The unassuming pho shop in question sits just down the road, about 150 paces from my Hanoi apartment. I walk up my green-canopied alley and turn right to join the busy road, with its four lanes and dust kicking into my eyes. I walk past the fruit stand, six small cafes, and a Domino’s Pizza that is under construction to arrive at a slim, corrugated metal building. Lately, I make this walk sometimes five days a week, under the noon sun or monsoon season rains.
While pho makes the perfect simple, casual lunch, it’s a dish taken very seriously within Vietnamese culture. It’s a source of pride. You don’t get such a beautiful flavour without cooking over a fire stoked by love and heritage, and the history of pho is ablaze with it.
The term ‘pho’ is thought (though not entirely proven) to be derived from the French word “feu”, meaning fire. The Vietnamese had been making noodle soups and bone broths for thousands of years before Western colonisation, but historically preferred to cook with pork, fish, or water buffalo meat. When the French colonised in the late 1800s, they brought with them their preference for beef, while in Vietnam cows were typically only kept as farm labour animals. Quick-thinking and entrepreneurial Vietnamese butchers began slaughtering farm cows to meet these demands, and local noodle vendors adapted their recipes to sell to French patrons.
That is the abridged version of the widely agreed upon birth story of the dish, which gained popularity over the years and travelled the country on the tides of history. Pho travelled as French labourers paved over rural settlements and as families migrated during the American war. Now it is rare to be far from a pho shop, as beef pho, the national dish, has become ubiquitous to locals and visitors alike. Its intricacies vary throughout the country, but beef pho (phở bò in Vietnamese) is always characterised by rice noodles, slices of beef, onion, and cilantro.
But today, as before, the beloved flavour of beef pho broth starts with heat, to simmer bones and spices in water for hours. A perfectly complex broth is said to achieve the right flavour only when cooked from scratch with the most flavour-rich, marrow-filled bones. Over a rolling fire, these bones, along with regional herbs such as star anise, disclose their secrets, ones told from the grassy roadsides where the cows graze and the terraced farms where spring onions grow towards the hot equatorial sun. The ingredients whisper their tales into the boiling broth, giving it the flavour of the country that reared it.
When I first arrived in Vietnam, fresh out of college with an ESL job, my romance with the country began with beef pho. The flavour, distinct from anything I’d ever tasted before, paired perfectly with the frenzied streets and humid air that I was acclimating to. It smelled unexpected and tasted like a new adventure. Like new lovers, I fell for our dissimilarities — those secrets that I could sense but hadn’t yet earned the honour of knowing. The fire wasn’t fed by what we’d been through but by the mystery of what was before us: me, this soup, this new place. I ate beef pho on rainy motorbike trips through the northern mountains and at sweltering beachside stands. To this day, it tastes like excitement and brings me back to my first year here.
I intended for that first year in Vietnam to be my only year here. I came with the familiar expat dreams: teaching in the days, drinking in the evenings, and travelling on the weekends. All followed by a triumphant return to my native Minnesota, full of tales and memories in a far-flung place that exists in a universe different from my own.
But, as will also be familiar to many who move abroad, I found more of myself in Vietnam than I expected. My life here became real, rather than just the sum of a series of whims and experiences. After three years, I found myself in a more serious relationship with the country than I had ever expected. I grew fond of my daily commute. I got a cat. I fell in love. My neighbourhood, down the road from the aforementioned pho shop, became where I lived, not where I was passing through. The initial spark found tinder for a real flame to bloom.
Fire is a beautiful thing for its capacity to ignite, to meld, to draw out, and to warm. But there is also a peril in these qualities. Fire boils down; it removes impurities and burns off unsightly details. It leaves us with the beautiful product of so many flaws. When pho broth is poured over bouncy rice noodles, the unsightly bones and organs from which the flavour came are strained and discarded. Bones slaughtered to meet the appetites of the transplants who came before me, in different vessels. Pho is a dish both distinctly Vietnamese and inextricably tied to its namesake, to Western demands.
Part of developing a closer relationship with Hanoi, of further entwining my life with this place, has been coming to grips with the unjust complexion of my presence. As a native English speaker, I am paid exponentially more than my local colleagues to teach the language. As a white person, I’m given preferential treatment. As someone who can’t speak Vietnamese, I live removed from many of the unpleasant complexities of everyday life. I can afford things, like my apartment and daily coffees, that I’d never be able to back in the U.S. Beneath the genuine adoration I have for this place is also the ugly knowledge of the spoils I enjoy here, ones that come with privilege inherited from colonisation.
In our neighbourhood bars, frequented by expats in the largely foreign area of Hanoi, we talk of our latest trips to different towns or national parks. Sometimes, when local beer gives us the nerve, we venture to ask each other the dreaded question of when we might leave Vietnam. Though the answers vary, it is uncommon that someone has no intention of leaving. We Americans, Irish, French, and South Africans largely know that our time here has an expiration date. We aren’t ingrained in the place; we are admirers with no business, no stock. We savour the flavour, but we rarely see the bones, and for that, it’s impossible to truly belong to the country.
Last year, I left teaching to pursue writing full time. Supplied with genuinely life changing experiences of a young adulthood spent in Vietnam, I nevertheless found myself at a loss for words about the country. I know Vietnam through the eyes of a young foreigner; I am the leading voice on my own experience here, but I don’t know Vietnam. For the same reasons my life here is made so easy, I also suffer from a sort of sensory dysfunction. I don’t know what makes the country tick or gives Hanoi its flavour. As I sit writing this, I can hear the garbage collector rumbling down the alley below, but I still don’t fully understand which day he comes and where the trash goes. I don’t have the language skills yet to ask. There’s a disconnect, an inability to pierce below the superficial. It’s the difference between enjoying a work of art and being able to create it myself.
It’s moments of clarity like this that make me miss home, make me long for Minnesota, more than anything. Having been raised there, I can identify so many of the spices. I know when the hawks will migrate over the ridge above my parents’ house, and I can smell the first snow of winter before it falls. Even as a child, without speaking, my classmates and I would all start wearing shorts on the exact same spring day, because we could feel it was the start of summer. We understood the full recipe, the common flavour of the place that reared us, and we were a part of its fabric. Three years gone, I’m afraid that I’ve come unwoven from that fabric. That after years of neglecting that side of myself, I’ve disintegrated from it, leaving me perpetually afloat between homes. This kind of homesickness comes more and more frequently.
Noodle restaurants in Hanoi generally specialise in just one dish, and this favourite neighbourhood shop where I eat so often is not selling the famous beef pho, but rather chicken pho (phở gà). It’s said that this version of the national dish can be traced back to 1939, when government restrictions on the sale of beef led pho chefs to substitute with chicken. This iteration of the soup, with a broth both lighter and clearer than beef pho, was initially rejected by Vietnamese people as being inauthentic, but over the years grew to be a respected dish in its own right. Before work or during lunchtime, this chicken pho shop that I frequent is packed with foreigners and locals alike, pouring over fragrant, steaming bowls. The air, moved by a single steel fan, is thick with the scent of broth simmered for hours. The floor is littered with spent lime rinds, like rose petals.
I didn’t start eating chicken pho, which is much less omnipresent than beef pho, until this year when I began working from home as a very confused new writer, toiling over essays about a place I couldn’t quite capture, missing a place I no longer lived in. Feeling frustrated at noon one day, I began my ritual lunchtime walk up the alley, along the busy road, 500 metres down to the pho spot I knew about but never had time to visit as a teacher.
My first taste of chicken pho nearly brought me to my knees that Tuesday. The rich chicken, the garlic and shallots, the star anise, tore me out of that restaurant and hurled me back to the Midwest, to winter evenings, to my mother’s homemade chicken soup. For a brief moment on the tongue, it was like being home. It tasted, and still tastes to me, like comfort, familiarity, and safety. If beef pho was spark and excitement, chicken pho is a roaring flame, steady love, the kind of partner you can be your worst self in front of. One who wraps you up in a hug, who knows you’re lost without having to ask.
And then, following the lead of nearby local lunchers, I squeezed a few limes into my bowl, a spoonful of chili sauce, and a sprinkle of black pepper. With these toppings, the broth took on the tang of where I lived, Hanoi, of honking motorbikes just outside in the humid air. The flavours danced me back and forth between Vietnam and Minnesota, a single partner speaking both to where I came from and where I was then. It challenged me on every spin and cradled me on every dip. At some point during the dance, I forgot which place was really home and which flavours were really familiar. But rather than try and parse it out, to deconstruct what made the dish beautiful, I learnt to lean into the whole mess of it all. I returned the next day for lunch, and the day after that, and have so many days since.
When you love something, it’s possible that the cruellest thing you can do is pretend to understand it completely. In doing so, you rob it of the freedom to be complex and dynamic. In a sense, you burn it down simply to feel its warmth for yourself and then clean it up neatly. In trying to solidify my place in Hanoi, in trying to capture it in writing with sweeping generalities and theses, I was doing this place I care for so much a great disservice. In trying to write this very essay, I was tempted to make claims about the country, and in doing so I was forcing it into a box to fit a narrative in which I was the centre. In longing for home, I have been looking upon Minnesota and bemoaning my irrelevance to it, without appreciating it for what it is outside of myself.
Vietnam extended a grace to me that I neglected for so long to give it in return. It allowed me to exist in a complicated way, without defining me or our relationship. While I was an impatient and selfish lover, trying to explain the country, Vietnam offered me, time and again, a landing ground devoid of stipulations and labels. I’m struck by this whenever I taste chicken pho. It reminds me of the beautiful and complicated flavour that exists somewhere between two faraway homes, in a liminal space that can be lovely in and of itself if I just let it.
After eating, when I walk the alleys and motorway back to my apartment, I try to remember to admire what these streets are showing me and listen to that rather than tell them what they are. When I climb the stairs to my apartment and return to my writing, I endeavour to let these places lead the narrative without trapping them in my own story. Once they start disclosing their secrets, it would be a great shame not to listen quietly.
When I’m asked when I’ll leave Vietnam, when I’ll clear out of this beloved neighbourhood that was never mine to keep, the answer has become: soon. It’s nearly time to rekindle with the place that reared me, to weave myself back in and stretch my roots. The day I leave will break my heart. Often, I prematurely mourn the flavours I’ll lose when I say goodbye to this country. But I take comfort in the idea that one day I’ll cook my mother’s chicken soup recipe and taste the familiar whispers of Vietnam. I’ll be reminded of the flame I still hold for it, and how grateful I am to have briefly called it something like home.
