What Cooking Bún Chả for My Birthday Abroad Taught Me About Vietnameseness

Curious to see if I could confidently call Montreal my home, I decided to turn 20 under the Canadian sun. Being the furthest I had ever been from home, I was more determined than ever to turn 20 the right, Vietnamese way. The idea of my friends tasting my favorite Hanoian dishes for the first time, whose recipes followed my family south to Saigon, was exciting, but it was the prospect of preparation these meals with them that I dreamt of.

In Saigon, grilling bún chả and rolling nem was a family tradition that eventually widened to include my closest friends. In Montreal, I trusted that the same labor-intensive endeavor would enlarge my “family” as it did back home.

I in addition knew that I would sing my way into my 21 st year on Earth, as I did every year prior. A private karaoke booth for my loved ones and I to sing songs that only we care for— that was probably what I missed most about Saigon whilst living abroad.

The beer cans that could have been I had designed the perfect trident: Hanoian barbecue, beer cans, and karaoke would guarantee a perfectly Vietnamese birthday. But each prong of the Vietnamese fork quickly bent to the Montreal winds — the material conditions of my new city threatened, and ultimately transformed, each of my traditions.

My bartenders scavenged the city for my beer cans only to return with bottles. Bún chả blues began with the meat cut Our journey to this happy evening was messy, and food was our most grueling obstacle.

With the joint audacity of three 20-year-olds, we believed ourselves capable of making nem from scratch for 15 people in an evening. Shopping for the right cut of meat, even so, was the most devastating hurdle. Eventually, the 11-hour time difference between Saigon and Montreal released my mom from my panic-stricken calls, leaving me helpless in the meat aisle.

Going to In a mix of French and Vietnamese, he, wasn’t sure what that was: having lived in Montreal for 60 years, he had lost much of our mother tongue. In a passage that I had painstakingly analyzed for my thesis, the narrator’s illiterate Vietnamese mother struggles to pick up oxtail to make bún bò Huế in the US. We made thịt xiên by cookery the wrong cut of beef the right way — adapting and tenderizing it however we could, just as my mom would have briefed us to.

We drank the right beer from the wrong bottles, washing down our oversized nem; we bastardized the concept of iCool with our version of karaoke in the park. I turned 20 in that mess, and at 22 now, I realized that there are no perfect standards of Vietnameseness except the ones we imagine.

Now, two summers later, I look back on this wonderful night only to see my favorite birthday party yet, one that was a loudly Vietnamese celebration in Montreal.