Uncle Nhien loves Linh.
I asked Uncle Nhien, “Why do you love Linh?” He didn’t reply, and I was surprised at his embarrassment.
Later, when I fell in love for the eighth time, I began to understand that explaining why we don’t love someone is much easier than understanding why it is that we love them.
A man, it is said, might marry a girl for her beautiful eyes, but a woman would never marry a guy just because he had great legs. Neither of these is true. Body parts may have a role to play in attraction, but they’re like an usher’s flashlight. They lead you to a seat in the theatre, but it’s the play itself that determines whether or not you stay to see it.
Wait, what am I talking about?
I’m talking about Uncle Nhien.
He loves Linh.
They’re a real couple who are getting married.
I didn’t know whether the sheriff would marry the flight attendant when they grew up, but the principal wouldn’t be stupid enough to marry Snow White.
Ti was not on my marriage radar simply because, in terms of cooking, she was the worst.
And as I told you in the first chapter, I was not a picky eater. I didn’t care about nutrition. Much later, I did have to care about such things as the percentages of protein, cholesterol, glucose, and lipids in my diet. But when I was eight, I loved only three dishes: instant noodles, instant noodles, and instant noodles. If my mother saw me with a package of instant noodles on the way to the stove, she snatched it away by force, if necessary. This was an assault absolutely contrary to her sweet nature.
In short, if I wanted instant noodles, I had to go to Ti’s house and ask her to cook them for me. I call it “cooking” to be polite. Is there any dish in the world as easy as instant noodles? You open the package, dump it into a bowl, add a pinch of salt, then pour in the boiling water. Making an omelet is like launching a spaceship by comparison. Yet even at the advanced age of eight, Ti could never do it properly.
Sometimes, the noodles tasted like a fisherman’s rope—tough and salty. At other times, she drowned them the way you might try to drown a cockroach or an unwanted kitten. Once in a while, she got the water right, but then she forgot the salt.
For these reasons, I fired Ti as my instant noodle chef not long after she was hired. I said in a loud voice (my “husband” voice, though we weren’t playing):
“Step aside! I’ll do it myself!”
• • •
When I was nine, my mother had a baby and I got a sister.
I bring this up because at eight—Ti’s age during the noodle debacle—my sister could cook rice and stew fish, clean the house, do the washing-up, and lots of other daily chores.
My mother told her:
“Girls must be able to do everything. When you are grown up, you will get married, and your husband and in-laws will judge how badly or well your mother has raised you by your housekeeping skills.”
That is how every traditional Vietnamese mother thinks. So what was wrong with Ti’s mother?
Death is what was wrong with her. Yes, sadly, Ti’s mother died giving birth to her. Because Ti didn’t have a mother, she learned to cook from the worst possible teacher: her father. How they survived is a good question. Probably by eating a lot of raw food.
Of course, when I was eight, I didn’t yet have a younger sister, and my mother hadn’t had a chance to express her views on domestic virtue. But even still, I was determined not to marry Ti.
My requirements for a life partner were not terribly demanding. She had to be able to cook instant noodles for me.
As you read this, you must be thinking: “What a jerk!” Maybe you’re also thinking, “what century was he born in!” Or, “why didn’t he cook his own damn noodles?”
But morally, it’s not that simple. For one thing, what people call “modern romance” is an illusion where men are concerned, and that’s the truth. Most men still want an old-fashioned wife i.e. a great cook and housekeeper even if they won’t admit it. That said, cooking certainly doesn’t play a big part in the first stage of romance. Thousands of romance novels are published every year, in every language, and if you go back a few centuries, there must be millions of them. But how many of their dénouements depend on the girl’s cooking? Does a boy ever desert his true love because of her soggy fritters? Romeo ignored a murderous family feud to elope with Juliet, but not because she whipped up a delicious bowl of spaghetti. (Here I have to say, however, that I believe their story is so beautiful precisely because they die before the instant noodle issue comes into play.)
I’m getting to the point, so bear with me. How many boys in our culture get a chance to judge their fiancées’ cooking until they have married them?
It’s not, as I’ve said, that the boys don’t care about cooking—they do; or that the girls deliberately try to conceal their ineptitude. Eating is just obviously a low priority for lovers. The heart is nobler than the stomach, no? Truong Chi, that legendary antique poet, thought so, at least, and who am I to contradict him?
A boy in love likes to take his girl out to eat. If he has plenty of money, he takes her to a fancy restaurant. If he’s on a budget, he takes her to a café. If he’s a poor slob, they squat at plastic tables in a squalid alley eating boiled caterpillars. When his pockets are empty, he tells her that he’s “very busy with my work today.” What self-respecting Vietnamese boy would ever think of asking his girlfriend to cook for him?
Not until the marriage veil is lifted does the benighted bridegroom give proper consideration to his dilemma—a dilemma he will face three times a day for his whole married life.
Are you with me on this? Would you agree that a marriage can sometimes founder over a bowl of fish sauce? That a perfectly boiled instant noodle not too soft, not too firm, not too salty, not too bland—is sometimes even more important than good relations with your in-laws?
That was what I figured out when I was about forty.
I realized there was an intimate relationship between happiness in the dining room and in the bedroom. You may think me naïve, you may even think I am a Neanderthal, but I was as excited about this belated discovery as Newton must have been when he got conked on the head with the apple. So brace yourself for another revelation: cooking is something that can be improved!
• • •
If we relate my current state of enlightenment to my past decision not to marry Ti, you might be inclined to say that I was mistaken. Why? Because after many years of married life, Ti and her husband are still together, with five kids, all healthy and happy. So, I have to conclude that that they all like raw food.
Now, let’s get back to Uncle Nhien and Linh.
Uncle Nhien couldn’t explain why he loved Linh. But it didn’t prevent him from texting her.
He texted her from his cellphone, and one of the reasons I looked forward to seeing him was the chance to play with it.
But it was a two-way street, because he wanted to see me, too, since I asked him about Linh.
Once I read a message that he sent her:
Shall we go for a short walk this evening? I’m so very sad!
I found this enchanting (though I wasn’t sure why), and I ran to Ti’s house at once:
“Do you have a cellphone?”
“Of course not, are you crazy?”
Then I ran to Tun’s house:
“Do you have a cell?”
“I don’t, but my mother has one.”
“Borrow it from her,” I said. “I will text you after lunch.”
Tun looked very pleased. Nobody had ever texted her before.
So after lunch, before being tethered like a cow to the sofa, which is to say, making mischief, which is to say, having my nap, I borrowed Uncle Nhien’s cellphone and texted Tun.
It goes without saying that Tun and I went for a short walk together. We just walked around the neighborhood and stood, for a while, by the watercress pond on the side of Hai’s house to see grasshoppers jump back and forth; at times, we slapped our thighs because mosquitoes were biting us. But it was fun to do something so adult. It was a “real” date.
A few days later, I sent Tun another text. I copied another message Uncle Nhien had sent Linh:
Shall we have a little drink this evening? I’m so very sad!
And that evening, we met for a little drink at Hai Dot café. I stole some money from my mother to buy Tun a bowl of sweet soup. She cost me (or my mother), but I didn’t regret it. Small things like that make life enjoyable.
The third time I texted Tun … well, maybe you can figure out what happened before I tell you.
Once again, I copied one of Uncle Nhien’s texts to Linh.
Shall we get into bed together this evening? I’m so very sad!
That evening, I stood at the gate, waiting for Tun as eagerly as before.
A moment later, someone emerged from her doorway: Tun’s angry mother. She stormed towards my house.
The upshot was that I got into bed by myself that night.
I lay face down while my father gave me a good spanking you know where.
So very sad!