The date was April 28, 1975. Saigon had been falling for days in the way that things fall when they have been falling for years — not all at once, but then all at once. My grandmother, Ba Noi, had come south from Hue in 1954 when Vietnam was partitioned and her family chose the south. She had survived that displacement. She was not a woman who was frightened easily. But that night she cooked.
I was nineteen. I was living with my parents and grandmother in a small house in District 3. We had a radio. We knew what was happening at Tan Son Nhat airport, at the edges of the city, in the announcements that grew more urgent and then suddenly went quiet. Sometime after ten o'clock, without explaining why, Ba Noi went to the kitchen and began making bun bo Hue. At midnight. She had saved lemongrass from the market that week. She had shrimp paste, pork bones, a cut of beef shin. She cooked for three hours.
We ate at three in the morning, the four of us at the kitchen table. No one spoke very much. The soup was the way she had always made it — deeply fragrant, red-orange from the annatto oil, the broth rich with lemongrass and a heat that built slowly in the back of the throat. It was the soup of her home city. It was the soup she had carried south in her memory twenty years earlier, the way you carry what you love when you must leave it behind.
My younger sister Lan and I left the next morning. My parents would follow in days, we thought. My grandmother was sixty-one and refused to go anywhere. She said she had already been displaced once and she would not be displaced again. I held her hands at the door. She told me to eat properly, wherever I ended up. She told me not to forget how the soup was made.
We made it to a boat on the Saigon River on the morning of the thirtieth. I will not describe the boat. I will say we survived it, and that we spent four months in a refugee camp in Thailand, and that we arrived in Houston in January of 1977, sponsored by a Baptist church whose members had never met a Vietnamese person and were very kind and very confused by us. My parents arrived eight months later, by a different route. My grandmother did not leave. I learned she had died in 1981, from a letter that reached me in 1989 when correspondence became possible again.
I have made bun bo Hue every April 30th since I arrived in Houston. Not April 28th, which was the night of the soup — but the thirtieth, which is the date the city fell and the date that marks, for those of us who left, the line between before and after. My children grew up with this ritual. They are American. They call it the anniversary soup. They know what it means even if they have no memory of the place it comes from. My granddaughter, who is nine and was born in Houston, has started writing down the recipe in a notebook she keeps in her room. I watched her do this last year and felt something I cannot quite name — grief and continuation at the same time, sitting side by side in the same moment the way bitterness and sweetness sit in a bowl of good soup.
