Celebrating Tet in Saint Paul, 1976

In January of 1976, Jimmy Carter smiled his way toward the presidency, I worked third shift in a steel foundry, a communist army occupied Saigon and the coldest winter in decades gripped the Twin Cities.

I am not sure how all these events tie together but I do recall coming home one Wednesday morning to the sight of a little Vietnamese grandmother trailing a string of bare footed children through a new fallen snow across the street from my apartment.

I yelled at her and she chattered back in Vietnamese while the children cried. The kids were already hurting from the pain of the cold and now they were frightened by the sight of a young American dressed in green overalls with steel toed boots and a steel hard-hat yelling at their grandmother - but after the hysteria died down they were all glad to come into the warmth of my kitchen.

I phoned Van, the Vietnamese wife of my friend Frank to translate. She did and explained that one of the kids was sick, the parents were working, and the grandmother was trying to find a doctor. The affair cost me a couple pairs of very warm socks for the kids and a little time driving the family in my VW mini-bus to a nearby clinic - but everything got squared away.

Later Frank called back, I guess the incident reminded him he had a friend who owned a mini-bus (people who know foreign languages or own mini-buses find they have a lots of friends).

Anyway, on that day in January he needed my help running errands for Van. A couple of months earlier she opened the city's first Vietnamese Restaurant and the sudden influx of thousands of refugees from Southeast Asia threatened to overwhelm her annual celebration of Tet, the Vietnamese New Year.

I was glad to help and drove to our old neighborhood where Frank and Van lived in a two-story clapboard house, the only house on the block to know fresh paint.

He met me on the stoop. More accurately, he burst through the front door and spun me around before my foot touched the fresh paint of his porch. The poor guy hadn't a moment of peace since an army of women, jabbering in a tonal language he did not understand, moved in before dawn. They came with children and aging mothers in tow to cook for the celebration.

Some things transcend culture and nothing does that better than the suffering of a man caught alone in a massive hen-party. Frank couldn't get away fast enough.

He was delighted to spend the next few hours in masculine company. We orbited the back streets and warehouses of Saint Paul on a scavenger hunt ticking off items from an exotic list: 50lbs bags of sweet rice, hulled mung beans, shredded pork, green onions, rolls of aluminum foil, spools of string and a fish sauce you could smell right through the glass of the bottle.

These were the ingredients for the Asian version of the burrito, the traditional Vietnamese New Year's Cake Banh Chung.

Shortly before noon we turned into the alley behind Frank's house. From the end of the block, we spotted white clouds billowing from his garage.  He paniced thinking it was on fire but a closer inspection revealed nothing more than steam rising from boiling pots of Banh Chung. A crowd of thirty or more old women dressed in traditional garb squatted around bubbling pots of sweet cakes in his garage cooking over piles of charcoal glowing on the bare concrete.

Frank's unhappiness returned.

I wisely stayed with the VW while he stomped, muttering obscenities, through the snow toward the back door. It was locked.

That irritated Frank. He banged on the door, shouting for Van to open up. Instead of Van, the alarmed faces of a series of women peered through layers of frost on the back windows. Each jabbered in turn at Frank as he yelled back at them. Then Van appeared. She too was yelling. I couldn't tell if it were in Vietnamese or English.

Frank motioned for me to follow him around to the front, there the windows were white with frost and the front door was also locked. He banged on the door and rang the bell, soon a hand cleared away a circle of frost. The blurry face of Van appeared crying out to Frank from behind the glass.

"Unbolt the damned door, Van!", Frank yelled.

"It's not bolted!", she hollered back.

"Not the lock, the dead-bolt", he corrected.

"I know what I am doing", she insisted.

Frank twisted the handle and jerked the door, nothing.

"Push from your side", he yelled.

"I been doing that all along", she told him.

I joined in to help and I was in damned good shape in those days from tossing around 100 pound castings at the foundry. All we managed to do together by twisting, pushing and pulling was snap off the door knob, but we couldn't get the door to budge.

The same effort at the back door produced only the same results quicker.

Finally Frank borrowed a wrecking bar from a neighbor. As he peeled the back door away from the house, a white cloud of steam billowed out and rose, dissipating high in the blue sky above the roof. Inside, a heavy fog forced us to navigate at a crouch and in every room knots of women huddled over hotplates boiling pots of Banh Chung.

Walking through the steam was like flying though a cloud. It swirled and eddied around you as you moved. It dripped from the walls, froze on the glass, permeated the wood, swelled the window cases, sprung the trim off the doorways, and bulged the plaster walls into weird works of modern art.

The Banh Chung got cooked but the house was a complete wreck. Frank and Van eventually gutted it and replaced all the plaster, trim, doors and windows.

Yet for a war-shocked, culture-shocked Vietnamese community the Tet party was a rousing success and now thirty-two years later the city serves tens of thousands of former refugees in hundreds of Vietnamese, Hmong and Somalian Restaurants.

All these places offer the greatest of foods and nobody loses a house in the process.

I guess that's progress.

© Greg Schiller, 2008

Author: Greg Schiller