My Early Days In Mai Hac De Street
by Thi Thu Hoa Le
My very first memory of food is my mother’s caramelised pork belly dish for an early dinner one summer’s afternoon when I was about three years old. Glossy succulent strips of pork belly lay invitingly in the big white bowl, garnished with freshly chopped green spring onion and coriander, then bright red slices of chilli. An orchestra of taste sensations explode in my mouth as I enjoy the perfect balance of salty fish sauce, sweet sugar, zesty chilli, tingling black pepper and aromatic five spice...
My mother is a great cook; she was taught to cook by our grandmother. I can never forget my grandmother’s sweet mung bean cakes topped with roasted sesame seeds for the festive seasons. My mother loves to cook with pork. She could make different dishes from pork for a week’s dinners, then would make the same pork dishes but in the different order for another week so we never got sick of it. I am not sure if pork was my mother’s favourite ingredient to cook with or it was cheap and easy to get in the olden days. My mother’s most frequent pork dish was caramelised pork belly, so my two younger brothers and I grew up with this dish. It was the perfect dish to have with rice and blanched morning glory. Morning glory also is known as water spinach. We usually blanch it in boiling water, then scoop it out before it becomes too soft as we like our morning glory still a little firm and soaked with pork belly juice.
My parents and I were living in a room with a balcony looking down the street on the first floor of an old town house in Mai Hac De street in Hanoi. We shared the room with my father’s eldest brother, his wife and their two children, my father’s younger brother and his youngest sister. It was quite common for families in the late ’70s in Hanoi to share a home together as the war had only finished for a short time. Life was almost back to normal. Resources were limited. The houses, buildings, roads, schools and hospitals destroyed in the war had started to be rebuilt.
The room which we shared with our extended family is always dim and quite big in my memory. The house seemed hundreds of years old, and I can still remember its stale and mouldy smell. Everything about the house was old and brittle as if time had sucked all the moisture and the life out of it. It seemed that you could easily break almost anything with just a soft touch. The thin discoloured wooden door that opened onto the balcony squeaked every time someone opened or closed it. It was twisted, out of shape with cracks that slim rays of sunlight filtered through into the room displaying a universe of sparkling dust particles. I can almost feel the still, dry air of that dark room in those summer afternoons as if I were there now.
The old town house that we lived in had two storeys, shared by three different households with a separate gate on the side to get access to upstairs. The landlord was one household living in a smaller room by himself outside of our room next to the stairs and I cannot remember him much, but his name, Mr Yen. We had to go through his room to get to our room. No one could remember the actual colour of the paint outside the town house except it was drab, grey with a lot of cracks and small holes showing red brick inside the walls.
My street was long, narrow and quiet with big, weathered mahogany trees alternating with tropical almond trees. Most of the houses on the street were double-storey and quite narrow but also quite long. They all had brown or dark green wooden doors and little windows with rusty steel bars. They looked quite like each other, time-weary and tiring but somehow charming, full of wisdom and spirit.
What I remember most about this street is that it was so pretty and exciting around the Lunar Calendar New Year. The flower market opened a week before New Year’s Eve and gifted our otherwise sleepy, drab street a fresh, sparkling Spring veil with beautiful roses, pretty violets and dahlia; gorgeous white and pink gladiolus; exciting pansies; warm and elegant chrysanthemum; festive cherry blossom plants and kumquat trees. There were so many people, buying, selling, browsing, talking and bargaining. The noise, the people, the fragrance and colourful flowers made the street so strangely alive, so different from its usual self when I peered down from our balcony.
I have since lived in many different houses in many different streets, but vivid memories of my mother’s pork belly dish , the family’s mouldy, dimmed room at Mai Hac De street and those sleepy, charming town houses in Hanoi never seem to abandon me. I often think of that room with warm affection and everlasting recollection. My personal reminiscence of old and charming Hanoi never alters nor fades despite the changing times. I am excited by modern Hanoi and its lively energy these days, however I still treasure my nostalgic memories of a beautiful and tranquil Hanoi.
I now live in Australia with my husband and my son. We live in a quiet and leafy street which somehow reminds me of the old street in Hanoi where I lived the first few years of my life. Like my mother, I love cooking and love to cook with pork. My husband and my son, who is eight years old, adore my Vietnamese style pork rissoles. I have a secret ingredient for my pork rissole recipe that spices it up a little. To make the soft, juicy and tasty pork rissoles, I would need some good, fresh pork mince from the shoulder part of a pig, where it has a perfect balance of fat and lean meat. I then marinade the pork mince with fish sauce, salt, cracked peppercorns, white pepper, chopped shallot, brown onion and white part of spring onion, a touch of sugar, five spice, cooking oil and Asian style BBQ sauce which is my secret ingredient . Leave the marinade for fifteen minutes, voila, I have the most delicious pork rissole mix ready to be cooked on the BBQ.
My son usually opts to have the rissoles with rice, but the best and most traditional way to eat pork rissoles is with freshly cooked thin rice vermicelli, mixtures of lettuce, mints, Vietnamese hot mint leaves, perilla (or Shiso leaves), coriander, sweet basil and dipping sauce which is made from water, fish sauce, brown sugar, lime juice, chopped garlic and sliced fresh chilli. The richness and flavour of the smoky aromatic barbecued pork rissoles makes a perfect marriage with the crunchiness of fresh lettuce and mixed herbs, soft rice vermicelli and the well-balanced taste of salty, sweet, and spicy dipping sauce. We call this dish “Bun Cha” in Vietnamese or Barbecued pork rissoles served with rice vermicelli, fresh lettuce and mixed herbs. “Bun cha” is a popular street food in Northern Vietnam and Hanoi in particular, although they would serve the rissoles with barbecued thin slices of pork belly marinated in the same way. It is a delightful dish to have in the Hanoi Summer when it is around thirty degrees Celsius and almost a hundred percent humidity, I also actually tend to make this dish more often in our Australian summer; it’s possibly about the nostalgia and atmosphere taking me back to my childhood in Hanoi . I think our neighbours are curious about the BBQ pork aroma wafting from our balcony into the open air of their house every so often, we might need to invite our neighbours over for lunch one day soon as to sate their curiosity and appetite. As much as I love cooking with pork, just like my mother, there is one thing I cannot do as well as my mother and that is to cook with pork for the whole week without the background bickering of my husband and my son. Hats off to my mother, she deserves a medallion.
Artistic statement
My narrative is a short story memoir about Hanoi in the late ‘70s. I attempt to carry the readers back to an old, charming and once sleepy Hanoi by sharing the images, the smell and the colour of our old room, the town house, and Mai Hac De street where I used to live for the first few years of my life.
Whilst I appreciated our class’s opinions at the workshop about building my story with a mystery character (Mr Yen), or a story with a starting point from the flower market at the Lunar Calendar New Year , however I decided to keep this story as a personal memoir with colourful, yet melancholy memories of Hanoi. On the other hand, I also think I would like to use this piece of writing as the beginning of a longer memoir narrative with more recounts about different stages of my life, but food will always be the main connection to my experience in my stories .