It’s very watery, the first one. Almost diluted now from being carried so long. The colours are thin and the scene plays slowly, as though going any faster would make it disappear altogether. Half a dozen men shouting and the turtle restrained with black cord, it’s neck about to be hacked with a machete and the clay of the riverbank that was wet under my feet.
I was born in Bien Hoa, where an uncle had a piggery; the sties came up to the back door step, and shared the same roof as the house. Pig shit is the most repulsive smelling of all shits. The poisonous odour was a fluid that filled the two-story house, drowning the Saints and Madonnas that papered the walls, the Christs and calendars of pop stars that curled up in the foul-some stench. The smell clung like a wet sheet that I couldn’t shake off as we ate on the floor.
Deep-fried mouse was my favourite thing to eat. The mice were fattened on the grain of rice paddies. This horrifying revelation was recounted to me eighteen years later by a toothless old woman who also claimed she gave me piggyback rides up and down the riverbanks. But when I was talking to her, I had no recollection of this old lady, and I could not share in the memory with her. I also ate grasshoppers, green ones whose hind legs would have been like chicken drumsticks in my toddler’s hand. Their tummies bloated with juice. Mum saw a grasshopper hanging off the fly wire on the back door in Geraldton, and told a story about frying up dozens of them over an open fire. I was both appalled and enchanted, having forgotten all about it by then.
Sometimes I can’t differentiate between what I think are my own memories and those images that were planted there by my parents recounting their stories. All the stills become much more personal the more I handled them, embellished them, and the ownership of the memories are blurred, so that their familiarity eventually colour them as mine.
The rivers of Can Tho in the Mekong Delta, which were our streets, and the longboats jostling for space; this was where Dad’s family came from, along the banks of the Mekong. This was a land of Buddhists, of fireflies that stitched up the skin of the night and toothless men with whiskers, peeling small bananas boiled in cafés over the ribboned river.
The most sobering thing I can recall is seeing my father pluck the feathers from a duck’s neck, take a butcher’s knife and slit the bald throat of the struggling bird and let the blood trickle onto a dinner plate.
The blood would then be put aside to congeal into a jelly-like substance the colour of Alizarin Crimson. Slivers of boiled liver, mint and crushed, roasted peanuts would then be sprinkled on top and the whole thing consumed with a spoon.
I have eaten it just the once.
Suzanne German, about 1 month ago
wow – what a colourful description of the flavours and memories of childhood so different to western life. Hop it’s amazing isn’t it the way memories merge and blend between our elders and ourselves?
This must have been both fascinating and moving for you to remember and write. I love the way you express in writing…..such an easy flow to your style of narrative.
thanks so much for sharing such a precious part of yourself with this group. really enjoyed reading this. it’s great stuff – hope there is more to come!
Suzanne :)