Cruelty: A Story of Vietnam and Cambodia

 

Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes by Chantha Nguon (published 2024) is one of the most brutal stories I can remember reading. Born in Cambodia to a Vietnamese mother, she experienced the early days of the hideous events in Cambodia in the 1970s; she fled to Saigon where she suffered as the Vietnam War ended and dictatorship and poverty overtook the once-prosperous country. She lived perilously in Vietnam and then again in Cambodia and Thailand where she was in a wide variety of urban slums, refugee camps, and other places of suffering. As I read, I often had to stop and take a symbolic breath of air to clear my mind of the anguish, as well as to recollect the history of the Vietnam War and the Cambodian Genocide, which I haven’t thought about recently.

A quote that the author uses throughout the book: “Rice is what you eat when you have nothing and when you have everything.” (p. 16)  Remarkably, Nguon’s narrative of want and desperation is nevertheless filled with food descriptions. This may be the strangest embedding of food memories I’ve ever read! Each chapter has its own recipes, usually for the traditional foods of the countries where she lived, and usually of a fascinating exotic nature with many local and unfamilar-to-me ingredients. Some of the recipes, however, are written in irony with instructions like this: “Buy the least rotten fish you can find in the communal store or from your neighbor in the market.” (p. 109) or “Recipe: A Taste of Poverty: This dish is easy to prepare, but the regimen is very difficult to maintain—unless you must.” (this recipe is only rice, p. 226)

Life for Nguon until age nine was happy and prosperous; even after the early death of her father, her mother was able to provide a pretty good home and appealing food. Her mother’s many varieties of hand-made noodles are an especially vivid memory. She later contrasts these delicious creations to the packets of instant noodles that were available in some of the refugee camps where she was confined. The instant noodles that her mother disdained were a luxury in these later bad times.

The family escaped from Cambodia to Vietnam just before the situation in Cambodia became impossible: the Khmer Rouge dictators of Cambodia drove the educated urban population from their homes into the countryside where they had nothing and where one fourth of the people died of starvation or worse. (I have included a historic note about these events at the end of this blog post). 

Nguon describes this flight from the city: “You pack your things and walk out of the city with your family. You ask no questions. A sea of humanity is on the move: children, grandparents on cyclos, the sick and wounded in wheeled hospital beds.” (p. 71)

As the Vietnam war ended, Nguon experiences another era of losing everything, becoming a refugee in a camp. “We slept in two rows of thirty bamboo beds in a long, open-air bamboo hut with a thatched roof and earthen floor.” (p. 82) Still, she recalled dreaming of food at that time saying: “my fondest food memories are more of food-dreaming than of the actual meals we ate. It was the dreaming that sustained our minds, if not our bellies.” (p. 65)

Image of boat people fleeing Vietnam, 1975. (source)

After fleeing from Vietnam in a small dangerous boat (that is, becoming “boat people”) she and her husband spent a decade waiting in another refugee camp in Thailand, hoping to be accepted to go to Europe or the US. In the camp, they were given a few necessities:

“Again, a UNHCR official issued us two cookpots. This time we also got a small wood-burning cook stove, two blankets, a mosquito net, a spoon, and a plastic plate. Someone showed us to a long, narrow structure with concrete floors, tin roofs, and thin cement walls on three sides. ‘This is your house,’ the man said. The shelters were designed for forty people, so each person was allotted a rectangle of concrete about the size of a single bed.” (p. 190)

Eventually, they realized that they had no chance of escape from the refugee camp, and in desperation they returned to Cambodia, which was emerging from the genocide nightmare and becoming civilized again. After several years of various endeavors, they founded a women’s weaving studio where they helped to create a better life for other people, and where they raised their two children, though there’s only a fairly brief summary of this time of her life.

Refugee Camps Still Exist: Waiting at the US Border This Month

As I read the stories of the expulsions 50 years ago as people were forced from their homes and were walking long distances in search of a place of refuge, I thought with horror of the fact that the same thing is happening right now. Long lines of displaced people in Mexico are heading for the US border, and as of this week, their hopes of asylum have been destroyed. The camps where they wait are eerily like the ones the author experienced in Southeast Asia a generation ago.

Historic Note on Events in Nguon’s Memoir

In case the history is unfamiliar to you, here is a summary of the Cambodian Genocide: 

”Lasting for four years (between 1975 and 1979), the Cambodian Genocide was an explosion of mass violence that saw between 1.5 and 3 million people killed at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, a communist political group. The Khmer Rouge had taken power in the country following the Cambodian Civil War. During their brutal four-year rule, the Khmer Rouge was responsible for the deaths of nearly a quarter of Cambodians.

“The Cambodian Genocide was the result of a social engineering project by the Khmer Rouge, attempting to create a classless agrarian society. The regime would ultimately collapse when the neighboring Vietnam invaded, establishing an occupation that would last more than a decade.” (source)

Review © 2024 mae sander for maefood.blogspot.com