Winter meal

1. Yesterday, my daughter looked at a picture in her textbook, a picture of the whole family gathered around the dinner table. She asked her mother, why does our family never have a full meal like that, only me and grandma or me and mom?

The daughter's mealtime is the same as her brother's extra classes, and the father is busy reviewing the end-of-day program... Therefore, Sunday is the only day left to have a rare full meal.

Suddenly I remembered the meals when I was a child. The days when my family was still very poor. On rainy days, with cold north winds, my mother's lazy hen would give birth to one or two tiny eggs. Those two tiny eggs had to be mixed with soybean powder (a support system for children against malnutrition) to make a full, pale yellow plate of eggs in the middle of the meal. The dish was so impressive that even after decades of not eating it, I still couldn't forget it because it was called fried eggs but only had the greasy, boring taste of soybean powder. And spinach soup was always a regular dish all year round, because my mother had a small garden of spinach that she grew herself to eat along the Lam River. The vegetables were good in all seasons.

The winter room always had to have the windows tightly closed to avoid the wind, the main door was only slightly opened. An oil lamp was lit, flickering, and occasionally the wind that seeped into the room was strong enough to blow out the lamp. Mom fumbled to find a lighter to light the lamp, and her daughter innocently said: "There's only a plate of eggs, no need for a lamp, we can cut a piece for each person and that's it, why do we need a lamp, Mom?" Many times, her words made her laugh until she cried, not knowing whether it was because of joy or sadness. I still remember those difficult days, not because I'm haunted by poverty, but simply because I feel happy and grateful that I grew up in such difficult days.

If I had to choose a dish that reminds me of winter, it would be my mother's braised mackerel with molasses. That is truly an addictive dish every winter because the salty taste of the sea fish blends with the strong scent of lemongrass, the sweet molasses, and a few slices of spicy chili are enough to drive away the cold wind.

I loved that braised mackerel dish so much that when I grew up and went to school far away from home, my mother always cooked extra batches and wrapped them up for me to bring to the dormitory to eat. Every time my aunt saw her niece after not seeing her for a year, she would ask, “Do you want to eat braised mackerel with molasses? Let me cook it for you.” And like my mother, after the meal, my aunt would often wrap some more for me to bring home to eat.

Not just mothers or aunts, many mothers in Vinh still cook simple dishes to bring their children rice in the winter. The other day, I was browsing Facebook of a friend of mine. She is a former student of Phan school, successful in Hanoi. In the winter, her mother prepared to bring her child a pot of braised mackerel. In the winter, thinking it was just a minor cold, she did not go to the hospital to cure the disease but only had a brief examination and still went on a business trip abroad as scheduled. She went far away and could never return home even though she had reached the apartment elevator, only a few steps away. When I looked back at the image of her mother's pot of braised fish, the brown color of honey, the red color of chili, my nose stung when I read: This is the braised fish you like, H., why don't you come home to eat...

2. When I was still living with my parents, sometimes I still felt annoyed because after eating, my mother would sit at the dinner table waiting for everyone to finish eating. She could have gone to bed early because she often had backaches. She was always the last one to stand up. At the dinner table where my father still lingered for quite a while, my mother would sit knitting, chatting, sometimes excitedly singing: “Beautiful flowers of Champa, how many months have passed”… That was a song associated with my mother’s youth, working as a frontline worker in Laos. The mark left by those days of fighting was her skin darkened by smoke after days of malaria in the jungle, and the song that I think still contained a smile in it.

Actually, after that, there were tons of things for my mother to do, not too free. But she still lingered like that at the dinner table every day. If my mother had hurriedly left the dinner table that day, I would never have found a song that could have shared my heart so much: Beautiful Champa flowers, how many months have passed... That is a song that after so many months, when I think about it, I remember the cheerful eyes spreading excitement on my mother's face during every meal. It seems that my mother never had a sad face at a family meal. And this song too: "In winter, father sits drinking wine, mother sits knitting. In the yard, the leaves of the banyan tree fall"... The lyrics seem to have come from a distant place of mine with images and moods exactly like that.

One time, my father-in-law angrily said, if you want to know the order of a family, look at the dinner table. That was when the grandparents came to visit, the son went out drinking with friends, the grandchildren went out to eat with friends, some were hiding in their own rooms and didn't go downstairs because they weren't hungry yet. The parents-in-law sat down to eat with their daughter-in-law, and according to my father, sometimes the daughter-in-law didn't want to sit down to eat when the husband went one way and the children went the other.

If there is no reason to eat together, grandparents may not even see their grandchildren, even though they live in the same house but in different rooms. Because when they leave the house, the grandchildren retreat into their own oasis. Not eating together is like refusing to share with each other.

3. We spend a lot of time on a meal. And that is time that should be spent. Not just to eat, but to share. So, no matter how much time you save in a day, you should not save time on a meal, especially a meal with your family.

Yesterday evening, when I took my child to practice at a martial arts school, my eyes stung when I saw a man in his 50s with a cheerful face, saying as if shouting: Practice is over, let's go home and have dinner with mom. His face was so happy, despite the back of his shirt being soaked with sweat from hard practice.

The ordinary things about that man are my unattainable dream. Maybe I can see him in my dreams, half real, half virtual, when my mother is far away.

Imitating someone's saying about the past and the future: You cannot create the future, but you can absolutely create a sweet past or not, because simply today is tomorrow's past. And whether my children's memories of family meals as a bond of love as I used to have or not depends on the attention their mother pays today.

And so, I always try to arrange to eat with my daughter, watching her carefully eat, chatting endlessly about this and that. And my eyes still often smile when I hear her flatteringly say that her mother cooks delicious food, even though that “delicious” meal is sometimes very simple, just hot rice freshly cooked, tightly packed with seaweed and canned fish bought from the supermarket imitating Korean style.

I cherish every moment of that, because I know that in this life, who can avoid many days without eating with their parents…