I was born in 1948 in a village on a small tributary of the Mekong River in Vinh Long Province. We did not think of it as the Mekong Delta — we thought of it as home, which had a name that was the name of the river nearest to us, and a smell that was the smell of water and mud and tamarind trees and rice paddies after rain. I lived there until I was twenty. In those twenty years I ate canh chua perhaps three thousand times, which sounds like a large number until you understand that the river made it unavoidable and that we would not have wanted to avoid it.
The river gave us everything for the soup: catfish pulled from the water each morning by my uncle, who woke before five and returned before the rest of us had eaten breakfast. Tamarind from the trees along the bank, some of which had stood there for generations before any of us were born. Pineapple from the plots on the higher ground beside the water. Bac ha — elephant ear taro stem — from the edges of the paddies, cut fresh and dropped into the pot at the last moment so it kept its crunch. The soup was made from what the land and water offered freely. My mother never bought ingredients for it. She only gathered them.
The war came to our region in stages. The American bombing of the delta began in earnest in the mid-1960s. Our village was caught between forces several times in ways I will not describe in detail because the details belong to those years and those years belong to us. By 1970 the landscape around our village had changed in ways I still struggle to name — some of the tamarind trees were gone, some of the paddies were unusable, some of the people were gone too. My family moved to Can Tho in 1971. My village does not exist now in the form I knew it. I have looked on maps. The tributaries have been diverted. The land has been changed.
I came to Sydney in 1979, after the reunification and the difficult years that followed. I was thirty-one. I lived first in Cabramatta, with other Vietnamese families who had arrived the same way, by boats and camps and goodwill and luck. I missed the river in a way that had no practical expression — you cannot miss a river in the way you miss a person, with things to say and questions to ask. The river simply was, and then it was not part of my life, and that was a kind of silence I did not know how to fill.
I began growing tamarind on my apartment balcony in my second year in Sydney. Not a tree — just a pot, with a cutting a neighbour had given me from hers. It grew slowly. It took years before it produced anything. When it finally gave fruit I picked the pods and made canh chua and ate it alone at my kitchen table and felt something shift in my chest that I cannot describe except to say that it was not quite sadness and not quite comfort but something in between, which is perhaps the only honest place to feel anything about a home you cannot return to.
I am seventy-six. My grandchildren were born in Sydney. They have never seen the Mekong and will probably not see it as I saw it, if they see it at all. When they come on Sundays I make canh chua and I tell them about the river as I cook — the way it smelled in the morning, the sound of my uncle's boat, the weight of a ripe tamarind pod. They listen with the particular attention children give to old people when they sense something important is being passed. The soup is what I have left of that place. When they learn to make it, the river will go with them.
