The wrong village

A morning lost in translation outside Hoi An, and what I had been eating all week without seeing it.

On my third day in Hoi An, I messaged Lộc, the Grab driver who had brought me in from the airport and left me his number in case I needed anything, a common practice around there.

I usually prefer to handle things on my own when traveling. Not this time. I needed someone who spoke the language. Everything between us went through a translation app, a few words of English on either side.

I told him I was a food writer and asked if he would take me to Phú Chiêm, a small village nearby, at around 1am.

Phú Chiêm is said to be the birthplace of mì Quảng, one of Central Vietnam’s signature noodle dishes, and women there still wake around midnight to make the rice noodles and the broth of pork bones and shrimp, to then sell it at stalls and markets in Hoi An and Da Nang before the town is properly awake. That was the story I wanted. I thought about those midnight kitchens for two days before doing anything about it.

Arriving at a random village in the middle of the night on a rented scooter, looking for a house with a light on and trying to talk to whoever answered, who probably spoke no English, was a bit much on my own. Hence, Lộc.

Lộc took the job seriously. He went to find the noodle village himself, spoke to the people there, and texted back with a plan: we would go early in the morning, “because they don’t work there” at night. I insisted once more on the small hours I had in mind. He told me there was nothing to see then. The few reports I had read were years old, so I assumed the tradition had faded.

I doubt that now. I only understood later that somewhere in there my 1am had turned into a morning visit to a village he knew.

We left early, out past the edge of town, rice paddies running along both sides of the road, then a concrete lane barely wider than the car, areca palms leaning over it. The village was even smaller than I expected. I checked the map when we arrived. This wasn’t Phú Chiêm at all.

Lộc didn’t correct me when I said the name out loud that morning, but he didn’t confirm it either. I never told him. As far as Lộc knows, the morning went exactly as planned.

I had written to him about knocking on strangers’ doors in the dark, reporter things. What I got was a morning appointment where someone was waiting for me. It was still someone’s home, and the least I could do was walk in with a smile.

A simple house, dusty, a mattress on the floor of the room next to where the work happens. A dog worked the gaps between the table legs. Women were making noodles the way it must have been done forever: rice ground to a thin white batter, ladled onto cloth stretched over boiling water, set into a soft translucent sheet, peeled, folded, cut into strands. On the work table, a knife and a button phone. The fire under the steamers burned on rice husks.

One of them stopped to walk me through it, step by step, and finished by holding up a handful of warm noodles with a grin. The finished strands went into a plastic colander with a desk fan pointed at them, and got weighed on a mechanical scale with a green plastic pan. Neighbours came and went. The noodle master’s son had left his bicycle by the door.

Then she pulled out her phone. They run cooking classes at the house, and she wanted me to see the listing, TripAdvisor I think, scrolling with real pride before making her pitch. I had come looking for a tradition that starts at midnight and I was being sold a morning class by the woman who keeps it going.

I tried a few strands with soy sauce and chillies. Plain white rice noodles. Not mì Quảng. Not the story I had planned.

When the work stopped, the four of us sat in the yard and ate jackfruit off a dark glazed plate, toothpicks on the side. Me, Lộc, the woman who had shown me the noodles, and her husband. Very sweet, a deep dark yellow, from right there on their street.

I never saw the dawn shift, never got my scene of turmeric noodles by lamplight.

On the ride back, the paddies ran along both sides of the road the whole way home, and it hit me that I had been driving through the answer all week. I had spent days chasing dishes instead of ingredients.

Bánh ướt thịt nướng, pork skewers off a charcoal grill wrapped at the table in rice sheets. Cơm gà, turmeric-stained rice under hand-shredded poached chicken, a plate of chilies within reach. Bánh bao bánh vạc, white rose dumplings, translucent rice-flour wrappers filled with shrimp and pork. Cao lầu, perhaps the region’s most iconic dish, rice crackers on top and rice worked into the noodles themselves. And mì Quảng, the very dish I had wanted to see made that morning, in a few bowls downtown.

The noodle was rice. The wrapper was rice. The cracker, the sheet, the plate under the chicken: rice.

I am not sorry about the morning anymore.