Chapter 5: Chapter 5 – Saigon Food Vendor

Mom makes food for me to sell. While I'm peddling food on the street, Mom catches up with other work and makes dinner for us. She also cooks food for customers' parties, for which I'm a great helper. On the occasions when Mom is too busy to finish making all the foods for me to sell in the day, I finish making the rest.

Mom brightens up, saying, "Oh, I'm glad you've come home. I need to prepare food to cater for a party, so you have to finish making the rest of the food you need for your food sale for today."

I'm ready to make banana crackers with the sunny bananas from my tree. I whip out the cleaver from its holder, climb onto the water tank, and hack at the thick stem of the banana bunch with the cleaver. The bunch comes down heavily onto the water tank and then slides down onto the floor. I try counting the bananas but keep losing count and having to start all over, so I give up.

I climb over the high wall, get down to the ground on the other side of the wall, and dig up cassava roots. There is no possibility of lugging the roots over the wall. I search along the foot of the wall, clawing out the dirt at any likely hole I find. Two loose bricks sticking out of the wall, at a level with my backyard, I pull the bricks out and pass the cassava roots through the opening.

Back in the backyard, I peel the bark off the cassava roots, and wash them, the roots looking slick white after having been washed. I fill the big copper cauldron halfway with water, the cauldron hanging from an overbuilt chain. I put kindling straws in the fire pit supported on a tripod, stoke the smoldering embers, and high flames flare up. I pick up the cleaned cassava one by one and put them in the cauldron, the boiling water raising bubbles each time I drop cassava in.

I add sweet potato flour to the boiled cassavas and pound the mixture into dough. I make smooth dough balls out of the dough.

I can make ten crackers out of each dough ball. On a well-floured cool table surface, I roll out a dough ball to a long rectangle sheet. Then I cut out ten dough circles for ten crackers from the dough sheet. To cut out each circle, I place the lid of a small cooking pot on the dough sheet and cut out the circle by moving the pointed tip of a bamboo stick around the lid's edge. 

After each group of ten crackers has been cut out, I place slant-cut banana slices on them, and then I brush them with ginger syrup. I lay the moist crackers on a rectangular wooden frame crisscrossed with bamboo laths.

After having used up all the dough, I climb up the water tank and bring the frames up to the kitchen's rooftop, and I lay them out flat in single layers on the rooftop, to dry the crackers in the sun.

Since this is my first time making banana crackers, I basically have fumbled along the way and ruined many bananas. Although I'm a little frustrated, however, I'm just glad to have figured out a way to use the ripe bananas, the yellow hue of which has haunted me since I first discovered them on my tree.

Mom throws charcoal chips into a small fire pit and makes a fire. She roasts the dried crackers over the smoldering fire, flipping and turning them to roast evenly until they reach a golden brown.

I have to make Vietnamese spring rolls. Hoa and Tin come just in time to make spring rolls with me.

A good spring roll is crispy in the crust and moist in the filling. You only need to chew lightly, and the whole thing breaks up into morsels. As you chew, you can hear the crust crackle like crinkling tinfoil, and feel the juice from the filling swapping around in your mouth. While eating a spring roll, you can smell the delightful aromas of an outdoor farmers' market and see in your mind the ingredients that go into making the rolls: mushrooms, beans, herbs, lettuce, crabs, shrimps, hens, ducks, roosters, cows, pigs.

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But the secret ingredient to the good taste of my spring rolls is the freshly picked crabmeat from the crabs caught from the field behind my house.

Hoa and Tin and I run along the base of a winding hill, and we come to an area of a streambed full of rocks where the crabs gather. We pry them off the rocks with metal rulers, the crabs flailing their pincers clanging against the rulers. We collect the crabs into a rattan basket.

I've steamed the crabs, and Hoa and Tin pick the meat from them. I put lean pork, chicken, and beef on a thick chopping board. With a cleaver in each hand, I alternately move my hands up and down, chopping the meat until it becomes a paste. The dried mushrooms have been soaked in water and drained. I mince the drained mushrooms.

Into the mixing container, I put crabmeat, minced mushrooms, meat paste, shredded carrots, bean sprouts, shredded yucca roots, Indian taro, and softened vermicelli noodles, two dozen eggs, five tablespoons of sugar, a teaspoon of salt, and seven shakes of ground black pepper. I pour a bottle of beer into the mixture, then glancing at Hoa and Tin to see if they are watching, I stick out my tongue and turn the empty bottle upside-down above the tongue, to get the last drops. I mix the ingredients all together by hand.

Mom cuts the rice paper sheets into quarters for bite-sized rolls and shows Tin, Hoa, and me how to make the rolls. To make each roll, she first softens a piece of rice paper with beer, because beer makes the spring roll skin crispier when fried. She scoops a tablespoon of the filling mixture onto the softened rice paper, folds the right and left sides in, folds the bottom edge up, and keeps rolling from there to form one spring roll.

Our rolls are not as neatly rolled as the sample of Mom's work.

Mom puts on her apron to fry the spring rolls in a large wok filled with sizzling vegetable oil. She stirs them with a pair of long chopsticks until they turn to a pleasing golden brown.

Hoa and Tin sample a whole bunch of spring rolls, and Mom lets them.

I gather all the goodies we've made for the day onto my vending tray, laying them out neatly in their proper groups. The tray's loaded with spring rolls, broiled shrimp paste wrapped around sugarcane segments, tapioca coconut pudding served in plastic cups, and rice crepes filled with shiitake mushrooms and roast pork. 

With the tray full of goodies on my head, my hands balancing the tray in place, I walk all over the place in Saigon to peddle to passersby. Within just two hours all the foods have been completely sold out.

I plan to spend the rest of the day catching up on my homework.

Hoa shows up at my house as I start doing homework. She says, "I guess you want to go to the 'World's Greatest Yard Sale,' don't you?"

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