Of course we had phở for breakfast, it was the breakfast food of Ha Noi. There was a good shop at the corner of the alley. I ordered a medium rare bowl for me and a well done one for Adam. The bowls came in about half the size they would in the U.S, without a plate of vegetables. I squeezed a lot of lime and added a dash of chili sauce into my bowl as usual. Then I spooned a sip of broth and drank. It startled me. An ensemble of flavors danced on my taste buds in perfect harmony, yet the broth looked innocently clear and as if there was nothing in it. I had gotten used to phở in Missouri. I had forgotten how it was supposed to taste.
Adam wanted to see the Citadel. I approved, I had biked past the long yellow wall surrounding this palace on my way to school for years but had never been inside. We took the bus to the middle of the city, where it was quiet like the eye of a hurricane. The Citadel was the size of a small park, and there were about a dozen people. Some of them were working in the excavation site. Several ancient bricks that lined a garden walkway in the 11th century were exposed, lying humbly between heaps of dirt and tools. Ha Noi was a thousand year old, counting from the year 1010, when a king decided to move the capital out of the mountains.
The war was over, there wasn’t a need to hide in a craggy place anymore. Ha Noi was open, flat, a river ran straight through its land (the name Hà Nội means “inside past the river”). Agriculture would flourish. Trade would prosper. He drafted an edict and the move happened. This citadel, his new home at the time, now had a museum that kept the printing block of the edict.
I suddenly realized I had a vintage hometown, the same way we realized our parents were old and what ignorant kids we had been and what could we do now to make up for it before time ran out. Ha Noi used to have five districts. In my childhood memory, my uncle lived in the Old Quarter at the center, and we lived in the suburb at the farthest end of the radius. I would shut my eyes during the 15-minute ride and guess what streets we were on.
Our house was a tower in the middle of an empty field, a new road, and several small lakes. The lakes now disappeared. The road was jammed with traffic all day and night. The empty field became banks, coffee shops, restaurants, houses of all shapes and sizes. There was no downtown, everywhere was equally busy and modern and important. One of my cousins lived on the west side of town, on a street whose name I didn’t know. It didn’t exist two years ago when I left. Outside its original circumference, Ha Noi had grown several new rings, filling up space with buildings and scooters and people as it went. Nothing was the same.
I wanted to excavate my memory lane and walk down with Adam. I took him to my regular coffee shop. We found the sign hanging in front of a dark alley that fit one person at a time. At the end, it opened up to a sky well: a yard, a staircase, open sky, walls on all sides. We ordered downstairs (“Two egg blacks and water, please”) then headed up to the yard and sat down on low, wooden stools. They made coffee with a dripper, letting water slowly extract as much caffeine as possible from the powerful Robusta ground. They whipped a raw egg and poured it on top of the coffee. Adam sipped cautiously, then lifted his eyebrows with approval, “It’s good.”
Ready for another bowl of Soup? How about Borscht?
