“Your skin’s erupting,” Mum said in Vietnamese, placing the dish of bitter melon on the wooden laminate dining table. The light above caught the gold wedding band she continued to wear twenty years after Dad’s death. The vegetable was cut up into thick rings – the green-grey of Shrek’s earwax. Lumpy grey meat rose out the centre.
“You need something mát,” Mum said, raising her eyebrows at me. Tattooed, they faded purple.
I sighed. Post-adolescent acne had turned my face to congee. A swollen lump under my right cheekbone had throbbed dully with pain while I tried to sleep the night before. According to Mum, everything contained either hot or cold energy. Ailments were an expression of these energies being out of balance, which could be remedied with food. My irritated skin was a result of my body being too nóng, or hot, and I needed mát food to cool it down.
Unlike phở, gỏi cuốn, and bánh mì thịt, bitter melon is one Vietnamese dish that hasn’t taken off outside of Vietnamese-Australian communities.
I put some bitter melon in my bowl. Grey juice seeped into jasmine rice. I scooped up a piece onto my spoon and ate it. It was slimy and chewy. The taste, like a crushed Panamax, shrunk my tongue.
Unlike phở, gỏi cuốn, and bánh mì thịt, bitter melon is one Vietnamese dish that hasn’t taken off outside of Vietnamese-Australian communities. It also features in Caribbean, South, East, and South-East Asian cuisines, and is most popular among first-generation Australians. When I complained about bitter melon to my Laotian-Chinese friend Sophia, she scrunched her nose and said, “Shitter melon is the food of lies. My mum told me it would help me get clear skin and big titties, but all I got was mad.”
I looked at Mum. She picked up a piece of bitter melon with her chopsticks, taking a bite of it, then put some rice in her mouth before chewing. She sat with one leg up, shin propped against the table, staring into space. Did she enjoy the taste, or did she eat it because it’s supposed to be good for her? Or maybe it was something else entirely.
In the short story, ‘I’d Love You to Want Me’ by Vietnamese-American author Viet Thanh Nguyen, Mrs. Khanh cooks for her husband a soup of bitter melon. Their children had never acquired the taste for it, but it reminded the professor and Mrs. Khanh of their own childhood. The mutual enjoyment of bitter melon is one of the last things that Mrs. Khanh, as a first-generation Vietnamese-American, shares with her husband, whose dementia worsens over the course of the story. It also serves as a point of difference for her economically mobile children who insist that she quit her job to look after her husband full-time. Like language, the taste for bitter melon might be most easily acquired during childhood.
While I never wore an áo dài, danced the múa nón, or spoke the language all that well, I did eat the Vietnamese food that my mum cooked. It was one link to Vietnamese culture that I never questioned.
The approval of these inner-city tastemakers meant that I could finally say that my culture was cool, even though I couldn’t afford to dine at these restaurants because I was working class.
Towards the end of my teenage years, Sydney chefs Pauline Nguyen, Luke Nguyen, Dan Hong, and Nahji Chu, caught the attention of culture guides like Time Out, Broadsheet, and Concrete Playground. Vietnamese food was cheap and provincial and they had made it expensive and urban. The approval of these inner-city tastemakers meant that I could finally say that my culture was cool, even though I couldn’t afford to dine at these restaurants because I was working class.
Growing up, our freezer was packed with Sargents meat pies, Birds’ Eye fish fillets, calamari rings, I&J microwaveable cheeseburgers, months-old Bulla Neapolitan ice cream and sandwich bags of mincemeat and Thai chillies. Sometimes after school I was home alone until 8:30pm. Mum was at TAFE night classes after running her shop. Those nights, I made something from the freezer and ate it sitting on an Ab-Doer and watching The Simpsons. When Mum got home, she cooked herself a bitter melon dish and ate it silently, shin propped up against the dining table behind me as I continued watching TV. Thinking about this dish that she enjoyed privately makes me suspect that eating bitter melon might remind Mum of her family, who she hasn’t seen since fleeing Vietnam in 1988.
I don’t know if I want to accustom myself to the taste of bitter melon. At best, I imagine myself tolerating it rather than enjoying it. And for what? So I can feel like I’m better at being Vietnamese? Frozen foods are integral to my experience as a working-class Vietnamese-Australian, and I take pride in knowing that few outside Australia eat the same things.
It is a mistake to think of ‘Vietnamese’ and ‘Australian’ as mutually exclusive categories that do not change – for Australians in diasporas, cultures live and change with us. Bitter melon and frozen meat pies are far from glamorous, but they are visceral reminders of where home is and where home never was.
Stephen Pham is a Vietnamese-Australian writer from Cabramatta. He is a member of Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement.
The article is part of a collaborative series by SBS Life and : Western Sydney Literacy Movement which is devoted to empowering groups and individuals from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds through training and employment in creative and critical writing initiatives. Sweatshop is directed by .
