Evan Scarlett

Hitting the Mekong: an Incursion into Indo China Evan Scarlett

Phuong can wake up in the morning, declare herself hungry, and walk one hundred meters to a freshly cooked bowl of soup or a mini-baguette filled with meat pate and vegetables. Pho and banh mi-we have a choice at least between those two in the space of a two-minute stroll on the street. Phuong will then come home and devour half a kilo of lychees while I eat the leftovers from the night before because she will not touch them. It's funny that she eats my cooking, because maybe she has to-she is the only Vietnamese woman I ever met who could not and did not want to cook. Then it's off to town for a com tom for her and a pork baguette roll for me. Then we hit the market. Tonight it will be pork stir-fry with rice, of course. We stock up on fruit as well, and today she insists on buying one of those deadly, spiky, stinky-shoe-shock smelly fruit: a jackfruit or durian. I am not sure which. This is the less smelly one, and I actually enjoy eating it with her. It's a lesson to Western women to watch these women eat so much food and still remain slim. Then she gathers the seed pods, boils them up, and peels them for me, and I am surprised at how much they taste like chestnuts.