hid it in a dictionary. That Tet, I could not doze off on the silky, sweet scented tresses. That year, her jam crumbs were burnt and bitter.
Mother asked Chi Thoi to pray for Uncle Tam at the Linh Mu Pagoda as his condition worsened. He walked up and down Le Loi Road hoping to see Ms. Ha, although she had followed her husband to a far away land. Not all the couples in Hue chose Linh Mu Pagoda to witness their oaths as they were afraid of the goddess in red who could get jealous and deliver unhappiness. Yet, uncle Tam and Ms. Ha had studied for exams in the pagoda... In the end, it was not the goddess who helped his recovery, but Ms. Ha herself. I could not recognize her. She was fat, decked with jewels and made up heavily. She looked pityingly at uncle Tam, emaciated, mumbling verses he'd composed for her. Looking at her, he shuddered as it struck him that he was pining for such a woman. That afternoon, all those verses written in violet ink were thrown away. I felt sorry, so I ran to pick them up and give them to Chi Thoi. She sat down and read them very slowly in the twilight.
Chi Thoi's two twin sisters were ten years younger than her. They were my classmates. They were so different from each other, like water and fire. But they looked like two drops of water, so beautiful and were household even as little girls in kindergarten. They won a lot of prizes in contests for healthy and good-looking children. To make identification easier, one of them always wore yellow skirts and the other wore blue ones. Soon, they came to be known as the Yellow and the Blue. The despicable Yellow sat next to me. When I unintentionally touched her multi-fold skirts that spread out like a sunflower, she would pinch me. If I showed her something, she would seize it immediately. If I threatened her with a fist, she would cry out and lie down in protest. The Blue was a little gentler, even though she had that same doll-face as Yellow. She and I usually played the cooking game or the husband-wife game together. As soon as the imaginary rice cooked in a tiny pot was scooped out and served in bowls made of breadfruit leaves, the Yellow broke the pot with a stone. The kite I had spent a whole week making was trampled beneath her feet before it had a chance to enjoy flying in the blue sky. I took her shirt, asking for compensation, and she pulled at my hair, yelling. I called Uncle Tam for help. She called Chi Thoi. In the end, we both received a lashing.
As I grew up, Chi Thoi made less and less sweetmeats for Tet. Now cakes in cases, sweets in cases, jams made by machines, cheaper and attractively packed, were to be found in great quantity. It took only an hour in the market to get them, so nobody wanted to spend the whole of ten long days on making the sweetmeats like Chi Thoi. And if she did it, not anybody wanted to eat them. The days people spent Tet eating home-made and traditional dishes were over. The trend now was to eat more food. Everywhere one went, one could see pork pies, fermented pork rolls, cold meat. Returning from a distant school, I rushed into Chi Thoi's kitchen. The Kitchen God had gone to heaven for a few days, yet the kitchen remained cold. She told me that she was not allowed to make the sweetmeats any more.
Friends of the Yellow and the Blue sampled only chocolates and cashew nuts when they came to wish the family a happy new year. Father's friends tasted the cold food with wine. The jam could not be sold, so it was distributed among children in the hamlet. Without the fragrance of Chi Thoi's kitchen, the flavour of Tet turned insipid. I went to the Tet market with my girlfriend. She did not know how to make the sweets, and had no desire to learn. She only wanted to wear chic clothes and roam the streets, looking through the shops selling Tet treats, sampling and buying some. As a little boy, I'd told Chi Thoi that I would only marry someone who was able to make sweetmeats as good as her.
When I returned home the next year, her kitchen was busy for Tet again. The preserved tamarinds and kumquats looked as delicious as ever, as did the sugar coated lotus seeds. The fragrance of sweetmeats pervaded the place, and Chi Thoi's clothes again smelt of jam and was warm with the heat of the fire, her cheeks were rosy, her hair tousled.... She explained that this year there were some visitors from afar. The Blue had married abroad, and taken home a Viet Kieu (overseas Vietnamese) to be introduced to the Yellow. On the other hand, there were uncle Tam and me, she said, looking at me and then at the door in expectation. Having awakened from his love dream, uncle Tam took his graduate diploma from the teacher's training college and volunteered to work in the U Minh forest land - the southernmost tip of the country. He'd promised to go home for this Tet.
The Blue came in just as Chi Thoi had just finished making a mixed jam with kumquat, ginger, orange. She rushed into the kitchen and kissed Chi Thoi time and again, saying: "I missed your kitchen the most!" She turned and gave me a smacking kiss. She remained as beautiful as in the old days.
The Yellow was so disappointed as the Viet Kieu was an elderly man, but the Blue said that he was only about five years older than her husband. He'd left for foreign lands in search of a better life, and was now returning to his native land because he missed it very much. The Yellow was not to this man's taste. It made no impression when she tried to wear fashionable clothes that revealed the curves of her young body. Her figure, that had once charmed so many judges in beauty contests, failed to catch the eye of the man she was hunting. He liked to roam about in search of places he remembered and preferred to make up for lost time rather than go dancing with her. Chi Thoi's family invited him to a 'Royal' dinner at the Huong Giang hotel, but he said if he would like to enjoy a dinner of the common people. So the main course was goby fish boiled with soy paste, typical of Hue, with sweet potato pudding as dessert.
The dinner produced satisfactory results. The guest enjoyed the food immensely, praising it repeatedly. He then took great delight in drinking green tea flavoured with ginger. Finally, he said that it had been twenty long years since he enjoyed a meal so rich in the home country's flavour and taste.
Until the 28th of the last lunar month, Uncle Tam had not returned home. I had to sit up late and keep an eye on the pot of rice dumplings. Chi Thoi's family was also cooking the same thing. The two fires were placed near each other on either side of the fence. The apricot tree was in full bloom. Chi Thoi told me that when she was a little girl, she often climbed up the apricot tree to see the flowers more closely. She seemed to see uncle Tam, but I saw the shadow of a person standing against the apricot tree. It was a girl. My heart clenched with a sudden presentiment. I turned to look at her, trying to record the look of happiness that suddenly shone brightly on her face before it died out.
Chi Thoi's sweets were in top form this year. She'd put a spell on them that had the Viet Kieu moping about in the Yellow's house. The Yellow boasted that he was about to bite the bait thinking that the sweets were made by her. He kept repeating that the food her family cooked was rich in the flavour of the homeland. "If I get married to him, I will have to take Chi Thoi along, I am afraid," the Yellow told me, smiling. "But when he finds out that you do not know anything about cooking, what will you do?" I asked. "Oh, it's as easy as shelling peas. When I go over there and he finds me unsuitable, I'll get divorced. There are a lot of people. It will hurt nobody." Looking at her red-coloured lips, I wondered how she could be Chi Thoi's sister.
The Viet Kieu duly proposed, but to Chi Thoi, not the Yellow. Her mother was dumbfounded. The Yellow was venomous: "If he does not like the fashionable world, let him marry her and go back to the 19th century. I'll get married to a man from Hong Kong." She threw a dirty look at the Viet Kieu and then sped on her motorcycle out of the gate, putting an end to the role of a decent girl.
I was not surprised. I did not believe that a man who still respected and lived with sweet memories and the past like the Viet Kieu could choose the Yellow as his bride.
But there was yet another bombshell to be dropped. Chi Thoi rejected his proposal. Despite her rather plain looks and age, she refused a man who could take her abroad without any regret. Disregarding the advice of her parents and the Blue, and even Uncle Tam, she sat in silence, looking out over the tea trees to where Uncle Tam used to walk listlessly, mumbling:
"Nobody thinks that naive love could be so profound.
Time goes by, but love stays.
Despite the hair turning white like a large bulbul field."
The golden sun had just set, and Uncle Tam discussed his marriage. His girl was also a teacher. She was an orphan, so the wedding should be a simple, short affair. Then they would leave and make their living in another land. He said the people there were warm, simple and easy to live with. He had found peace there. For the simple wedding ceremony, he relied on his sister-in-law (my mother) and his close, childhood friend. Chi Thoi began preparing for the wedding. I kept stealing glances at her, but she was silent. As the wedding day approached, she was bustling about as if it were her wedding. The light in the kitchen burnt until mid-night as she sat up to make the cakes for the wedding. As I watched, I suddenly got angry with her:
- Don't care about them. Go to sleep.
- When you get married, I'll sit up the whole night.
"I don't want your help. Why do they want to put more work on your shoulders when you already work so hard?
- Just to keep my head free of thoughts, you know.
She smiled aimlessly, and then got down to business. Knowing there was nothing I could say, I sat down to help her and finish the work sooner. She worked as carefully with the preserved vegetables as in the past. I suddenly noticed that the leaves carved out of papaya were shaped like teardrops, and looked as though they were jade. And the carrot flowers turned into blood-red drops. Chi Thoi was crying.
1. Chi stands for elder sister in Vietnamese.
Translated by Manh Chuong
