Tet is coming, I miss my room

Just thinking about Tet, so many memories of the old house, of my mother, of the Tet dishes of the past come back like a scent fermented over the years, opening the lid of the jar of memories, spreading gently and permeating my soul. I gently closed my eyes, took a deep breath and felt in that warm yet distant scent a familiar and heartbreaking taste. That was the smell of my mother's Tet sausage.

Usually around the 28th of Tet, after my sister and I brought home the basket of pork that the cooperative had given us from the communal house yard, my father would sit on the steps and separate the basket of meat into many parts. Of the lean meat that was separated, my father would always save about half a kilo to put in a ceramic bowl and then call my mother over and say: "Here is the meat for making pork sausage, ma'am". So my mother would bring the meat bowl, the small cutting board hanging in the kitchen and the sharp knife, and sit in the yard. My sister and I started chattering and followed to watch my mother do it. My mother turned over the ceramic bowl that my sister had just brought out, rubbed the knife blade on the bottom of the bowl, turned it from side to side a few times, then sliced the meat into several pieces, cutting the fresh lean meat into bright red slices. My mother's hands were quick and precise to the smallest detail. When finished, she marinated all the meat in the ceramic bowl with fish sauce and MSG.

While my father was putting the marinated meat in the bowl into the mortar on the porch, my mother was chopping the washed green onions and leaving them on a small basket to drain. In just a moment, the green onions, which had been mostly cut to the base, were chopped into small pieces. The white and light green onion slices rustled like rain on the cutting board, splashing pungent drops of water into my eyes. Then the sound of my father's meat pounding pestle stopped. My mother took the earthenware bowl containing the lean meat that had been pounded until it was soft and smooth, turning it into a thick, bright pink mass, and added the chopped green onions. My mother told me to get her a basket of washed, drained tofu on the porch. She put a dozen beans into the earthenware bowl, gently rotating it with a wooden pestle to break up the tofu, mixing it into a bowl of milky white mixture, dotted with the green of the thinly sliced green onions.

Finally, the fire was lit on the stove. The split, dry, sun-dried wood caught fire with straw, warming the December kitchen. The fire crackled. A black cast iron pan, shiny with soot, was placed on the stove. My mother scooped a piece of white fat from the earthenware pot and slid it across the surface of the pan, melting into a layer of fat.

My mother and sister sat and made meatballs. My mother was very skillful at making them, none of them broke. Each meatball was as big as a butter cookie, still bearing the indentation of her finger. As she molded more, she dropped more into the meatballs. The pan of fat sizzled, shooting tiny globs of fat all around. My mother often told my sisters and I to sit far away to avoid getting burned, but my sisters and I usually didn’t move. My mother sat in the middle, turning the meatballs, making new ones. My sisters and I sat on either side, our eyes glued to the meatballs changing color in the pan. From the initial opaque white color, the meatballs gradually turned yellow, spreading a rich aroma throughout the kitchen. When all the meatballs were golden and round, my mother took them out into a large earthenware bowl. My sisters and I gulped, watching the meatballs that had just been taken out, then looked at my mother as if pleading.

My mother often knew what she meant, so she smiled at us, picked up a small bowl for each of us and said: “Here! Taste it and then go out and see if your father has any questions.” I picked up the still-hot piece of meatloaf, blew on it, and put it in my mouth to bite. Oh my god! I will never forget the taste of my mother’s meatloaf! How fragrant, delicious, and creamy it was. The hot meatloaf was soft and melted in my mouth. The meatloaf was not dry like cinnamon meatloaf because it had a lot of beans, and it was fragrant because of the scallions. Usually, after finishing the meatloaf, my sister would go out and help my father, while I would insist on sitting on the small chair to watch my mother continue cooking and occasionally look at her as if begging, but my mother always just smiled.

Every Tet, my mother makes a batch of pork sausage like that. There are about four or five medium-sized dishes of pork sausage in total. My mother puts them in a small basket, placed in a small rope basket, covered with a thin basket and hangs it in the corner of the kitchen. Every meal, my mother takes out a plate to arrange on the altar. My family is crowded, and pork sausage is my siblings' favorite dish, so in a flash, the pork sausage dish is gone. I usually put two or three pieces in my bowl to save some, then slowly dip it in a strong fish sauce and eat sparingly to preserve the pork sausage flavor throughout the Tet meal. Once, I set up a small stool, climbed onto the stool, and tiptoed to reach the basket hanging with pork sausage in the kitchen. After picking up a pork sausage, I tiptoed down just as my mother entered the kitchen. My legs went limp, I dropped the sausage on the floor and burst into tears. My mother came closer, smiled softly, picked up another ham and gave it to me, saying: “Stop crying! Next time, don’t climb anymore or you’ll fall.” I held the ham my mother gave me, tears still streaming down my face.

Growing up, having traveled to many places, and eaten many Tet dishes of the countryside, I have understood and loved more and more my mother's cha phong dishes. Sometimes, I wondered about the name of this dish. What is cha phong? Or is it cha bou? When I asked, my mother said she didn't know. The dish, whose name is so simple and crude, is actually a Tet dish of the poor, of a time of hardship. If you calculate carefully, that dish has three parts of beans and one part of meat. Only with dishes like that, my mother can bring joy to a whole bunch of children during Tet. There is nothing so delicious, so noble, so rare!

Yet, every time Tet is near, my heart is filled with smoke from the kitchen, my eyes are stinging with the smell of spring onions, my soul is filled with the image of my mother and I gathering around a pan of cha phong on a fire crackling in the dry north wind. Another Tet is coming to every home. This is also the first Tet I no longer have my mother. But I will make my mother's cha phong again as a habit, as a memory of the distant seasons, the old Tet. I tell myself that. Outside, the north wind seems to be starting to warm up.

Nguyen Van Song

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