Thương, in a bottle of water
There is a small restaurant in Huế that sits down a kiệt, one of the narrow alleys that branch off the larger streets and lead into the quieter part of the city. The address is 34 Kiệt 42 Nguyễn Công Trứ. About eighteen people fit inside, on wooden chairs at tables. The woman who runs it is small and quick. She has a son and a daughter who work alongside her. I never asked her name. In my own mind I called her Mom.
I was staying at a hotel about fifty meters down the same alley, and the first night I ate at her place I did not think anything of it. The food was Huế food, careful and full of herbs, and the bowl in front of me was a little larger than I expected. I tried something different each visit. Bánh Bèo, the small steamed rice cakes with their dimples and their dipping sauce. Bún bò Huế. Bún thịt nướng with grilled pork over fresh noodles. Whatever she put in front of me was good. I never had a bad dish there.
What began to happen, though, was something I did not have language for at the time. On nights when I was coming back from somewhere else, late, the restaurant would still be lit and she would see me passing in the alley. I could not walk by. A bottle of water or a beer would arrive in my hand before I had agreed to stop. She did not speak much English. I did not speak much Vietnamese. The exchange happened mostly with her hands and her face, and a few words on either side, and the cold bottle pressed into my palm.
On the last night of that first stay I went to say goodbye. She would not let me leave without one more meal. Pork and rice, the plainest thing on the menu, the dish you would feed your own family at the end of a long day. She would not let me pay. I tried, and she shook her head, and that was that.
I left Huế in January. In March I came back. I walked into the alley and into her restaurant and the place was busy, every chair full, her son moving between tables with bowls. She saw me from across the room. She stopped. She crossed the floor and put her arms around me and held on for a long moment, and then she stepped back and looked at me, and then she put her arms around me again.
There is a Vietnamese word, thương, that does not move cleanly into English. It is sometimes translated as love, but that is not quite right. It is closer to a kind of care that does not need to be earned and does not stop when you are out of sight. The woman in the alley had no reason to remember me. I was a stranger who had eaten at her tables for a few weeks and then gone home. But she had been holding me in some small way the whole time I was gone. I did not understand this until she crossed the floor.
I thought about the bottles of water for a long time after that. I had taken them, in January, as kindness from a stranger. They were not that. They were the same thing the hug was. She had been doing it from the first night.
