Rambutans, Dragonfruits & Logans

“Mua ca di,” “re lam, re lam, mua di chi,” chanted the morning lot of wives, daughters, and mothers, as they called DaNang awake with the offers of their men’s early toil. Before the ceremony, the farmers rose to pluck their dew-wet sacrifices from crawling vines, towering trees and medusa bushes. The fishermen cast their nets before the sun shown its light on the deep blue pacific. The women, cloaked in cotton or silk pajamas, laid out their rambutans, dragonfruits logans and guavas in woven bamboo baskets to sacrifice to the waking city. In wooden crates, ice crystals clouded over ivory squids, rosy salmons, and metallic skipjacks.
Concentrating on holding my breath in the rancid outdoor market, I felt a tug on my pants and looked down. A six year old girl dressed in a thin, dirt-stained t-shirt and torn Biti’s sandals gazed up at me and held out a paper crane. She uttered the words “800 dons.” After I glared at the crane and then her, I swiftly walked away. Within seconds, a swarm of dark faces and skeletons flocked to my side and offered me everything from bamboo trinkets to jasmine incense.
Frantically, I found my mom waiting for Ba ban ca to gut and clean the white squid she needed for her sea salad, and rushed to her side. She saw the trail of desolate children and glowing eyes behind me and handed me ten bills of 10,000 dons. I glanced at the money, then the tatters on their backs and then my crisply ironed khakis. After I reached out to give a little boy 10,000 dons, he scuttled away and left me with a sea of wide eyed stares. I swallowed and leafed out the rest of my bills.
Ba ban ca gave my mom the cleansed squid that she prepared for our lunch with my Ong Ba noi in Que, the countryside, that afternoon. Our trip to Vietnam that summer freed my mom from her nine to five manicurist shackles and revived the ethnic cook in her. She once perfectly seasoned her pho with cloves, coriander, cinnamon, peppercorns and Hoisin and Hirachi sauce and timely cooked her noodles so they did not stick to the pot. Nowadays, she carelessly measures each spice and finds time to cook in between working and spending time and with my sister and me. Seldom finding time to combine her passions, my mom uses the kitchen counter as her podium. Last fall, while she was stripping carrots of their skin for the chicken pot pie, an American staple, she lectured me about preserving my culture. “Don’t forget tieng Viet,” she said, with her broken English. When she was throwing out wrinkling, rotten tomatoes left on the windowsill, she turned to me and said “Try to work hard in school. Con don’t want to be like me,” a blue collar worker that answered to other people.
She accepted her blue collar position to open up a life of opportunities for me. She gave me the keys to two cultures, but I only discovered her gift at the market that day. America, the land of opportunity, can teach me how to drive a car and do the groceries at the Acme, but Vietnam shows me who plants the banana tree, cares for it, and harvests its fruits before Acme receives the bananas sitting in its produce aisle. Vietnam keeps me rooted and gives me Que, a homeland, to return to, where my grandparents and great grandparents have lived for generations. Both countries have raised and taught me what it knows, but I have to decide what to remember.