by:  Kim O’Connell

My mother’s kitchen is small and worn, like she is. Splatters from long-ago meals speckle the walls, in the places her arms can’t reach. The cupboards are packed with impractical pots she never uses, ones she got on sale in the back row of the Asian market years ago. Every counter is covered with sauces and spices, utensils and bags. In the middle of it all is my mother, her back curved like a spoon, her black hair now laced with white, as she tends to the spring rolls sizzling and spurting in hot oil on the stove. I am at her kitchen table, surrounded by a fragrant bowl of mixed meat and vegetables, the filling that we will use for our next batch of rolls. We are replaying a scene that has occurred countless times in my life, both when my mother was part of it and when she wasn’t.

My mother was born in Vietnam and met my father during the war. She had been hired by the U.S. Army to teach Vietnamese to American soldiers, and my father was one of the handsome young soldiers in her class, an idealistic, corn-fed Midwesterner who offered to drive her home on base after class. After a short courtship, they married in the chapel at the military base in Okinawa, Japan, and he brought her back to America, first to New York and then to the Washington, D.C., suburbs where I grew up. That was in the late 1960s, long before that war ended with the capitulation of Saigon in 1975. That was the formal end of the war, at least. War has a way of lingering in the minds of the people who managed to survive it.

In many ways, we were a typical American family, and my mother worked hard to make it so. We ate American food and listened to American music. My mother spoke only English at home. But one vestige of her old life remained: her spring rolls. Called cha gio in Vietnamese, spring rolls are similar to Chinese egg rolls, but with a lighter wrapper and a denser, more fragrant and savory filling. Considered mostly an appetizer or street food in Vietnam, in my mother’s kitchen they were the main event–an entrée that we planned for ahead of time and ate with relish, sometimes six or seven rolls at a sitting. Making my mother’s spring rolls was a weekend-long affair that involved traveling a long distance to the closest Asian market (not as common then as they are now), filling our basket with ground pork and shrimp and chicken, and carrots and bean sprouts and mushrooms–so many ingredients, which made my younger self salivate with anticipation. At home we would chop and mix and season it all with salt, pepper, and onion powder until it was just right. Then we would separate a stack of thin rice papers and scoop a hearty spoonful of the filling into the center of each paper, before rolling them up and dunking them into sizzling oil until they were crispy and brown. I was never happier than when a mountain of hot spring rolls took center stage on our dining room table.

This idyllic family scene didn’t last, if it ever really existed at all. Less than ten years after their Okinawa wedding, my parents’ marriage was over, and when I was 9 years old, a judge awarded primary custody of my brother and me to my father. I knew this development would change my life, but I didn’t know how deeply it would change my mother, who would forever after be an ephemeral presence to me. She would be part of our lives for a while, dutifully taking us on our court-appointed weekends with her, and then, when whatever molecules holding her together would dissolve, she would go out of my life for long periods, not taking visits, not returning calls, nothing. I would be left angry and hurt and questioning. Then her molecules would fuse together again and she would be back, ready to go shopping, ready to make spring rolls. I learned not to question her absences, because she never had a good explanation for them and hardly ever an apology.

When I grew into a teenager, this pattern became more pronounced and I became angrier. In those few times we were together, we often wrenched ourselves apart with words that we wielded like weapons. It came down to this: She was too Vietnamese, and I was too American. As a defiant teen and then later an outspoken adult, I felt as disappointing to her as an unripe melon, and she was disappointing to me, too. Many times, the filament that connected us stretched to the breaking point, and we stopped speaking to each other. Sometimes, the estrangements lasted for months; sometimes, they lasted years. She missed my wedding. She missed the birth of both of my children.

When my mother wasn’t in my life, I tried to make her spring rolls on my own. I would get what looked like the right ingredients. I would mix the filling as I’d seen her do dozens of times. I would turn up the oil to what I thought was the right temperature. I would try to create something tangible out of something illusory, to prove that what we had was real. In those moments, tending to the rolls over a hot stove, I felt her motherly presence at my side, and it was comforting.

I try to connect to my Vietnamese roots in other ways, too. I like to shop at a large Vietnamese commercial area near me called the Eden Center, located about a half-hour drive outside D.C. The Eden Center is where I feel both the most Vietnamese and the least. There, walking in a sea of Vietnamese people past jewelry stores and pho restaurants and bubble tea vendors, I feel a sense of recognition, empathy, and kinship. Yet I know that I stand out. Tall and pale, broad-shouldered, with medium brown hair–I am the spitting image of my American father. I imagine that few of the other shoppers have any idea that I am half-Vietnamese. I want to say to them, I’m one of you, but I am never sure if I really am anyway.

Inevitably, I will go into the one of the delis and buy a sack of spring rolls to take home, along with a side of nuoc cham, the classic Vietnamese condiment made of fermented fish sauce. The rolls are good, but never as good as my mother’s. Yet I understand the effort that goes into making them, and that they might represent the same thing for those cooks, many of them immigrants and former refugees themselves, as they do for my mother and me: a memory of a home long gone.

My mother is now my only living parent. My father died nearly ten years ago of a heart attack, a day that my mother called the saddest of her American life, even though they’d been divorced for over 30 years. She and I have tried harder since then. We’ve made spring rolls together dozens of times. But she remains an ephemeral presence. I have learned to appreciate her when she is present and to be patient when she is not. The filament that connects us has been torn and mended so many times. I’m not sure if this has made our relationship weaker or stronger in the long run than it would have been otherwise, and I wonder if I will lose her one day without ever knowing for sure. I sometimes hold my breath, wondering.

Main photo courtesy of: Alice Young

 Kim O’Connell is a writer based in Arlington, Virginia whose articles and essays have appeared in newspapers, magazines and literary journals. Her website is: www.kimaoconnell.com