Reading Journal

street foods, no one recorded the first time someone made a broth with scraps of beef and added flat rice noodles (called bánh ph in Vietnamese and ho fun in Cantonese ) (Greeley 80). Certainly Cantonese soup vendors in Hanoi and Saigon had offered many kinds of soups in the nineteenth century, some with wheat noodles (mien), and some with rice noodles. Beef broths were not common in either Vietnamese or Chinese cooking, but during colonialism French consumption of beef left the bones and other scraps available for the soup pot (d’Enjoy 780). Networks of Chinese and Vietnamese who butchered meat for the French or cooked their meals probably diverted beef remnants to street soup vendors, whose numbers increased with the rapid onset of colonial urbanization.

By 1919, Jean Marquet heard ‘‘Yoc Pheu!’’ called out on the streets of Hanoi, by Vietnamese selling beef soup, in competition against Chinese vendors of chicken soup or duck soup with wheat noodles (Marquet 76). From Marquet’s reference to the dish in his novel about Vietnamese urbanization and radicalism, we can sense already ph ’s importance to a Francophone audience, seeking the comfort of hot soup and simple platitudes. Marquet used the sound of delicious street food as a sign of the exciting, ever-changing urban world of colonial Hanoi, from which rebel leader Haı̈-Hoa was separated by prison walls. This may be the earliest use of the word in print, and the earliest effort to label ph a uniquely Vietnamese dish.

Eight years later, the young writer Jean Tardieu found himself in Hanoi before starting his military service. Wistful and dreamy, he admired the November weather and the plaintive flute sounds of a Vietnamese funeral procession outside his window. Soon after, a similar tune wafted up to his window, the ‘‘Pho-ô’’ of a soup vendor. ‘‘Il me semble que j’ai toujours vécu ici,’’ he wrote to his friend (Tardieu 67–68). For the new arrival, the call of the soup vendor was just as eternal as the sound of the funeral procession, and represented the enduring traditions of Hanoi’s ancient culture. Like Marquet’s character Haı̈-Hoa, Tardieu heard the call of ph outside and imagined the urban soup without tasting it. Prison walls had kept Haı̈-Hoa from enjoying ph ; fear of cholera kept Tardieu from tasting the dish: ‘‘[T]rès appétissant d’aspect – et paraı̂t-il vraiment succulent – mais je n’y goûterais pas ‘pour un empire’’’ (76). His light-hearted dismissal of ‘‘empire’’ rings ironic, given that he was an active agent of French military power.

Not all French people were so wary of disease. Hilda Arnold (a friend of archæologist Louis Malleret) detailed the vast variety of Vietnamese street foods, but singled out ph for special treatment:

Au Nord-Viêtnam, on apprécie beaucoup le pho, sorte de soupe chinoise mais avec des nouilles de riz, du bouillon, et de la viande de bœuf. Le pho est très aromatisé et assaisonné, et les Français l’aiment généralement. Il en existe aussi au Sud mais son usage est moins répandu. Les mêmes nouilles

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de riz, sautées avec de la viande, des légumes et bien assaisonnées, constituent l’excellent ph sào. (10)

Her enthusiastic analysis indicated the soup’s likely Chinese influence, but she also emphasized rice noodles as the base of the dish. The noodles, the ph themselves, gave their name to the soup, as they did to the stir-fried noodle dish ph xào. While acknowledging ph ’s northern (and Chinese) roots, she notes that ph was also available in southern Vietnam by 1950.

Nevertheless, when almost a million northerners descended upon the south after the Geneva Accords in 1954, they caused a marked increase in ph consumption. When northern Vietnamese arrived as refugees in the Saigon- Cholon region, they could differentiate themselves from the multitudes of Chinese soup vendors by offering more than just soup—they were offering access to the real Vietnamese ph experience. Only from them could one obtain the essence of ph , imported to the south for the benefit of their fellow Vietnamese, southerners who had been gone too long from their ancestral roots in the north (Nguye~̂ n Tùng 168; Le Huu Khoa 62).

Politicizing ph

Ph ’s expansion down south began its next phase, where it took on the role of symbol of the now-divided nation. At such a difficult moment in Vietnam’s history, it is not surprising that ph was politicized. The most notorious article on ph was written in Vietnamese, in 1957, by a well-known northern essayist named Nguye~̂ n Tuân. The Communist Party had just admitted serious missteps in their land reform program, and Nguye~̂ n Tuân saw an opening for a more playful approach to political writing than the dour socialist realism demanded by the Party. In May 1957, the first issue of the literary journal Văn included Nguye~̂ n Tuân’s essay on ph . The piece began with enthusiasm, exalting the accessible nature of the dish, but undertones of political commentary soon emerged. On the one hand, Nguye~̂ n Tuân mentioned people who could not afford meat in their ph , implicitly suggesting the government was not taking care of the population; on the other, he discussed the aesthetics of ph , which could be perceived by the Party as a bourgeois conceit.

Nguye~̂ n Tuân also broached the topic of industrial food, controversial today but even more so in his day when the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) was receiving from the Soviet Union quantities of industrially produced potato flour and wheat flour, to be made into cheap, tasteless food for a hungry population. He wondered whether the country’s advance towards an entirely socialist economy would lead to canned ph . Despite his firm answer that the people of Vietnam would never eat ph from cans ‘‘like Americans,’’ the very question may have made the authorities nervous (560). The next year the Party

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shut down the journal and made Nguye~̂n Tuân apologize publicly for the frivolity of his ph essay. Yet the essay was far from frivolous, and raised questions whose significance became even clearer as the enjoyment of ph became more and more difficult under continued Communist rule. Street vendors sold only a meatless ph ; licensed shops offered a foul, watery State ph , made from old rice and meat scraps (Xuan Phuong 170).

Those living under Communism were not the only ones to use ph in political metaphors, now that the soup was identified with the nation. In 1974, a group of Vietnamese in Paris worked with Georges Boudarel and Alain Forest to put out a volume critiquing the Saigon regime. They quoted President Nguye~̂ n Văn Thi

_ êu’s telling statement after signing the Paris Peace Accords:

Le cessez-le-feu sur place ne signifie pas que, demain, le communiste pourra entrer au marché de Saigon et s’y installer pour manger un pho, ou qu’il a le droit . . . de revenir à son village pour revoir sa femme [ou] rendre visite à ses parents (Communauté vietnamienne 70).

Here ph served as a symbol of Vietnamese normality, even in the south. Thi _ êu

proceeded to insist that any Communist who did return to his former village should be killed on the spot: ‘‘il faut les liquider exactement comme nous le faisions auparavant.’’ Thi

_ êu’s critics in Paris cited the juxtaposition of the image

of a bowl of ph and the threat of immediate execution to highlight the president’s brutality. Thi

_ êu wanted to restrict normal life (the family visit, the

bowl of ph ) to people who submitted to his regime; his opponents wanted to bring French attention to the daily violence meted out to thousands of people in Thi

_ êu’s Republic of Vietnam. With such sources, scholars are beginning to

sketch the outlines of the history of Vietnamese attachment to ph , and the soup’s politicization by opponents of different regimes.

Métissage and Authenticity

Francophone fascination with ph provides a different narrative. The overt politics of ph receded in French texts even before the Cold War ended, as ph began to stand for the authentic experience of Vietnam. For the Eurasian Georges Condominas, ph went beyond an abstract concept, and signified his own desire to belong, to feel rooted somewhere.

Ph was part of a seminal moment in Georges’ life—his father Louis’ courting of his future wife, the future mother of Georges, Adeline Vieira- Ribeiro. Decades later Louis reminisced at great length about the hot summer evenings in the 1920s, when the ph vendor would stop by the Vieira-Ribeiro house in Haiphong (Louis Condominas 125–6). These comforting meals Louis shared with Adeline’s large, multiracial family contrast with the usual image of

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ph as street food, just as her family’s background—a mix of Portuguese, Chinese and Vietnamese—prevents any neat, exoticist reading of the scene. Ph ’s presence at the start of his parents’ union, however, underscores the soup’s importance in Georges Condominas’ understanding of Vietnam and its place in his own book.

In Condominas’ autobiographical account, L’exotique est quotidien, his young self had returned to Hanoi in 1939, after being away for most of his life. His Eurasian background made him uncomfortable in French circles, so he threw himself into reading the classics (in French, his first language). He had previously tried and failed to read Proust, but now he remembered liking the madeleine incident. When he found À la recherche du temps perdu in Hanoi’s municipal library, he vowed to try again. After dining in ‘‘un infâme gargotte, à la cuisine française gluante et ragougnasse,’ he took the first volume to bed:

Je me glissai sous la moustiquaire avec ‘Combray l’insipide’ . . . Ce fut alors extraordinaire . . . Toutes les fleurs, toutes les odeurs, les saveurs d’Ile-de- France m’etaient restituées et meme cette madeleine trempée dans la tasse de thé . . . Je glissais dans un anéantissement complet du moi . . . Au réveil, je demandai au boy d’aller m’acheter un phö . . . J’avalai ma soupe et, toujours dans mon lit, repartis du côté de chez Swann (60).

His emotional and physical connection with the novel continued beyond measure: ‘‘les jours succédaient aux jours,’’ as he barely got out of bed. But the only food mentioned was the ph he ate to restore himself after that first night, that ‘‘soupe tonkinoise,’’ colonial, yet eternal, reminding him of his infancy in northern Vietnam.1 He was almost infantilized at this point, in bed, unable to feed himself, sending a servant down to the street to buy soup, much as Proust’s mother sent for the madeleine, much as Aunt Léonie hand-fed young Marcel madeleines she had dipped in her tea. Condominas desired a connection with his long-lost motherland: ‘‘Inconsciemment, je voulais pénétrer plus intimement dans un monde en réalité tout nouveau pour moi’’ (52). Ph played a role in Condominas’ imagination, linking him to his childhood, to his mother’s family, to a country that still felt exotic despite his longing for it to feel familiar. His turn to ph as comfort food while reading Proust allowed him to establish his French colonial authority even as he was claiming a partially Vietnamese identity.

The postcolonial Francophone engagement with ph started with Kim Lefèvre’s autobiographical Métisse blanche, published in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell, and three years after the Vietnamese government instituted significant economic reforms. Writing her memoir in Paris, where she had barely tasted Vietnamese food for decades, Lefèvre reminisced about many dishes from her childhood, including ph . But far from submerging ph in a welter of charming culinary memories, she gave it a particularly discordant character. She wrote of

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being four or five years old, assigned to sleep in the same bed with her teenaged cousin ‘‘M. Yves,’’ and the terrible, regular awakenings:

[J]e retrouvais ma main dans la grande main molle de mon cousin qui la posait sur son sexe. J’étouffais sous le linceul du drap, paralysée de dégoût . . . Avec le jour je retrouvais le goût de vivre. De la cuisine me parvenait le parfum de coriandre et de gingimbre du Pho matinal, la soupe d’Hanoi, le cliquetis des bols et des cuillères du petit déjeuner, tout un monde familier et rassurant (21).

The constrast between dégoût and goût, between molestation at night and fragrant ph in the morning, foreshadows the eventual tension Lefèvre faced between on the one hand, her love for her mother, her sisters, and her motherland, and on the other hand, her deep-seated need to leave a country where she was regularly tormented for the racial difference marked in her skin, hair and eyes. Lefèvre’s beautiful writing occludes her use of ph as a symbol of an authentic Vietnam, from which she eventually had to distance herself due to her mixed background.

Ph and the Nostalgia Industry

In 1997, Georges Boudarel and Nguye~̂ n Văn Ky published Hanoi, 1936–1996, as part of a series Collection Mémoires published by Autrement. Unlike the very political anti-Thi

_ êu project Boudarel helped put out in 1974 (Communauté

vietnamienne), this volume dips into nostalgia. The first chapter, ‘‘Une cité- mémoire,’’ returns again and again to the idea of ph as the typical dish of Hanoi, and perhaps all of Vietnam: ‘‘cette soupe élevée au rang d’institution nationale’’ (5, 20), which is also ‘‘[la] soupe tonkinoise’’ (36). Ph can now serve as a symbol of Vietnam to a French readership beyond those who lived in the colony. The soup is tasty, available outside of Vietnam, and has apparently lost its political connotations.

The chapter also includes an abridged—and oddly altered—translation of Nguye~̂ n Tuân’s 1957 article on ph . At the end of his essay, Nguye~̂ n Tuân had addressed the sticky question of ph ’s regionalism. He reminisced about a girlfriend who—before she emigrated south with the others—liked to lace her ph with hot peppers. He admitted that the south had its own style, but said the best ph was clearly that eaten next to a hot stove in the center of Hanoi’s thousand-year-old civilization. He also hoped that the north and south would soon restore normal relations, so that he could treat his friend to ph just as in days gone by (Nguye~̂ n Tuân 565).

But in his 1997 translation Nguye~̂ n Văn Ky inserted a phrase I do not see in the original, asserting in Nguye~̂ n Tuân’s voice that the girlfriend ‘‘attribuait la

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facilité de gagner sa vie aux lieux où l’on trouve du piment fort qui vous enfle les lèvres’’ (42). The implication that she used ph to bolster her seductiveness is very strange, and this French translation or mistranslation is the only place I have seen ph linked to a woman’s physical appearance. Nguye~̂ n Văn Ky erased the complexity of ph ’s emergence in a particular colonial moment, along with the subtle politics of Nguye~̂ n Tuân’s original essay. In Ky’s hands ph gained instead an association with Vietnamese female sexuality, suited to Vietnam’s new role as tourist destination.

Ph has been mobilized to rescue Vietnam from French memories of conflict, substituting nostalgia and the hope for a profitable peace between the nations. In that aim, French writers now ignore the urbanization and new labor systems which led individuals to invent ph under colonialism, and replace that history with an idealized view of ph as an authentic, eternal Vietnamese dish.

When France Info says that Corlou is a ‘‘créateur de dialogue culinaire’’ between East and West (Langlois), and when Le Figaro declares that Corlou ‘‘a su marier les cuisines occidentales et locales’’ (Lecourt), and then one experiences Didier Corlou’s vision of ph made with foie gras at his pricey new Hanoi restaurant (La Verticale), one grasps the financial value of praising the hot French ph -nomenon and downplaying the inventiveness of anonymous vendors in turn- of-the-twentieth-century Vietnam. Contemporary Francophone discourse pre- sents ph as indigenous and timeless, subject only to the creative tinkering of a brilliant French chef. In this discourse, former colonies were never sites of modernity in their own right, where tastes changed and the locals themselves invented new dishes to please the market.

A more hopeful position is presented by Nguyen Xuân Hiên, one of the few writers who manages to discuss ph in French without essentializing. In a recent article on ‘‘La tradition alimentaire viêtnamienne’’ he noted the thousands of ph shops in Hanoi: ‘‘aucun pho se ressemble aux autres . . . l’art de la cuisine est plutôt une habileté personnelle qu’une pratique collective, voire régionale ou nationale . . . on voit bien la place éminente de la créativité personnelle’’ (131). Rather than treat Vietnam’s home-grown cooks and chefs as unthinking followers of timeless traditions, we can expect from them the same level of imagination and ingenuity their predecessors demonstrated when inventing ph a hundred years ago.

Note

1 The French empire labeled northern Vietnam ‘‘Tonkin,’’ southern Vietnam ‘‘Cochinchina,’’ and central Vietnam ‘‘Annam.’’ Calling ph a ‘‘soupe tonkinoise’’ is a way to name the soup’s colonial provenance nostalgically rather than as a problematic source of disruption and violence in people’s lives. Naming ph has posed an enduring problem for the French. In 1927,

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