“Hot summer night, mid-July, when you and I were forever wild,” Lana Del Rey croons every July 15 to celebrate my birthday. Those melodramatic words consistently evoke three specific elements in my mind: Heineken or Tiger beer cans on the floor; the sweet smoky smell of bún chả and nem enlaced with the rainy air of a darkening Saigon sky; and my friends and family under the LED-lit roof of an iCool karaoke room. Such pillars uphold what I consider the quintessential Vietnamese birthday experience.
Versions of this birthday routine punctuated my summers until July 2024, when I left Vietnam for Canada. In three years of studying abroad, only my second year was unmarked by a visit home. Curious to see if I could confidently call Montreal my home, I decided to turn 20 under the Canadian sun. Being the furthest I had ever been from home, I was more determined than ever to turn 20 the right, Vietnamese way.
The idea of my friends tasting my favorite Hanoian dishes for the first time, whose recipes followed my family south to Saigon, was exciting, but it was the prospect of cooking these meals with them that I dreamt of. In Saigon, grilling bún chả and rolling nem was a family tradition that eventually grew to include my closest friends. It was a rite of passage for those with whom I envisioned a lasting friendship: only the truest bonds survived an entire day of cooking with my family.
In Montreal, I trusted that the same labor-intensive endeavor would enlarge my “family” as it did back home. I tasked friends who did not qualify for the kitchen crew with bringing either Tiger or Heineken beers — cans only. Neither Heineken nor Tiger is a Vietnamese brand, yet these names automatically recall quintessentially Vietnamese moments. Crushed tin cylinders, green and silver or blue and orange, overlay the floors of nhậu joints; the floor of my uncle’s backyard in Hanoi on the night of my grandmother’s funeral. I also knew that I would sing my way into my 21st year on Earth, as I did every year prior. A private karaoke booth for my loved ones and I to sing songs that only we care for— that was probably what I missed most about Saigon whilst living abroad.
The beer cans that could have been
I had designed the perfect trident: Hanoian barbecue, beer cans, and karaoke would guarantee a perfectly Vietnamese birthday. But each prong of the Vietnamese fork quickly bent to the Montreal winds — the material conditions of my new city threatened, and ultimately transformed, each of my traditions. My bartenders scavenged the city for my beer cans only to return with bottles. I heard the sound of defeat — the unbearable clinking of glass — before I could see it. Such a minor substitution should not cause despair, but my heart sank anyway: bringing Saigon to Montreal might be more difficult than I thought. The absence of cans alone would not make my celebration less Vietnamese.
Bringing karaoke into the wild
But it was more than cans. Orchestrating a karaoke experience that matched my Saigoneer memory was surprisingly challenging. Whereas karaoke rooms populate every crevice of Saigon, in my area in Montreal, karaoke exists only in one bar on the main boulevard. Here, strangers gathered around a small wooden stage facing a small screen hung from above. Under the disco ball, you didn’t have to know others to sing with and to them. One did not choose their songs directly from YouTube, but from a song book. The limited set list, whose latest hits came out circa 2018, was printed in tiny font sizes that drunken customers squinted to read.
Clearly, I was a long way from iCool. In that faraway kingdom, I ruled as karaoke queen as my loved ones smoked and drank on leather couches, under the cooling AC ambience, screaming lyrics projected on a huge flatscreen. This luxury, which I took for granted in Saigon, was far beyond my reach in Montreal. The only similar options were Korean karaoke salons: a private room with mostly Korean or Japanese hits, mixed with the occasional banger from the Black Eyed Peas, would cost me more than any Vietnamese person should be willing to spend on karaoke.
Luckily, my pièce de résistance — a compact karaoke machine — was available on Facebook Marketplace for CA$60. Its vendor lived at the very end of the blue line, which I rarely took. Early the next morning, my roommate and I rode down to a corner of Montreal we seldom saw. After nearly an hour on the metro and another half spent battling Google Maps under the sun, we reached our destination. The vendor unboxed the brand-new device, and the three of us spent nearly another hour trying to set it up. Once that was done, my roommate and I sang Rihanna in this sweet stranger’s living room. The night of my birthday, the cool summer breeze, the dim light of the moon and candles overflowing from wine bottles, and the picnic benches of Parc La Fontaine built a world more intimate than an iCool room.
Bún chả blues began with the meat cut
Our journey to this happy evening was messy, and food was our most grueling obstacle. With the joint audacity of three 20-year-olds, we believed ourselves capable of making nem from scratch for 15 people in an evening. I underestimated the time it would take to transfer cooking skills, which took years to become instinct, to friends who had never tasted, let alone made nem. The meticulous dicing of vegetables, the delicate rolling techniques, even the hunt for jicama, exhausted us. As the sun rose, we labored around my kitchen table, inhaling every final drop of caffeine, rolling our last nem to the rhythm of French rap.
This logistical nightmare became a wholesome, albeit long, night I was lucky to share with friends who cared enough to recreate something they have never known. The traces of our collective effort — rice paper stuck to the table, puddles of spilled water, ground chicken splattered on the walls and counters — would be a pain to clean up in the morning. But that night, I contemplated that mess, which transformed my apartment into my family’s kitchen, with endearment.
With no barbecue equipment, I eventually had to replace bún chả with bún thịt nướng. This was a happy substitution: bún chả’s Saigoneer sibling was more practical but just as delicious. Shopping for the right cut of meat, however, was the most devastating hurdle. To accommodate my friends who avoid pork, I decided on beef thịt xiên. My mom theorized that thăn would be the only one cut of beef that can remain tender after being thinly sliced, skewered, and broiled. I did not recognize it, nor could I find its English equivalent. I Google-translated the word she uttered; I studied beef cuts diagrams online, naming and showing every cut to my mom. Having never cooked nor shopped in English, she couldn’t confirm my intel; having never cooked or shopped in Vietnamese, I couldn’t understand hers. Hoping live visuals would help, I called her again at the supermarket. I showed her every tray of ruby meat; I scanned every tag and read the Vietnamese translations out loud as my mom shook her head on my screen. Eventually, the 11-hour time difference between Saigon and Montreal released my mom from my panic-stricken calls, leaving me helpless in the meat aisle.
My homesickness and perfectionism willed me to prove that I could recreate Vietnam accurately anywhere. So I continued searching for a cut of beef I could not name, across five hours and three grocery stores. My last destination was the Asian supermarket by my old apartment, a 40-minute walk away. To my surprise, the butcher was Vietnamese. I ran to him, hopeful, asking for the cut in Vietnamese. In a mix of French and Vietnamese, he told me he wasn’t sure what that was: having lived in Montreal for 60 years, he had lost much of our mother tongue. Desperate, I begged for an adequate substitute — if language barriers separate us, surely we still share the same food memory? To my dismay, the butcher selected the one cut my mom instructed me against, and I began sobbing between the meat refrigerators. It was now 5pm, meaning 4am in Saigon. I could not reach my sleeping mother now, and even if I could, what would I tell her with my limited Vietnamese?
Resignation washed over me as a dual realization settled: I have failed at grocery shopping and must now surrender to a random tray of meat; and I am living in an Ocean Vuong scene from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. In a passage that I had painstakingly analyzed for my thesis, the narrator’s illiterate Vietnamese mother struggles to buy oxtail to make bún bò Huế in the US. Devoid of the right English words, she jumps from Vietnamese to broken French to body language, ultimately leaving the store empty-handed. Why academically hypothesize about the gut-wrenching relationship between home and language, when I can experience it myself?
Crushing failure reigned temporarily in the wake of my attempts at the perfect Vietnamese experience. My disgraceful shopping led me to question my knowledge of my culture, and thus my belonging to it. Out of options and out of time, my friends and I cooked our misadventures away. We made thịt xiên by cooking the wrong cut of beef the right way — adapting and tenderizing it however we could, just as my mom would have told us to. We drank the right beer from the wrong bottles, washing down our oversized nem; we bastardized the concept of iCool with our version of karaoke in the park.
Circumstances forced us to deviate from my recipes for a quintessentially Vietnamese celebration; the whole thing was a mess. But the mess was laughter, labor, music, homemade food and love. I turned 20 in that mess, and at 22 now, I realized that there are no perfect standards of Vietnameseness except the ones we imagine. Now, two summers later, I look back on this wonderful night only to see my favorite birthday party yet, one that was a loudly Vietnamese celebration in Montreal.
