Ms. Lee and Her Gold-Pitted Fruit

 

Every night, after my host dad had leaned back in his plastic chair in satisfaction, she brought out her menagerie of fruit and began peeling and slicing and pitting, a master in her own (limited) domain. Ms. Lee didn’t spend her days in the kitchen, but in an office. But by the time she had come home, put water in a pot to boil, and seasoned the pork kidney, her motorbike had just begun to cool. The fruit, she said, makes her too fat, but she prepared it anyway. She displayed her technique to an inattentive audience, the only applause being an empty plate and the full stomachs of her husband, son, daughter, and me.

 

I like to think that she picked the fruit just for me, somehow knowing that the engorged “buoi” (pomelo) reminded me of my grapefruit-for-breakfast home, where meals are far more mundane and identifiable. But whole-wheat pasta and orange juice had been replaced by coagulated cow’s blood and lavender colored tapioca drinks. I found myself in Hanoi, living for four months with the Pham family, discovering how comforting fruit, and a mother who cut it, could be.

 

I could never be frustrated with her. I could never communicate with her. I could never understand why she didn’t just go to sleep or take a shower after work. She never could understand why I was so afraid of the spiders in the bathroom, why I refused to accept the coveted last chicken foot. So with our many barriers and miscommunications, it could be said that Ms. Lee and I went along for 128 days, not understanding one another, living as one Vietnamese woman and one American girl in one pastel-painted house. But Ms. Lee found pride in preparing food for her family, her family that, as far as she was concerned, included me. Whether or not she knew it, she reminded me of home, not because of the fruit she sliced, but because of the motherly care with which she peeled it, placed it on the plate, and smiled at me. So, no, I would not say we did not understand one another. We understood each other as well as a mother and daughter could—blessed with the simple ability to make one another happy, proud, and at ease.

I found myself eager to get home, not to take a shower or start my homework, but to sit with her and watch as she prepared dinner. I made her proud of her role and the fruit she intricately prepared, in charge in a misogynistic world, and in return she made me feel part of a family, with someone who cared for me in a stranger’s country.

 

I remember seeing a Vietnamese woman like her in an American-produced travel book I read before I left. But now I was across the world, on the other side of the window, sweat dripping down my calves and my chopsticks falling from my fingers into my soup. I looked to my mother, Ms. Lee, methodically carving the gold out of the pit of the fruit and, as we made eye contact, she silently handed me a spoon.

 

Mackenzie Boss ‘11