On grief and yams

How eating is connected to grieving

“I have a hard time writing about grief,” begins an essay by the writer Yuxi Lin titled “Trust Me,” published in the winter 2020 issue of the Nashville Review. It must’ve been a year later, in November 2021, when I discovered Lin’s essay and was so enamored by her words. It was such a good essay that it stayed with me months after reading it, for Lin’s words called to mind the experience of dealing with grief—through eating.

Even though her essay was more about turning to food (omakase) to comfort her after a hard breakup, the idea is still the same. We eat to forget. We eat to celebrate. We eat for certain occasions (like funerals and weddings and baby showers and bar mitzvahs). We eat to grieve, because eating sustains our bodies and takes us away to a different place, at least for a while. The smell of roasted marshmallows. The steam of a bun. The clink of dishes as it gets passed around. The smell of hot sauce. The crunchiness of crackers or fish. The comforting fragrance of chai and tea and coffee as it enters our nose, to name a few.

My mom is a very frugal person. Growing up—and even today—I witness her trying to save things that, in my opinion, aren’t worth saving. The last bit of French fries from my kids’ happy meals, for example. Or the remains of rice in a pot. The leftover stubs of bok choy. Canned foods near its expiration date. Bananas past their prime. You get the idea. I was pretty annoyed by her extreme penchant for saving things, not wanting to let anything go to waste.

It wasn’t until recently that I began to understand why. Like, really truly understand. At the end of October, I saw a call for submissions from my local nonprofit magazine—Oregon Humanities magazine—and decided that I wanted to write about my dad. The main reason: I’ve written so much about my mom (like here and here and here) but hardly anything about my dad.

My dad passed away in 2003, when I was 18, less than two months away from my high school graduation. I remember being angry at him for dying. I knew he didn’t have much time left, because he was very sick at the time, but somehow I believed naively that he would be around long enough to see me go off to college, to attend my high school graduation ceremony like he said he would. In fact, he seemed so certain that day at the airport when I saw him off—it was the last time I would ever see him in person too—to go back to Vietnam for medical treatment that I believed him. His words clung to me and gave me hope.

It’s really hard to talk about grieving someone when you haven’t really talked about them very much. And the reason you haven’t talked about them very much is because you want to bury the grief deep inside you. Grief is a tough pill to swallow. “Unlike pleasure, grief has no timeline,” Yuxi Lin writes. “It lies in my body as if on a bed of ice, fresh, potent, and insoluble. Like a toxin, it needs to be slowly shoveled out over the years, perhaps never completely gone.” This is exactly how I feel—and still feel—about my father’s death.

To me, grief has two sides. You can grieve for something you’ve never had or something you had but lost. Either way, the feeling is the same but how we deal with it is different for everyone. Every year on the anniversary of my father’s death, my mother would lament on the lost years, the years she never had and never will have with my father because he died before either one of them reached retirement age. The things they will never be able to do together, and the things they did…all of which points to a very, very difficult period in their lives, well before I was born.

Image credit: Hungry Huy

The year was 1977. My mom was thirty years old and my dad was thirty six. According to my mom, it was one of the most difficult times of her life, not just because of health problems (which I learned of recently when I asked her about my dad for the essay) but because of the food shortage that occurred in Vietnam during the late 70s. From about 1977-1979, right after the war ended, there was not enough rice to go around. Heck, there wasn’t enough food to go around, period.

What did my mom do during this time? Several things, in fact.

One, she diluted a lot of the foods with water, mixing in milk powder if there was any for my brother Tony, who was a toddler at the time. My other brother Long was almost ten years old. She was very malnourished during that time. Pretty much everyone was.

You’re probably wondering WHY there was a food shortage. The reasons vary. From bad government decisions to a tough year with harvest to a country trying to recover from the losses of war, it was not surprising that they would experience a shortage. It’s similar to the supply chain problem that we are experiencing right now.

The other thing that my mom did was plant some yams. In those years, she said, there was a field behind their house that was very fertile. So she planted yams, corn, and other root vegetables. It yielded so much that it became the main thing they ate. What started out as an effort at survival turned into a lifelong appreciation. If it wasn’t for that field, who knows how they would have fared?

Needless to say, my mom’s love for yams continues today.

Yams come in many names. Some call it sweet potatoes; some call it Japanese yams; others call it Murasaki yams. They come in a variety of shapes and sizes. My mom likes the red yams so that’s what she calls it. They’re high in fiber and packed with vitamins and minerals. You can leave them out for a long time without rotting. Best of all, they keep you feeling full long after you eat it. The soft, egg yellow texture that emanates from the yams after it’s been steamed or cooked is a smell that you’ll never forget. It’s inviting and comforting at the same time, like chicken noodle soup. Thus, when my mom discovered the opportunity to grow yams near her house, it was hard to resist.

These days, my mom loves to eat yams, corn, and pickled bok choy.

How does this relate to my dad? Well, he and my mom continued to do some farming until the early 90s, when my mom began working exclusively as a roving food vendor at the markets around the city. She travelled by foot as far as she could manage and my dad stayed home and dedicated his life to our church.

Much of my childhood is spent without my mom being around. I always thought that this was rather strange, having a working mother. Everywhere I looked, I saw women at home tenderly taking care of the household and their children, while my mom was gone from sunup to sundown. I didn’t see much of my dad, but I certainly saw him more than I saw my mom. I grew up amongst a large family on both sides, so there were always cousins or neighborhood kids to play with. But being the introvert that I was, I preferred to play by myself.

After having a conversation with my mom—the first and only long conversation we’d ever had about my dad—I understood why she is so frugal (that mentality of lived experience never really goes away) and why she and my dad kind of switched roles (Hint: it wasn’t because they wanted to.) In Vietnamese culture, especially where I came from—a small village in southern Vietnam where most people were not very educated beyond high school—there is the traditional household of “mom stay at home, dad works and the kids are all close together in age” kind of thing. But that wasn’t my family. My brothers and I are so far apart in age. My oldest brother is sixteen years older than me and my other brother is ten years older than me. Then I had a mother who was very independent and worked all the time. I was slightly bothered by this fact, that aside from being Catholic, I didn’t really belong to a “normal family.”

Truthfully, I didn’t know exactly know what constitutes a ‘normal family;’ I just knew that it wasn’t mine.

This is the only picture I could find from that event.

Several years before COVID happened, my brother Long and his family got together with my mom to host a celebratory dinner in honor of my father’s death. It was late April or early May, and the spring blooms were starting to give way to summer ones. The breeze came in on the day of the dinner, a welcoming change. Several members of the immediate family gathered at my brother’s house, including several aunts and uncles, their significant others, their children and grandchildren, along with a priest from our local church.

In the cramped living room of my brother’s house, we gathered to say our prayers and to celebrate my dad, who was in many ways a complicated man with a complicated history (the facts of which I wrote about in my essay but cannot fully disclose here, because I’m still waiting to see if my essay would be selected for publication or not) but still loved and admired by many. One of the poems he wrote was imprinted on a plaque and hung up on a makeshift altar. I don’t remember the exact words, but I do remember that it was beautiful—something about love or commitment or maybe it was about my mom. I don’t know. What I do know is that afterwards, tables were set up adjacent to each other, overflowing with a variety of dishes laying on top of mismatched tablecloths. That’s how we do it here in America. Simple, yet deserving and nourishing. There were soups and salads and meat—lots of meat, and vegetable dishes. But there were no yams, for we were finally out of that predicament. Finally, we could eat well. Finally, I could recognize that to eat is to grieve, to remember and honor a life, however it ended.

Cheers, and happy holidays,

Hoang