|
Teardrop leaves
By Que Huong
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 |
Best websites
