My mother left Hanoi with almost nothing. It was 1979. She was twenty-three. She had a cloth bag, a photograph of her parents, and — though she would not have described it this way — the memory of a smell. Star anise. Charred ginger. Bone broth that had been on the stove since before she woke up.
She arrived in Sydney two years later through a refugee resettlement programme, after time in a camp in Malaysia. She settled in Cabramatta, in the city's southwest, where a community of Vietnamese families were building something slowly and quietly from what they had managed to carry. My mother's first job was in a fabric shop. Her second job was in a pho restaurant, where she spent six months trying to convince the owner that the broth wasn't right.
She was correct, of course. He was using green cardamom. She told him it should be black — smoky and earthier, nothing like the green — and that the onion needed to be charred directly over a flame until the skin blistered and the flesh softened. She told him the ginger should be treated the same way. He didn't listen. She started making her own at home on weekends.
I grew up watching this. Every Saturday morning, the bones went on before six. The charring happened over our gas burner — she'd hold the onion halves directly over the flame with her bare hands, turning them slowly, until the smoke filled the kitchen. My brother and I would wake to that smell and know what day it was. Not Monday. Not school. Saturday. Phở day.
She never used a timer. She never measured the fish sauce. She'd taste the broth throughout the day, adding a little, adjusting by instinct — an instinct she'd absorbed as a child watching her own mother in a kitchen in Hanoi. When I asked her once to teach me properly, she laughed. "You are learning right now," she said. "You're standing here." I wrote everything down anyway. She didn't stop me, but she watched with a small, patient smile, the way you'd watch a child trying to catch smoke in a jar.
In Hanoi, phở is served simply: a bowl of clear, golden broth, flat rice noodles, sliced beef, spring onion, fresh coriander, a dish of sliced chili and a small jug of fish sauce on the side. Nothing else. My mother would bristle at the bowls in some Sydney restaurants — the bean sprouts piled up, the hoisin sauce, the Thai basil. "That's southern," she'd say, with a measured diplomacy that made clear exactly what she thought of it. She was from the north. The north was where the broth was everything.
She is seventy-one now. She still makes it on Saturdays, though the portions are smaller and she sits down more between tasks. I make it too — in my own flat, on my own gas stove, with the same black cardamom I order from an importer she found thirty years ago. When the smoke rises from the charring ginger, I am seven years old again, standing in her kitchen, supposedly learning, actually just watching the light come in through the window and feeling, without having a word for it yet, completely safe.
