The first Indochina War (1946–1954) between the French and the Viet Minh began when I was about two years old and my family was still quite wealthy. Following tradition, my father gave me a Chinese name at five years old when I went to school, Tran Binh Quoc.[1]
The village countryside of Tan Loc lay ten kilometers west of the coastal city of Ca Mau. I attended the village school where I learned my lessons in both Chinese and Vietnamese. Although I tended to be a mischievous child, I was beloved by all my teachers. Many of them were quite poor and my family provided their housing, so I got to know them well. Those with children were given separate cottages, but the unmarried ones lived in our large home with us since we had so many rooms available.
One day, though, in 1950, French soldiers marched through our village and burned down both our home and the school. This ended my education in Tan Loc village and even split up our family for a time. My second and third brothers attended a Chinese-speaking school in Ca Mau where our family owned other homes. My oldest sister was already married and second sister worked in the city as a seamstress. As one of the three youngest boys, I stayed at home with my mother to care for the rice fields, while my father traveled back and forth on business between Ca Mau and Tan Loc.
My father soon built another house in a remote area near Tan Loc to avoid the main travel route. Yet as the French continued to drop bombs on our village, my mother urged him to move all of us to the city. So, after living in the village until the age of eleven, I went to school in Ca Mau and received my instruction in Vietnamese. Then, between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, I continued secondary school in Saigon.
The Lunar New Year, which we call Tet, was my favorite holiday growing up because our family would go about the village offering New Year’s wishes to all our relatives. The elder in each home presented every child with a red envelope (lai-si) filled with money and, since our clan was large, we visited many families and collected many lai-si. My older siblings also took time off work to travel home for this holiday. Thus, Tet would be a family reunion with plenty of delicious food. On New Year’s Eve, our servants prepared bountiful dishes to pay tribute to our ancestors. Those dishes would include fish stomach, fried shrimp balls, and giant steaming hot pots filled with delicious meats and vegetables. We ate those dishes for the next three days, since it was bad luck even for our servants to work at the beginning of the new year.
At mealtimes, my mother, my father, and the other men in our family would eat together first. The boys would join them, but the girls would have to wait their turn. Only after the men were done eating and our dishes cleaned, would the other women and the girls finally get to eat.
We enjoyed three full meals a day to celebrate the New Year. Breakfast was simple, usually hot porridge flavored by a savory dish like salted radish with eggs or stewed pork. We ate a bit more for lunch, but dinner was the largest meal consisting of soup, a salty meat (usually pork), and stir-fried vegetables.
For the remaining days of the festival, we placed all the leftovers into a giant pot to combine the flavor of all those dishes. Some of my favorites were the delicious sizzling crêpes (banh xeo), tasty beef stew with pickled bean sprouts (bo kho), braised pork with eggs (thit kho), and the sticky rice cakes wrapped tightly in banana leaves (banh chung). After the third day of leftovers, we seasoned the rest of the food with salt so that it would not spoil. This made the food too salty to eat by itself, so we ate it along with heaping bowls of plain rice porridge (chao).
We also stored the fried shrimp balls in a canister to keep for snacks. We loved coming home at the end of a long day and popping those shrimp balls into our mouths. Their squishy, oily goodness always tasted so heavenly and they remain to this day my absolute favorite snack! Sadly, the Tet offensive during the war would leave a bitter taste in American mouths, so we could not celebrate as freely when we first arrived in our new country. Yet the sights, sounds, and smells of Tet still remind me to this day of my homeland and the food which draws us together.
[1] Every male in our generation, brothers and cousins, received the same middle name, “Binh,” meaning “peaceful.” My father and my uncles in the older generation shared a different middle name amongst themselves. Each of these generational names for the Tran clan has been recorded in a poem which is still kept safe in our home village of Trieu Chau, China. The names of our ancestors are each inscribed on wooden slabs in the temple to honor them with our memories.
