Ph(o)netics

Pho, that ingenious Vietnamese concoction, is an incomparable and sacred broth. Spiced with roasted star anise, cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, charred ginger and onion, and made savory by fish sauce, the soup is brewed in a low heat until the beef falls off the bone and the marrow seeps. Pho inspires passion, and is as endemic to Vietnamese culture as the Vietnamese language itself. But since the Vietnam War ended, the soup, too, has become a global ph(o)nomenon.

So much so that among my own clan, whenever we’d gather from all over the US, Canada, France and England – to celebrate a wedding, say, or mourn the passing of a relative – “pho-talk” often tops the list of our conversation. “I was in Athens last year and guess what?” Someone would start and someone else would rise to the challenge. And so would begin the rowdy banters and tall tales.

It is a kind of game of one-upmanship, both to show off our new cosmopolitan sheen and to marvel at how far we’ve come since our initial expulsion from our beloved homeland as refugees. For within the culinary experience is the theme of our journey itself. Cousin B, the rowdy kid back home, has become a manager for a big high-tech company and travels widely. He has eaten pho in Rio de Janeiro. Aunt J, who lives in France, has eaten pho in Tanzania and in Rio de Janeiro.

Other friends and relatives have eaten pho in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Jakarta, Mexico City, Paris, London, Melbourne, Seoul, Bangkok, and yes, even far-flung Dubai and Johannesburg. We gossip. We tell pho stories, often while savoring the soup. It’s as if knowing another far-flung city that serves our once national treasure brings comfort to our sense of nostalgia and appeases to our hope for prosperity: Wherever there’s Vietnamese, there’s pho.

……In Ubud, Bali, Vietnamese pho has taken on a delicate taste. Served with fresh snow peas and a wedge of lime and no other garnish to speak off, except a sprig of an amazingly spicy and fragrant basil, it’s a delight, especially when the waitress blesses the soup with a white orchid to enhance the spirit of the broth.

…Did you hear about the story about a pho place in a colony in Antarctica? This Vietnamese woman, right, she married a scientist and they lived there and she grew bore among the tundra and glaciers and penguins. So one day…

Enter the word “pho soup” and you’ll likely get tens of thousand of hits, from Wikipedia to various chefs giving recipes and writers waxing admirations, to critics providing reviews and scholars writing scholarship papers on the soup’s origin. The Campbell soup company took it mainstream in 2002 by canning the prepared pho broth and aimed it at mainstream eateries. Even the Food Network has chefs teaching its audience how to make pho.

But just where did this pho come from? What’s almost certain is that it came from North Vietnam, specifically Hanoi, about a century ago. What is less certain is how. Seminars on the dish have scholars from all over the world arguing whether the word came from the French word feu (fire) – as in the dish pot-au-feu – or whether it descended from the word Fen, Chinese for rice noodle. Star anise, native to southwest China, is used in combination with Vietnamese fish sauce to give it its distinct flavor, but French onion is also used to sweeten the broth. Cardamom comes from India but noodles are definitely Chinese. Yet in Vietnam, beef was rarely used until the French came in the late 1800s.

It may sound like a contradiction when a dish is said to be distinctly Vietnamese when it has both French and Chinese influences, not to mention South Asian, but it isn’t. Whether Feu or Fen, pho is indelibly Vietnamese because it incorporates foreign influences. Like the country whose history is one of being conquered by foreign powers and its people must constantly adapt to survive, the soup takes its roots in so many heritages, yet retains a distinctively Vietnamese taste.

Long ago in parochial Dalat, that lovely hill station the French built on a pine-filled plateau, I would wake up on the weekend with that exquisite aroma of pho permeating our villa on the windblown hill. Downstairs in my mother’s kitchen, the clattering sounds of dishes and bowls and chopsticks were welcome music to the ear. Serenity in the salty dawn; I close my eyes, and in spite of the years, I can still hear it: Mother singing softly downstairs, her ladles’ clatter against the pots and pans, and the steady chopping sounds of the cleaver on the worn wooden block.

That insular world has irrevocably changed and can only be had in the recalling. So many of us have scattered. But I take comfort in knowing that that delectable pho aroma, too, has perforated the world.

Andrew Lam is the author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora. He recently won an award a Society of Professional Journalists Award for commentary. .

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