A Mother’s Day tribute
“I owe so much to snails,” the show opens with these words as the camera shows a Vietnamese woman quietly cleaning the live snails which she will sell at her street food stall later that morning. “Snails put my son through school.” Her voice continues, “they carry my family through hard times”. The street food vendor’s name is Truoc. The opening scene is from the new Netflix’s documentary series called Street Food, which takes viewers to Asia’s street foods and the stories of the people who create them.
I, too, grew up on eating street foods. They were part of my story. Maybe that’s why I teared up hearing those opening words. I could relate. As the episode unfolds, you learn Truoc and her husband went through hard times after the Vietnam war, unable to afford school fees for her son. With no skill nor means, she relied on selling mud creeper snails she remembered her father cooking when she was a child. She struggled at the tiny street-side food stall, but managed to eke out a meager earning to put her son through school.
No sacrifice is too much for a mother. You can see it on the softness on Truoc’s face. Getting up at 2am everyday to buy fresh snails almost felt like a gratitude.
Puts a Sheet of Iron on my Face
In the South Korea’s episode, Yoonsun Cho was a naive mother thrown into the jungle of gruelling food market work when her husband’s failed business put the family in mounting debt. “I’ll do whatever it takes”, Cho said as she applied lipstick to her stoic face, to make herself presentable for her food stall customers. “To make life better for the next generation,” she continues, “the market puts a sheet of iron on my face.” Yoonsun’s relied on her memory of her own mother’s knife-cut noodles (where the dough is flattened, folded over 2-3 times, than cut into noodle width by hand). Enduring much bullying from competing vendors, she added Kim-chi dumplings and perfected the broth.
My Mother
The story hits close to home. My feisty 90 year old beautiful mother, all 4′ 7″, went from a stay-home mom of three to full-time work overnight, to help support her kids when my father lost his job as a telephone technician. My mom never went to school one day in her life and cannot read or write. Poverty in the Chinese village meant her peasant parents could only afford to send the boys to school, not the girls. When I was 5, my mom stood in line for 2 days just to obtain an application form to apply for first grade at a local Catholic school, for an education she never had. I did not get accepted that year. Find out what happened in a later post.
What is your mother’s story? Leave a comment, love to hear from you.
