How Yams Helped My Family Survive Postwar Vietnam

On a Saturday afternoon in Portland, I take my mother, along with my two children, to a local Asian supermarket for her weekly grocery run. Out of habit, my mom begins on the outer perimeter of the store, in the produce section, while the rest of us follow along. She glances at the prices—always the prices—before selecting the items: bundles of bok choy, cabbage, and mushrooms are part of her usual repertoire. But this time, inside Fubonn, my mother first notices the potatoes.

“Five dollars for a five-pound bag of red potatoes? Ahh!” She shakes her head in disbelief, looking resigned as she returns the bag to its place.

Next to my mother, a woman picks up the same bag and says to the man accompanying her, “Look how smooth and firm these are!” The man nods in agreement and, without further ado, the woman puts potatoes in her cart. Together, they walk away.

Unlike them, who spent little time critiquing prices, my mom takes pride in finding deals in food. Her proclivity towards looking for discounts and sales was borne out of necessity. For many years, she had little control over what she ate and what she could afford to feed her family.

On this particular day, she sees a giant pallet full of yams of various sizes, firm and strong, with smooth, unbruised red skin, plump to the touch, and heads straight for it. She selects one yam and holds it gently to her face like she’s holding a newborn baby. She confirms that the price is a great one—only two dollars per pound—and puts a few on the scale. Once she got the amount she wanted, she placed them into her cart. Meanwhile, my kids have already moved on to the avocados.

For my family, the affordability of food goes deeper than just dollars and cents. Money savings and creativity in cooking were the difference between survival and starvation during postwar Vietnam. That mindset followed us here to Portland, particularly my mom. Yams provided her with much needed sustenance in the past—the ability to eat fully and freely, to survive. Survival has become front and center in my life too, ever since the pandemic began and I lost my job.

Yams, in my family, were catalysts for survival. At Fubonn, I put yams in my basket too.

*

The Vietnam War began when my mother was just a little girl—barely eight years old in 1955—and it ended in 1975, when she was in her late twenties. Her family had roots in the north, but after the war officially began, they migrated south and settled in a small village called Tra Co, where I was born in 1985.

Tra Co had—and still has—the qualities of what you’d expect a small village to have: dirt roads, farming, a few schools, a noisy cacophony of motorbikes (which we called ‘xe Honda’) and vehicles at all hours of the day, plus a single church that served as a gathering center for the entire village. A tight kinship existed amongst several generations of families who settled there, including my own. Helping those in need was a cornerstone of our existence, borne out of a sense of familial duty and belonging. But during hard times such as war, everyone had little to give.

Yams, in my family, were catalysts for survival.

Tra Co is a little over an hour by car from Ho Chi Minh City, but when my mom was growing up, they called the city Saigon. The city was renamed after the general Ho Chi Minh, who was a former president of north Vietnam, as a way to exert control over the people. After the city’s fall in 1975, it was strictly forbidden to utter the word ‘Saigon’ to anyone for any reason. But uttering forbidden words was the least of my mother’s problems. In my parents’ early twenties, my father was sent to a political prison just after the birth of their first son Long, leaving my mother behind to fend for herself.

Suddenly, my mother was thrust into single parenthood. She learned how to survive by working for the Americans, saving a little bit here and there while weathering life in Tra Co. The village also became an accidental victim of constant raids. Women were hit particularly hard by these raids. Many of them, including my mom, hid in the forest or under homes until the troops moved out. By the time my father returned to Tra Co in 1974, my mother had accumulated enough money to build a house, which is exactly what they did to rebuild their lives.

The fall of Saigon also coincided with the birth of my other brother Tony. My mother became a roving food vendor while my father found it hard to get regular paid work given his past. They finally had a home but were still haunted by the tragedies of war. As a child, I hardly ever saw my mom before I got up for school. She often woke up at the crack of dawn to make snacks and treats to sell as she made her way through the markets in Tra Co and beyond. Only in the evenings would I see her trudging into the house, carrying her đòn gánh—two baskets tied to a bamboo stick—with exhaustion written all over her face that I knew she’d had another long, hard day.

*

I never thought of us as a farming kind of family. I saw a lot of agricultural work happening all around me, but we were more urban in mindset. My father loved books and poetry; he often held philosophical debates with other village men. I remember listening to long political conversations from atop his shoulders as he paraded me down the streets. My mother, on the other hand, was always the dealmaker. I saw long bidding wars in the market and the encyclopedic memory she had for prices and seasonal items. Her skill sets were limited due to a lack of education, so she leaned more towards making food and selling home cooked meals as a way to support our family.

At home, my parents and brothers—now a family of four—often ate simply, a bowl of rice topped with pickled vegetables, fish or soy sauce, and if they could afford it, some preserved meat or fish. This was a typical meal that I also ate growing up in the early ’90s in Tra Co. Sometimes we ate soup made from leftover pork bones and chicken carcasses. Rice was such a common thing to have every day that my parents never expected that one day, the supply of rice would dwindle dramatically.

Food shortages and famines are no stranger to Vietnam. Both my parents came of age after the great famine of 1944–45, which killed millions of people. Therefore, their generation has always lived with food insecurity. For years, rice farming played a large role in the country’s national identity, providing sustenance and income. The country is one of the world’s top five exporters of rice, with 6.5 million metric tons exported in 2021. But in the late ’70s, the Vietnamese government had so mismanaged rice seedling imports that it caused rice farming to collapse and triggered a food shortage. To cope, my mom often diluted the rice with water or milk powder. “In those days, I was so skinny,” she said. “We all were.” So she continued to pray.

Her prayers were answered when she discovered an empty field around the corner of her house one day. My mom’s experience during the war turned her into a very resourceful person; thus, when she found this field, she took advantage of the opportunity and planted varieties of yams and potatoes. The area where my parents lived in Tra Co was lush and fertile, perfect for planting root vegetables. Over time, it yielded enough to feed the entire family, and her love for yams began.

By the time I was born in 1985, the shortage became a distant memory. Rice was a plentiful and ubiquitous part of my diet. Much of what I ate as a child were not yams, but rather heaping scoops of steamed rice sprinkled only with sugar (yes, I was that picky eater), and later on, when my parents decided I’d had enough sugar, a dash of soy sauce on top with pickled bok choy.

To my family, yams are more than just a root vegetable. These tuberous, starchy delights represent a livelihood that aided them through the hard times. Where we come from, poverty is pervasive. Things hadn’t changed much during the decade I spent there. Dirt roads, wooden shacks and one room schoolhouses were still part of its landscape. The concrete structures that people called home became adorned with sturdy iron gates, blooming lotus flowers and guava trees, but underneath, the country remains marred by its history of tragedy and loss.

*

At Fubonn, after my mom selects her yams, we make our way through the rest of the store with little fanfare. Soon after, we drive back to her apartment, where she unpacks the yams and the other vegetables in her bag, careful not to dent them. Yams are ubiquitous in her diet now, save for the occasional bok choy or carrots or cabbage. My mom is a woman who eats very simple meals. The scarcity mentality has never left her.

Inside her apartment, my mom takes a yam out of her bag and places it into the microwave for approximately five minutes. The rest of the yams goes into her fruit basket. When the microwave dings, she retrieves the yam, hot steam curling up and around the plate, ready to be eaten. Surrounded by an aura of comfort and nostalgia, she bites into the yam with the same enthusiasm that one would have when eating their favorite homemade pie.

The scarcity mentality has never left her.

Earlier in the pandemic, I began taking her to the grocery store when she was going through chemotherapy, weak and unable to drive. As the months wore on, I began taking her on more grocery shopping trips, which allowed me to reflect on our current times and see the parallel between my mom being in her thirties, planting yams to survive, to my own experience in my thirties. With a loss of income early in the pandemic, the need to preserve resources became more prominent in my life and without realizing it, I had adopted my mom’s frugal mindset, which transferred into how I feed my family and myself. While I don’t have to worry about national rice shortages, the sense of frugality and the need to save is still there.

When I look at my mom, I see a woman who’s survived a lot—war, immigration, cancer, and more. I see a woman who’s glad to have the opportunity to eat whatever she pleases, but with a budget.

These days, she no longer plants vegetables, but every time she picks up a yam at a grocery store, as she did on this particular afternoon, she’s transported back to a time when she had to be creative and make something out of nothing.

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