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make you sweat, keep you cool inside.” I look at the packet of Knorr on the floor next to Shelley’s purse. It’s a simple dish, really. “I can write it down. You need lot of garlic, sugar, ripe pineapple to balance sour ingredients—tamarind, lemon grass, tomato,” I tell her. And then, because the talking feels easier than I expected, I tell her more. I explain the things she doesn’t need to know, the things that suddenly seem important. I tell her that, when you make it right, it tastes just like summer: earthy, sweaty, fresh. I tell her that, during those hot months of my childhood, with the food rationing and the war, we rarely had fish, but we could get tamarind, a fist-size pineapple, a few tomatoes. If we had no sugar, my mother used sugarcane juice instead. On summer evenings, the whole family squatted on the sidewalk in front of our house, holding steaming bowls of soup balanced on our knees. The smell could make your eyes water, but the broth slid easily down the throat, a perfect blend of sweet and sour. All of Hanoi would be out on such nights, eat-ing soup, drinking hot tea, nibbling on chilies in hopes that the sweat on our faces would catch some slight breeze floating in off the river. I was just a kid then, I explain. More than thirty years have passed, but I can still see the tower of empty soup bowls left forgotten on the sidewalk, and hear my father, squatting in the doorway, telling stories to the neighborhood kids. During those summers, my father drew crowds. They used to call him Ông Ngàn Ti Õ ng, Mr. Thousand Voices. With the most imperceptible shifts of tone, he would become a ferocious dog, a cranky old woman, a cunning thief. The older children vied for position around his knees. The little ones watched from a few feet away, peeking out at him from behind the shoulders of their parents. I, too, felt frightened by my father’s voice. My earliest memories revolve around listening to his stories while staring intently at the strands of hair that curled like elegant writing against the damp skin of my mother’s neck.
    Shelley listens, sealing my Baggies with firm little knots. Every time she glances up, her eyes fix on me. I’m surprised that an American would listen so closely, or care about such unimportant things. After a while, she says, “That’s not the Vietnam I ever heard about.”
    “No,” I say. The Americans hadn’t even dropped their bombs. We had only four in my family then: my father, my mother, my sister, Lan, and me. It was before Lan married Tan and lost him. Before she gave birth to My Hoa. Before I fell in love with Khoi. Before the cancer came and took my mother. “It was nice then,” I tell her.
    Shelley has stopped what she’s doing. “My husband was in Vietnam,” she says. “He worked as a military mortician in Danang.”
    I look at her. “He describe the place different?” The box of basil sits empty. I toss in the knotted bags that lie scattered like herb-filled balloons across the floor.
    She says, “He never told me anything.” “Can’t blame him for that.”
    Often, my words come out sounding harsher than I intended. Now Shelley blinks and I can see that I’ve hurt her. I stare at her, unsure of what to say. Then, quite suddenly, she smiles, almost as if to reassure me. “No,” she says. “I don’t.”
    From the register, I hear Marcy calling, “Hey, Mai.” A moment later she appears in front of us, not even registering the oddness of the fact that I am perched on the floor with a customer, bagging basil. “This afternoon can I use the kitchen to bake a cake for Travis’s birthday?” She stands above us, hand on her hip, a beautiful Vietnamese all-American girl.
    “Cake?”
    She nods. Marcy and her boyfriend enjoy hobbies. They believe there’s a value in making things from “scratch,” even if the cake would taste better and look prettier if you bought it at Food Lion. They will use up a whole good Saturday making hand-stamped