How we cook and what we eat tells us
a lot about who we are.
My family escaped Vietnam one week before the fall of Saigon.
My parents are not people who mourn too much for the past.
They do, but they don't talk about it.
Sometimes I wish they did, but then,
they're always looking forward.
And I think that that is their strategy for surviving.
A lot of very varied ideas come to play into Vietnamese food.
It's a country that has been dominated by foreign powers
on and off quite a bit over the centuries.
Colonialism has shaped the history of Vietnam
in many ways, but also shaped the identity
of Vietnamese people as being feisty, resilient, plucky
folks.
We're just going to survive wherever we go,
and you definitely see that in the kitchen.
So when we first got to America, food
was really important, because it could remind us of our home.
[music playing]
[sizzling]
The smells are just incredible.
So you've got the aromatics, you know,
the bits of ginger and garlic really
browning up nicely in there.
That is the sound of good cooking.
My mom is this quintessential Vietnamese lady,
and she grew up in a place called Hai Duong,
which is in northern Vietnam.
And her family was well-off enough so that they
didn't necessarily have to cook, but she
if she wanted to learn how.
When she got to South Vietnam, my mom
was after a specific dish.
She wanted to learn how to make this Vietnamese beef stew.
It's called bo kho.
"Bo" means beef, and "kho" means to simmer,
but she didn't know how to make it
because it's a southern Vietnamese dish,
and she's a northerner.
So she befriended a woman named Ms. Lee, who
was of Chinese-Vietnamese descent,
and she got the recipe, and it's a recipe that she has kept
with her throughout the years.
Every person that makes bo kho has their own version,
and the version that my family makes,
the reason why I love it so much,
is-- well, number one, it's really good.
But it's also traversed so many decades of our family's
experience in the kitchen.
From my mother coming to Saigon in '54,
targeting this colleague of hers at work to get the recipe,
bringing it to America and then me having it in my own kitchen,
and me putting my own imprint on it.
Cooking is messy and not always perfect.
A lot of times cutting ginger gives me
this kind of meditative aspect of cooking because it evokes
the fragrance of so many dishes that are Vietnamese,
that are my favorite dishes.
Cultural appropriation in the Vietnamese sense
has been a means to survive foreign domination.
By the 1880s, the French had a firm grip on the country,
and the country became part of French Indochina.
So there have been times when people have described bo kho
as, oh, that's just like the Vietnamese knockoff
of French boeuf aux carottes, which
is a beef and carrot stew.
And I'm like, no, it's Vietnamese.
It's bo kho.
It's French in the sense that the French started
harvesting a lot of cows when they were there
for steaks for their table.
A lot of the French colonials didn't
care for Vietnamese food, and they wanted foods that they
were comfortable with.
So they left the tough cuts for locals.
Vietnamese people didn't eat a lot of beef before that,
it was mostly water Buffalo, their work animals.
But then you've got like Chinese five spice in there,
and you've got lemongrass, which is
definitely a Southeast Asian seasoning,
and you've got fish sauce.
It gives it this umami depth.
It's just kind of freewheeling, and you can eat it
for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, and it's OK,
because we love it that much.
It uses ideas that are European, with some Chinese influence
ideas, but yet it's brought together
in this Vietnamese sense to say that, yeah you're going to come
in, and you going to take stuff from us,
but we're going to take from you and we're
going to make it our own.
There's one thing that unites all Vietnamese people,
and that is a desire for self-determination.
From 939 AD, the Vietnamese spent like nine more centuries
fighting off intrusion from the Chinese, from the Mongols,
from the Europeans.
And the French were the formal colonial power in Vietnam
from 1880s to 1954, when the Vietnamese
were able to kick them out.
REPORTER (VOICEOVER): Bao Dai, former emperor of Annam,
was recognized by the French as independent, but existing
within the French union.
And under the Geneva Accords, the country was split into two.
REPORTER (VOICEOVER): A historic conference began in Geneva.
Out of it was to come a ceasefire
and a division of Vietnam into north and south.
And thus began what we know as a terrible Civil War,
and also the Vietnam War, that eventually brought people
from Vietnam into other parts of the world,
in the form of the Vietnamese diaspora.
I was six years old when my family left Saigon,
my dad tells me leaving Vietnam was the hardest thing.
We had a good life, but Vietnamese history
is full of precarity.
It was really weird.
I'm just-- even though I was only six years old,
I remember how tense things were.
I knew something was going on because the country
was falling apart.
And my father was watching the events unfold
as the Vietnam War wound down, during the early part
of the '70s.
And tensions were running really high in the entire country
of South Vietnam, frankly because America
was abandoning Vietnam.
RICHARD NIXON: Let us resolve together
to make the peace we have achieved,
a peace that will last.
[gunfire]
And it was a matter of how do we get out,
not how do we manage and stay.
My father knew that if we stayed,
he would end up in a reeducation camp.
That's just a prison.
So my aunt, Hua, worked for the US State Department,
and at that time a man who had worked with her--
an American man--
had decided to come back to Vietnam
to help as many Vietnamese people
as he can come out of the country.
On the 23rd of April 1975, my dad said, each of you
can bring one change of clothing, and that's it.
And so we packed our stuff in there
and my dad had also some paperwork.
My mom in her handbag--
that was sort of like a size of a tote--
she had her best jewelry, she had a couple of family photos,
and then she slid this little orange notebook of
handwritten recipes in there.
So we're sitting there, waiting in the car,
and then my aunt comes out and gives my dad a nod.
And that's a sign that we can leave.
And we followed the American man and his associates.
We had false documents, and we passed the checkpoints
and were able to go in to the airport.
And I remember just not knowing where we were going,
I was young.
I knew it was a strange adventure.
It was my first plane ride and we were in this huge airplane,
you know, sort of like a military airplane,
and everyone was just sitting all over the place.
And we flew from there to Guam, and then
from Guam briefly to Hawaii, and then from Hawaii
to Camp Pendleton, a US Marine base
located in Southern California.
And we were among the first Vietnamese refugees
to leave the country, and we were damn lucky.
We didn't get to bring much to America, but we have this.
This is this little notebook that my mom brought over,
and it doesn't look fancy, right?
It's just-- it's just paper.
This is my family's heirloom, for me.
This is one of the things that I really
love about making bo kho, which is this sort of primal aspect
of the marination, where I get to smell all
the raw ingredients, and then eventually
they'll be transformed.
But this fragrance of the dish just always sets me
back to the same place, which is in my mother's
kitchen, where all of this kind of started for me.
So when we first got here, we were only shopping
at the American supermarket.
It was just a new situation, and all the butter and white sugar
and flour and dairy products, cheeses--
my god.
All of those things that I just mentioned
are expensive items in Vietnam.
So in many ways we had sort of this reversal of situations,
where there was this plenitude all of a sudden.
But at the same time, my parents were missing a lot
of the flavors of their home.
Supermarkets back in the 1970s, you know,
didn't carry things like fish sauce.
No rice paper, no rice noodles.
If you got rice, it was like American rice,
but it certainly wasn't the kind of tender, chewy, fragrant rice
that my parents were used to.
So we were able to use certain ingredients that
were available to us at the American supermarket
to make Vietnamese food.
My mom would get on the phone with her Vietnamese expatriates
on the weekends when the rates were low,
and we'd be dialing for recipe ideas and cooking ideas.
And when we finally got a car, we
would drive to Los Angeles Chinatown,
where there were some markets that
carried Vietnamese groceries.
And it was like an hour and a half each way,
with no traffic, that is.
And that was how we would make these foods that
could remind us of who we are.
Because you know, that house that we left,
the people that we left, the neighborhood that we left,
was not going to be there for us anymore.
What was in our sphere of control,
but the food that we can make and eat ourselves?
[sizzling]
Smells so good.
I love it.
This is like the favorite part of the cooking process,
even though I know I'm going to get it all over my hair
tonight.
What's fascinating about Vietnamese food
is that it's totally doable.
Even with limited ingredients, you can still enjoy
the savors of the cuisine.
What it's doing is it's cooking down, concentrating,
kind of steaming in there.
And all those flavors are melding.
The fawn from the brown beef and the aromatics,
the onion, the tomato.
So you've got all these beautiful spice notes
and aromatic notes and the ginger and the garlic
and the bits of lemongrass.
And that's all going into the pot with the tomato.
Umami, umami, umami.
Savory sweet note.
In Vietnamese, we call that [vietnamese],, which means,
like, savory depth.
Everything just really comingles and starts
to develop the aromas that are distinctive to bo kho.
That little notebook really represents
our family's history, and in many ways
the history of Vietnam.
Because when you look at it, it starts in Vietnam,
it's made it here, through the diaspora,
through our refugee migration to America.
And then it's filled with these Vietnamese American recipes
that she had tweaked and things that she had changed
because of ingredients here.
Check to make sure that the beef is kind of tender, chewy.
Oh, yeah.
I've got about a pound of carrots in here,
and let it simmer for another 30 minutes.
Then everything will be done.
I think for me, food is such a fabulous lens for taking a look
at who I am, where I've come from, and where I'm going,
but also to involve other people.
And the beauty of where we are now today, in America,
we are seeing food move across borders really quickly.
And younger people are open to exploring different flavors,
and also the history and stories of people who make that food
and where it comes from.
Because frankly, if food doesn't have context and story,
it just doesn't taste that good.