Where Grandma learned to make fish sauce, I still don’t know. For it is what Grandma made best, and it is what we knew and ate. But my vegetarianism didn’t last long, and neither did the cheeseburger-only diet that followed. When in college I studied environmental science and became a born-again vegetarian, I raged against that same enemy-out with fish sauce. Not everything gets to be a soup! I often thought as a kid, an American boy with a serious hankering for cheeseburgers.
In the traditions of the Vietnamese, and in my family’s accordance to such laws, practically every dish was drenched, as it were, in fish sauce. “The incapacity to name,” writes Roland Barthes, “is a good symptom of disturbance.” Whenever I read this line, all I hear is Grandma: “Put down your book. I can taste fish sauce as quickly as it slips from my tongue. In my mind, fish sauce is literary, the stuff of similes: briny, like sweat, but sweet, like caramel. Fish tears? Fish piss? Fish pulverized in a blender to a pulpy nothingness, to water? I could write down a lot of things, but where would I begin? Still, I have no recipe and can think of no analog. Online blogs and palate profiles describe fish sauce as having an earthy scent and an acrid, umami taste, suggesting that it can be replaced by soy sauce. But fish sauce does not taste like fish nor does it taste, as the adage goes, like chicken. I didn’t like its pungency or aftertaste, despised the way its name conjured a sense of the off-putting, of that which is literally fishy.
Grandma: whose recesses and education were abruptly ended in first grade by the Vietnam War. After that, upon reaching America, she prided herself on the fact that she could read, in English and in Vietnamese. In this way, we are the same.īut this all came after the War, after Grandma escaped a hellfire of bombs and then fled Vietnam, by boat, for any coast (“Whichever came first!” she likes to remind me).
Books I litter her attic with, the ones I think I understand. Grandma pretends to read: Gender Trouble, Camera Lucida, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Magazines that litter her coffee table, the ones she takes from the nail salon where she has worked, for the past thirty-some years, in hunchbacked submission. Grandma loves to read: People, Us, Vogue.
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