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not the opposite. Or did they want to warn us that love can kill?

    lạytổ tiên

    bowing to the ancestors
    THOUGH THE COUPLE BOWS LOW , noses to the ground, the ancestors hanging on the wall above the altar will never give them the true reason. They will be content to watch the incense sticks burn and to observe the transmission of rituals from one generation to the next. They know that one day the mothers-in-law will no longer offer earrings to their new daughters-in-law. Already, hardly anyone remembers that at the engagement party the mothers insert into the brides’ earlobes gold balls that represent buds. At the marriage, the mothers-in-law replace them with earrings in the shape of full-blown flowers that symbolize the blossoming of the bride, her defloration.

    tiễn đưa

    saying farewell
    FROM MY IN-LAWS , all I got was an envelope that must have been worth its weight in gold because the papers in it offered me another elsewhere and an unknown life with a stranger. Since I had neither father nor ancestors, they’d thought it best to avoid ceremony. I left for the airport with no convoys of cousins and friends, unlike the other passengers. There were hundreds outside the airport, children, old people, tears, promises, all tangled up in emotions. In those years, people went away with no hope of returning. They only promised not to forget. Unlike other Vietnamese mothers, who counted on the loyalty and gratitude of their children, Maman wanted me to forget, to forget her because I now had a chance to start again, to go away with no baggage, to reinvent myself. But that was impossible.

    gia đình

    family
    WHEN VIETNAMESE PEOPLE MEET , native village and family tree are the two subjects that open most conversations, because we firmly believe that we are what our ancestors have been, that our destinies respond to what we have done in the lives that came before us. The oldest knew my grandfather by name or in person, that man I had never met. The younger ones remembered Maman’s brothers and sisters and knew that I didn’t resemble them. They envied my slender legs, but they feared the scandalous story hinted at by my overly pronounced curves. Only those Québécois clients who had adopted a child in Vietnam dared to approach me with a neutral gaze, to offer me a blank page.

    tình bạn

    friendship
    JULIE WAS THE FIRST to stick her head into the opening through which I delivered the plates. Her smile stretched from one side of the aperture to the other. The enthusiasm of her greeting was like that of an archaeologist upon discovering a trace of the first kiss. Promptly, before even a word was uttered, we became friends and, with time, sisters. She adopted me as she’d adopted her daughter, without questioning our past. She took me to see movies in the afternoon, or we would watch classics at her place. She opened her refrigerator and had me taste its contents in no particular order, according to her mood of the day: from smoked meat to tourtière, ketchup to
sauce béchamel
, and including celery root, rhubarb, bison
, pouding chômeur
and pickled eggs. Sometimes Julie would come and cook with me. I would show her how to keep sticky rice in superimposed layers of banana leaves by squeezing them firmly but without smothering the rice. It’s always a fragile balance, one that fingers can feel better than words can explain.
    At the end of every January, we had to prepare several dozen of the treats because my husband wanted to offer them to his friends and his distant relatives for the Vietnamese New Year, as his mother used to do in her village. The scent of banana leaves cooked in boiling water for many hours reminded him of the days before Têt when the whole neighbourhood spent the night feeding the fire undercauldrons full of rice rolls stuffed with mung bean paste, smooth and as discreetly yellow as the moon.
    Julie came to our restaurant often. She