I am making my grandmother Noi’s cha gio by myself for the first time, and I am nervous. Here are the ground pork, the shrimp peeled and deveined, and the wood ear mushrooms soaking in water. Here is a bottle of fish sauce from Phu Quoc, my father’s recommendation; beside it, a bowl of shallots. For me, cha gio and pho, fried spring rolls and rich beef noodle soup, are the defining dishes of a Vietnamese home. They make you or break you. In other words, I need to get this right. So I begin, plunging small bales of mung bean noodles into a bowl of warm water. They give off a sweetish, dusty smell that reminds me of the Saigon Market back in Michigan, where my family shopped every week. My father gossiped with his friends while Noi chose what she needed, slipping me a tin of sour candy or a package of dried squid.
I stir the noodles, combing them apart the way Noi showed me. When I was growing up she would poke me in the back anytime she saw me slouching. I stand up straight while making cha gio.
My grandmother grew up in Hanoi, where she received a French education before marrying my grandfather. He owned a wholesale food distribution business, selling everything from oranges to rice to beer, and these were the only years of wealth the family would know: servants and silk, gold bracelets, seafood and meat at every meal. The business collapsed during Ho Chi Minh’s battle against the French, and, shortly before partition in 1954, the family moved south, to Saigon. This would not be the last radical move for Noi, and nearly 50 years would pass before she would see her sisters again.
Saigon was supposed to be an escape, a way of starting over in a better place. But then my grandfather died, leaving Noi and their four young sons to shift for themselves. To get by, Noi sold pho and noodle dishes from a booth on the street corner and ran an improvised five-and-dime from the front room of her house. “We were poor,” my uncle Cuong says cheerfully. “And I mean poor. But Noi always managed somehow.” Her four sons grew up and joined the South Vietnamese armed forces; three of them came home. When my sister and I were born, Noi took care of us. And in April 1975, on the day before the fall of Saigon, she moved the family once more.
Among thousands of refugees seeking resettlement in the United States, we ended up in the midsize town of Grand Rapids. There, my father and uncles got factory jobs and rented a ramshackle house for $100 a month. In the backyard, my grandmother grew roses that climbed the chain-link fence; she cleared a spot for an herb garden of rau ram, mint, and coriander. In immigrant settlements, it is always food that defines the community and brings it together. In the strange cold of their first Michigan winters, my family went to parties after Buddhist temple and found new friends at the Saigon Market. The market’s scroll calendars—free with any purchase—hung in our kitchen, a daily reminder of the past shaping the present.
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