The doctors tell me my mom’s swallowing ability may be impacted by her stroke. They tell me the diabetes she’s ignored for years has wrecked her blood vessels, that she also has something called Moyamoya, that it’s rare, that it’s unclear if it’s genetic or related to the diabetes, that my brother and I should consider getting screened, too. I nod along but all I can think about are the two pieces of fried chicken I still owe her, a bribe I made to persuade her into throwing out something silly while we were cleaning out my childhood apartment. She may never get to eat that thigh and drumstick, her favorite pieces. I desperately just want her to be able to eat whatever she wants. But I also remember how decades of eating whatever she wanted is what got her here, in the intensive care unit, with a bleed the size of an egg in her brain.
Even now, two years after her stroke, I can’t look at an egg without seeing it as a deep red splotch blooming within seconds in the delicate crevices of my mom’s head, turning her body limp in my arms during the seemingly endless moment before an ambulance arrived.
In the ICU, my mom lays between me and the doctors, on a hospital bed that swallows her small frame. There are wires and tubes everywhere, but the tube coming out of her mouth worries me most, because it’s connected to a ventilator, and after researching all night about the rate of morbidity for stroke patients on ventilators, I fear the worst. I’ve fortified myself with questions to keep from crying in front of the doctors. What are the next steps? How do we get her off the ventilator? What other deficits should we prepare for? I protect myself with these medical terms even when I know that really, “deficit” is just another word for “loss.” These questions come one after another to stall the inevitable moment when the doctors say “it all depends,” before retreating to visit another patient and I’m left alone with my mom and her machines. The gentle hiss and pump of the ventilator is interrupted only by the beep of her blood pressure or heart rate or breathing rate going too high or too low.
I look out the window at the steam billowing from another wing of the hospital. It dances in the morning light and swirls up, up, and up, until it dissipates high above the city into the cloudless January sky. I sit by the window and feel hot and cold at the same time. My mom, dad, and younger brother had only been in Rhode Island for six months, after a cross-country move from California, catalyzed by my dad’s own stroke less than a year before. I think about all the food we’ve eaten that’s finally catching up with my parents, that might one day catch up with me, too, if I’m not careful now. There’s also all the food we’ve yet to eat together. All the days out I had planned to make up for the time we were on opposite coasts, now wiped away. My mom and I share a common language in food. Even at the peak of our most destructive and explosive fights, we would pause to eat together.
As a family, we have always found comfort in sitting down to share a meal, and for years after coming to America, this looked like gathering around McChickens, double cheeseburgers, Cup Noodles, fried chicken, lo mein lunch specials, or Hot Pockets. My childhood apartment in Los Angeles was flanked with fast food chains. The McDonald’s down the road had a Burger King across the street. A few blocks in the other direction was a Pizza Hut, Domino’s, Jack in the Box, KFC, and Carl’s Jr., stacked atop one another into the horizon.
I first learned of the term “food swamp” sometime after college when I was writing an essay about how much my family loved McDonald’s. Coined by researchers looking to draw a link between rising obesity rates and the density of fast food chains in poorer neighborhoods, “food swamps” are areas where the number of unhealthy food establishments far outweigh places where people could buy fresh produce. For a four-person family subsisting on my dad’s minimum-wage income, buying eight double cheeseburgers was faster, easier, and cheaper. This was especially true when stores in our neighborhood didn’t sell lemongrass or water spinach, ingredients my mom knew how to use. At the end of my essay, written over six years ago now, I talked about my mom’s burgeoning diabetes and the pain in her fingertips—the tingling she felt every now and then but didn’t know how to address. “Please, go to the doctor,” I begged her at the time. “Please.”
When we weren’t giddily unwrapping fast food from the many chains around us, we sat at the family table for hours around my mom’s platters of egg rolls, wontons, bánh xèo, or stir-fried greens. Making all of those dishes first required a journey by bus to our Chinatown in Los Angeles. The bus wound its way down San Fernando Road, taking us away from our tiny apartment and dropping us off half an hour later to sights and sounds and smells that finally held some form of familiarity. There, I saw my mom transform. She has never been a quiet person, even around the people who don’t speak her language. But she was especially alive in Chinatown, where she could serve a joke across the way to another Vietnamese person and have them volley in return without hesitation. At the stores in Chinatown, she picked out vegetables and seasonings with a joy I didn’t see much of elsewhere. That’s where she could find daikon the size of her forearms or noodles as thin as threads.
At home, with the ingredients we brought back in our collapsible shopping cart, my mom would hover above the stove, steam rising in puffs toward her flushed face. She usually wore cotton pajama shorts and a matching short-sleeved top and never seemed to care if tiny specks of oil stung her arms. I would smell the garlic first. Whether I was outside or in the bedroom, it made its way to my nose, filling every breath with sharp savoriness. If she was making sautéed tofu and tomatoes, she would add in quartered tomatoes after the garlic. Then some fish sauce and sugar. Lastly, fried tofu triangles went in to simmer in the sauce until she called out to us, “lunch is ready!”
This is the dish I try first when we get clearance from her doctors to give her solid foods, months after she is discharged from the hospital and back home under the full-time care of my brother and myself. After half a year of working with speech therapists and taking various swallow exams, she’s told that she can eat whatever she wants now, as long as she eats slowly and in small bites. I interpret all of this to her from English to Vietnamese as she sits next to me in her wheelchair, smiling pleasantly at the doctors and nurses. Her right arm is in a sling to support it when she sits upright and though it’s only October, she’s already wearing a Christmas cardigan because that’s what she had us put on her for the doctor’s visit. Her eyes stare into the distance and she nods but I know she’s not really there because her medications are a constant swirl of clouds in her brain. We help her through every aspect of living and moving and being. Still, to this day, every time I transfer her from her bed to her wheelchair, I get a brief glimpse back to the moment when her body first crumpled in my arms and I will myself to stay as solid as stone.
“It doesn’t taste right,” she tells me after one bite of my tofu tomato attempt. When I ask her what tastes different, she can’t pin it down. “It’s just off,” she says, then pushes the bowl away. “You don’t know how to cook Vietnamese food.”
Part of me knows that her stroke-afflicted taste buds are confused, but another part of me worries that she is right, that the online videos I’m watching will never teach me how to cook like her. Every meal time, I sit her up at the table in her wheelchair and hope that she eats more than two bites. Sometimes she does, but most times, she pulls a scrunched up face and pretends to vomit. Sometimes she actually does vomit. I look at her, this woman whose entire world once revolved around food, and feel heavy knowing that every meal she skips is a meal we have to supplement through her stomach feeding tube using Jevity, a liquid nutrition formula prescribed by her doctors. It’s tan and thick, filled with “all the vitamins” she needs but looks nothing like the foods she once loved to cook and eat. It smells sweet and manufactured, and every time I pour it into the tube connected to her abdomen, we both stare at it silently as it empties into her stomach.
Any time my mom requests a dish, I see it as a blessing because I’m grateful she is at least craving something. I busy myself with researching recipes and I ask her how she would make it herself. She tells me in whispers and half-connected thoughts that forget themselves as soon as they begin to roll out of her mouth. Some days, I can tell she’s present, when she lifts her good hand and demonstrates how she would mix the seasonings in with a pair of chopsticks. Other days, exhaustion and confusion glaze her eyes. These are the times when fear unfurls in my chest, when I fixate on the parts of her brain that are damaged beyond repair, the parts we’ll never get back.
In the first year after her stroke, and even sometimes still today, I can’t look at a mother and daughter without being consumed by envious grief. I watch them, hungrily, as they walk down the sidewalk, hand in hand on a Sunday morning or weekday afternoon. Sometimes they just walk beside each other without touching, connected by their shared destination. If we’re headed in the same direction, I trail behind them until they inevitably disappear into a shop or cafe. Then, I continue on my walk, over to my parents’ apartment, where I let myself into the quiet home and walk down to the bedrooms; in one, my dad sits crouched over his tiny phone, and in the other, my mom lies in her inclined bed, watching cooking shows on YouTube.
“Ngon quá!” So tasty, she tells me, pointing at the people she affectionately calls her friends. The Vietnamese woman, her white husband, and her parents have a giant hotpot feast laid out in front of them. They all live in Florida and sit down to eat a big meal in every video. “I want soup,” my mom says. I jump on this opportunity to make her something. After her most recent hospital visit—she was admitted for an open ulcer—she hasn’t had an appetite for anything. She sends back every dish I make like a customer who’s disgusted that the chef might even contemplate making something so foul. In desperation, I make her meal after meal based on inklings of what she used to make for us as kids, with the hopes that something will strike a familiar chord in her taste buds. I painstakingly slice ginger for gà kho gừng, a braised chicken she made every holiday season. I caramelize sugar and fish sauce for thịt kho, her favorite pork belly dish. It’s all bad and I’m about to resign myself to a life of feeding her Jevity until she says, “I want soup.” So I try soup.
There’s a genre of Vietnamese soups called canh, a simple, brothy soup with some combination of meat and vegetables. Sometimes it’s winter melon and pork. Other times it’s water spinach and shrimp. Every time, it’s a sort-of sweet, sort-of savory soup that’s enjoyed with some rice. My mom’s favorite turns out to be canh thơm chua, a tomato and pineapple soup. It’s sweet and sour, thanks to the intermingling of these tart ingredients, brought to a boil and then simmered until the pineapple is soft enough for my mom to chew. It’s the first meal I’ve made in the two years since her stroke that she doesn’t immediately react to in disgust. “It needs more time,” she tells me after my first try. I learn, over time, that everything takes time.
I remember that when the ICU doctors first weaned her off the many sedatives and she was finally rid of her ventilator, she could barely utter a word. “Well, this is her now,” they said to me. We didn’t know if language would return to her. A speech therapist at the hospital told me to sing to her. So I sang every day when I visited, until one day she started to sing along too, even if her vocal cords were paralyzed, as they still are, and she could only whisper along. Somewhere, buried in her brain, was every exact word to the classic Vietnamese Mid-Autumn Moon Festival song. It was February in New England, a far cry from mid-autumn, but that didn’t matter. She knew the song. I started to bring in an iPad during my visits. I downloaded every Vietnamese language learning application for kids. We played with flash cards every day to excavate “dog” or “shirt” or “apple,” from her brain. Her first full sentence was, “Hai mẹ con, ngôi sao may mắn.” The two of us, good luck stars.
Now, on her energetic days, she cracks jokes and tells me in long strings of excited whispers just exactly how I should cook the tomato pineapple soup. Heat the oil in a medium pot. To that, add chunks of tomatoes and pineapples. Some garlic. Some fish sauce. A bit of sugar. Water. When it boils, set it to simmer and place the lid on top. Then, wait. “That’s it?” I ask her. “That’s it,” she replies. “It just needs time.”