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.
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.
My husband and I have invited friends over to sample my first solo try at cha gio, but a series of mishaps leaves us with only one guest. By the end of the evening I am glad—I want the cha gio for myself. The dinner I had planned to follow—lemongrass chicken curry, jasmine rice—never happens. We simply eat cha gio after cha gio as our entire meal, something I haven’t done since I was 12 years old.
The test of cha gio is eating them plain, fresh from the fryer: the sting of black pepper, the sweetness of fish sauce, the firm bite of the mung bean noodles, the light crunch of the fried wrapper. Thankfully, mine pass.
Sometime during the night I wake up and go to the kitchen. By the light of the open refrigerator door I eat three more cha gio, cold. They are even sweeter now, the texture of each ingredient more distinct; I can feel the flavors deepening against one another and I keep eating, trying to remember the taste. I am trying to keep my grandmother with me. I want to close my eyes and know what she knows: this amount of pepper, that amount of fish sauce. A world without measurements.
Here are some of Noi’s rules about food: At every meal lay an extra serving—food for the ancestors, the family members who have died, the spirits who protect us. Eat oranges after dinner. Serve iced canned lychees in teacups on hot afternoons. Sit on the front stoop with slices of watermelon or spears of mango. Suck the juice from pomegranate seeds late at night. All those times, all that food—I don’t remember what we talked about. Language, hers Vietnamese and mine English, dwindled between us; it wasn’t that we had less to say but that we had less language with which to say it. So we ate. Side by side, Noi would work on her jigsaw puzzles while I read or did homework. In the evening she would sit cross-legged, her knee-length silver hair loosened from its daily bun, and carve crescent moons from apples and pears. I am learning from her daily, remembering all the things she taught me. I learn while she mixes ingredients together to make a hundred cha gio. Her hands are larger than mine, as large as mine will be one day if I have worked enough.