Tet—lunar new year—was the greatest holiday in our household: My siblings and I got to skip school and spend the day eating and setting off fireworks. On these mornings, the living room’s bronzed statue of Buddha would be surrounded with gifts and offerings: incense and red candles, tangerines and lychees, cool squares of green bean cake, pasty dough balls stuffed with red pork and Chinese sausage, mooncakes shaped into Buddhas, heaps of dried fruit: flattened eyes of persimmon, curls of coconut, nubs of sugared pineapple. “Chuc mung nam moi,” my siblings and I would sing, “Happy New Year,” and lucky red envelopes, stamped in gold and filled with crisp bills, would fall into our hands.
The centerpiece of Tet was always cha gio. Noi would make several hundred for a party. She’d sit on the dining room floor, grinding chopped shrimp with a wooden mallet, mixing in the pork with her hands. She’d grate a mound of carrots, her fingers flying. She knew just how much fish sauce and black pepper to use.
When the mixture was ready, I’d sit at the kitchen table to help roll them: She’d place a forkful of the filling on a triangle of banh trang spring roll wrapper, fold in the left and right corners; a quick roll, and it all came together, smooth and slim, sealed with a dab of egg yolk. When my cha gio would turn out lumpy and bloated, Noi would laugh, unroll them, and show me again.
At the Tet party the other cha gio on the buffet table would be all wrong—too thin or too thick, rolled too loosely, too much noodle, not enough shrimp, too pasty, too bland. I’d feel genuine sorrow for the hostess, known for turning out pale cha gio with a soggy bite. I once saw a woman in a red ao dai check on the trays she had brought: still there. Meanwhile, Noi’s cha gio, stacked in golden pyramids, disappeared.
Last December, Noi showed me once more how to make cha gio, and this time I wrote it all down. Now that Noi has a Cuisinart, she no longer does everything by hand. But she warned me against such ease. One pulse too many, and you get a pasty mash of shrimp, throwing off the entire textural balance.
As I took notes, Noi peeked at them, amused. She had no measuring spoons and no doubts. She mixed the filling and I watched. Her hands were shinier than I remembered, the skin over her knuckles tightening as she worked. At 84 years old and four feet nine, her posture was positively regal.
At the table the cha gio were snapped up, wrapped in lettuce leaves with sprigs of fresh coriander, mint, and rau ram, and dipped in nuoc cham. We sat for six solid hours, eating, drinking wine, and talking loudly. At last, late into the night, my father and his brothers began telling stories about Vietnam. “Like that time on the boat,” my father said, meaning the overcrowded ship we boarded to leave Saigon. I was barely six months old, my sister a year and a half. One morning everyone was given half an apple. This treasure, a respite from meager portions of rice and water, caused a commotion. But Noi saved her apple; she didn’t have one bite of it. “It was all for you and your sister,” my father said. I glanced at Noi, but her face was impassive. She did not recall such a moment. No wonder—she has been feeding us for years.
Pinterest
