A Story as Old as Cha Gio

In October 1952, Tran Xuong Kinh flew from Saigon to Washington, DC. A trained midwife and public health nurse, she was coming to the United States to spend the year learning American obstetrics techniques. “Though a bride of only four months,” Tran Xuong Kinh told a reporter, she “could not afford to pass up the study opportunity” (Eads 1952). Her year abroad would be funded by the Mutual Security Agency in Saigon where her husband was a clerk. (The office was established after President Truman signed the Mutual Security Act of 1951 authorizing military, economic, and technical assistance to friendly countries. This was one of many soft power initiatives that marked the entry of the United States into the Cold War.)Newspapers across the country ran this political and human-interest story. I found articles in newspapers from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Indiana, Kansas, Texas, and Washington. All of them focused on the nurse’s appearance (her “doll-like figure,” “child-like face,” and “satiny ebony hair”), her clothes, and finally her hobby of making cha gio (Vietnamese eggrolls): “Mme. Kinh likes housekeeping, especially cooking […] her favorite dish is made with chopped pork and crabs, onion and other Indochinese vegetables wrapped in a sheet of rice paste and fried in fat. When nicely browned you dip it into a fish sauce and eat it with salads and rice” (Eads 1952). This public health nurse may have been the first Vietnamese person in the United States to teach Americans how to make and eat Vietnamese food.The conventional US history of Vietnamese people and Vietnamese food is a refugee story. It begins in 1975 with the “first wave” of refugees who, after being moved from refugee camp to refugee camp eventually settled in ethnic enclaves along the West Coast and, to lesser extents, the Gulf Coast and northern Virginia. Soon after, they opened grocery stores and restaurants—also in ethnic enclaves—that were created primarily to serve fellow Southeast Asians. These refugee-entrepreneurs are widely credited with introducing Vietnamese foods and tastes to mainstream America.But decades before “the fall of Saigon,” Vietnamese men and women in cities like New York, Washington DC, Fayetteville, and Boston were already cooking, eating, looking for, and sharing information about Vietnamese food. The pre-1975 Vietnamese American food scene is distinct from its post-1975 counterparts in that it’s centered “east of California,”1 isn’t exclusively or even mostly based in restaurants, and involves people from a wider class spectrum. They include members of the diplomatic elite, housewives, nannies, university students and faculty, or professionals like Tran Xuong Kinh who were in the United States to enhance their skills and training. Others were steamship workers who traded maritime work for work in hotels, professional kitchens, and private homes and still others were wealthy travelers touring America.Although largely forgotten, New York City and its greater metropolitan area was a vibrant center of early Vietnamese life and Vietnamese food in the United States. The spatial clustering of diplomatic organizations as well as universities, international airports, piers, and cargo ports is a major reason Vietnamese people have been coming to or at least going through New York City for more than a century.The Vietnamese history in New York may have begun in 1912 when the French steamship Latouche-Tréville docked at a pier on the Hudson River. Among the ship’s kitchen staff was a young Ho Chi Minh (then going by the names Nguyen Tat Thanh and Nguyen Van Ba).2 Many of the stories about Ho Chi Minh’s food history is apocryphal—He was a waiter in the Bronx! He was a dishwasher in lower Manhattan! He was a baker in central Harlem!—but there is evidence to support claims that in 1917 and part of 1918 he parlayed his skills as a steamship cook to work as a private chef for a wealthy family in Brooklyn.3In researching the early history of Vietnamese food in the United States, I’ve combed historical records; city and county records; academic books and journals; blogs; social media posts; memoirs; local, regional, and national newspapers; as well as the first- and secondhand memories of early Vietnamese Americans and those who knew them. Not surprisingly, this food history is incomplete, ambiguous, and discontinuous. It is also rich and far more extensive than is generally understood. For example, there was a false start in the late 1780s when Thomas Jefferson tried and ultimately failed to procure “the dry rice of Cochinchina.” He once noted the rice’s “reputation of being whitest to the eye, best flavored to the taste” (Boyd 1955: 646).The earliest actual appearances of Vietnamese food in the United States can be traced to the 1940s when diplomatic institutions like the Vietnamese-American Friendship Association and the Vietnam Mission to the United Nations (both located in Manhattan) organized state dinners for US, Vietnamese, and other foreign dignitaries. At all of these events, Vietnamese foods functioned as cultural objects of ethnic pride and political tools for staging a positive image of Viet Nam’s national identity (in familiar gendered terms).One such dinner was in Washington DC, in 1954. It was hosted by Mrs. Tran Van Kha, wife of the first Vietnamese ambassador to the United States.4 Historical records of embassy dinners are scant and fragmentary but what information is available suggests that the ambassador’s wife was a deft and striking hostess. Newspapers described her as a “tall, interesting-looking” woman. She “wears her hair pulled severely back into a bun at the nape of her neck and rather severely fashioned high collared coat-like costumes which make her stand out in any Washington gathering” (Eads 1954). But the real draw at these dinner parties was Mrs. Tran Van Kha’s cha gio, a “fried pie […] usually made with crab meat and bean sprouts wrapped in a thin dough” (Eads 1954).There’s no record of how these women sourced their ingredients. Rice paper, mung bean sprouts, and fish sauce weren’t common items in American grocery stores in the 1950s. A decade later, they were still difficult to find. South Viet Nam’s UN Attaché To Ngoc Thach and his wife discovered this in February 1965 when he was on temporary assignment in New York. They spent an afternoon in Manhattan’s Chinatown looking for and failing to find rice paper, what one journalist covering the story described as “a rice-flour staff-of-life to Vietnamese.” “Housewives wrap it around chopped pork, mushrooms, shrimp or other fillings and deep-fry it into cha-gio, a kind of Vietnamese eggroll” (Morello 1965).Ba Dam Thi Tuyet’s search for Vietnamese foods in Washington DC yielded the same disappointing results. In 1965, she moved to the capital with her husband Do Linh Thong, a translator and broadcaster for the state-run news broadcasting service Voice of America. Unable to find a Vietnamese market or food products, Ba Dam Thi Tuyet sent away for staple ingredients. Her daughter Que-Huong Le-Si explains, “My mom had to import rice paper from Viet Nam. Her sister [in Saigon] packed it up, shipped them on a boat. It took three months to get here.”5 Laughing, she adds, “Sometimes it makes it, sometimes it doesn’t.” Her mother also had the enterprising idea to serve as a private supplier to nearby Chinese grocers in Washington DC and Maryland. “We took the rice paper to Chinese markets to sell them so they could resell them because there was no rice paper back then.”6 Ba Dam Thi Tuyet also sold her homemade cha lua (Vietnamese ham) to Vietnamese students and diplomatic families in the area, many of whom she met while catering Ambassador Bui Diem’s state dinners at the embassy.Until the late 1970s, Vietnamese people living in the United States mostly sourced their staple food products through private networks. I imagine that Tran Xuong Kinh, possibly on the advice of her mother, brought rice paper from home. Packaged in flat, thick sleeves, they would have been easily and safely transportable in her luggage, in between her allegedly “extensive wardrobe” of “native costumes” (Eads 1952). The embassy’s cha gio were almost certainly made from rice paper that the ambassador’s wife or, more likely, her staff brought from Viet Nam. The embassy was reputed to be teeming with “treasures from their homeland” (Eads 1954).Marie Tran, whose husband Tran Long Nghi was secretary to the Vietnamese ambassador in the 1960s, sourced Vietnamese food products in much the same way my mom did in the 1970s and 1980s: through word-of-mouth networks and by eavesdropping. Her daughters, KT Diovisalvo (born in Viet Nam) and Barbara Tran (born on the Lower East Side in New York City) recall their mom spending hours circling Chinatown looking for Vietnamese ingredients or, when pressed, acceptable Thai substitutes. She also listened for Vietnamese people. KT Diovisalvo tells me, “Any Vietnamese person she saw or heard speaking Vietnamese, she would stop and hug them and talk to them.”7Marie Tran was shopping for family meals but also for the lavish dinner parties she hosted at the Viet Nam consulate in Midtown and at her home on the Lower East Side. KT Diovisalvo remembers these parties fondly. They provided her mom opportunities to meet and befriend other Vietnamese people in New York as well as to flex her culinary skills. Marie Tran was a seasoned chef and had occasionally cooked for South Viet Nam President Ngo Dinh Diem when he visited the consulate in Manila where her husband was previously assigned.Unlike Marie Tran, Tran Thi Khen often made do with American substitutes. Tran Thi Khen moved to the United States in December 1964—first to Washington DC and then to Fayetteville, North Carolina—as a live-in nanny for a South Vietnamese diplomat, his wife (Ba Thao or Madame Thao), and their six children. In January 1967, Tran Thi Khen moved to New York City to work as a live-in nanny for the Taylors, a prominent family on the Upper East Side. When the Taylors’ private chef and her partner Ngo Van Giap retired in 1975, she eventually filled that role too (Tran 2007).In dishes that called for snakehead fish, Tran Thi Khen used swordfish. She used vinegar instead of tamarind and heavy cream instead of coconut milk. When her daughter and grandchildren joined her in the United States in 1992, they discovered that she had developed a taste for Vietnamese American food. As her granddaughter Tanya Nguyen tells me, “When my mom would make the traditional foods, my grandmother didn’t enjoy it much. She would say that she didn’t remember it tasting like that. I don’t think she realized her tastes changed. She got used to the taste of the substitutes.”8 The one ingredient Tran Thi Khen believed had no substitute was nuoc mam or Vietnamese fish sauce. Even though Bertrand Taylor didn’t allow fish sauce in his foods, Tran Thi Khen admitted to her granddaughter that she sometimes snuck it in anyway. Shocked but laughing, Tanya Nguyen asked her grandmother, “What if one of them was allergic to fish Her grandmother the allergic to fish Tran Thi Khen and Marie Tran, Vietnamese food was a and a of Tran Thi Khen made Vietnamese food for her but also for and her Ngo Van food was more the Taylor didn’t eat with my The Taylor in the kitchen with Tran Thi Khen and Ngo Van The Taylor on Ngo Van French food in the The Taylors’ their Vietnamese staff and, Taylor adds, “When my had dinner Giap a sister Khen would in dinner my made that there was a to the those who didn’t cook for a living or dinners in the service of Nam diplomatic Vietnamese food were a of and social These were made and in private and and Vietnamese especially Vietnamese their social and around food. When Ngo Van Giap and Tran Thi Khen weren’t living with and cooking for the on the Upper East they hosted with their Vietnamese and in their West in Manhattan’s the Upper East on Nguyen dinner parties with her a UN secretary and one of the get at almost did the cooking but brought or was a of food […] cha gio and at least three of rice paper between the Thai that her sister sent her from These ran or “We mostly about the food or what was in New York. 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