The couple who own the local Vietnamese market stay in the shop from open to close, six days a week. “I’m working like a dog,” Nguyệt said to my husband as we checked out. “You mean like a water buffalo,” my husband corrected. “Yes.” Nguyệt smiled at me from behind the counter. “We say a…
When my husband was in middle school, he tried to get the neighborhood boys to help him catch toads to make toad soup. The other kids were scared to touch toads because they thought they would get warts. I heard that myth growing up, too. But in Vietnamese the word for warts even has toad…
Here are some Vietnamese sayings and colloquialisms I’ve picked up through the years from my husband and his family: Criticisms Talking to you is like water pouring on taro leaves. (Nước đổ lá môn.) Going in one ear and out the other. Nothing sticks. Chicken head, duck butt. Something that is trying to be something it’s not.…
While waiting to get into a popular phở restaurant in San Jose, my daughter tried to read the sign taped to the window. “Dad, what does that say?” she asked. “It’s a help wanted sign,” he said. My daughter studied the sign to see if she recognized any words. “What does cần mean?” “Need. It says they need a…
“I don’t like the Vietnamese term for the Internet,” Lượng said one night at dinner. During my husband’s childhood in Vietnam, there was no Internet, so it’s only been on recent trips back that he’s heard the Vietnamese word for it. “They don’t say Internet?” I asked. Vietnamese-American’s sprinkle English words like Internet into conversations…
My creative nonfiction piece “Flickering Little Lights” appears in the September 2015 issue of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. Cha is an award-winning English online literary journal based in Hong Kong. “Fireflies are called flickering lights (đom đóm) in Vietnamese. As a child in the Mekong Delta, my husband saw them darting around the …” Read the rest here.…
The restroom in the restaurant we stopped at in Little Saigon had everything you might need, including fresh roses and false eyelashes. I took a photo to show my husband. The multipack of false eyelashes hanging in a clear bag on the wall reminded him that a Vietnamese phrase for flirting is đá lông nheo…
Ever since my husband first started telling me the stories of his childhood in Vietnam, he talked about cheap trees. When his family flees to Ship Island (Cồn Tàu) after the Tết Offensive: “Má points to an island in front of us that’s surrounded by cheap trees. The trees look like they’re growing out of the…
When I took Spanish, I was startled to learn that a knock on the door was toc toc and dogs barked guau guau. How could sounds be different in another language? Weren’t onomatopoeia supposed to represent how we actually heard them? But once I accepted that everything sounds different in another language I was enchanted. Upon meeting…
I wouldn’t have thought Mr. Fermented Soybean to be a common name, but two of my husband’s neighbors were called this. At one point both of the Mr. Fermented Soybeans or someone in their families probably made or sold the dish that earned them this nickname. Both neighbors are in my book, so to make…
Rambutans—Their Vietnamese name, chôm chôm, means “pointy” for the soft spines covering them. My husband says chôm also means steal. Growing up he thought the name meant “steal steal.” “Steal steal” is the perfect name because that’s how good they taste.
