Chapter 1 — Vegetarian Restaurant Behind the Temple Gate

At four-thirty in the morning, when the whole Bodhi Tree Alley was still in a thick darkness of mist, Giap Yen Nhi woke up. She doesn't need an alarm. Her body, after two years of returning, had automatically memorized this time as a reflex, exactly like the way it had remembered the time of a five-star restaurant kitchen in Saigon - except now there was no one shouting, no sharp knife and chopping sounds of twenty people at the same time, no cold white halogen light shining straight into the back of her head. There was only the sound of a gecko clicking its tongue somewhere on the ceiling, and the sound of my grandmother tossing and turning in the next room.

Yen Nhi walked downstairs, her bare feet touching the old tile floor, cool and slightly rough because the enamel had peeled off in small patches in the corner of the kitchen - where her mother used to stand to cook, where she stood for twenty-five years until the day her legs could no longer stand. The yellow filament light in the kitchen turned on, casting a long shadow on the wall, mottled with moldy, petal-shaped stains. She stood still for a second, like every other morning, letting her eyes get used to that light, a light unlike any industrial light she had ever worked under.

An Tam Vegetarian Restaurant is located right at the beginning of Bo De Alley, a small alley paved with moss-colored tiles running along the side of Tinh Lien Pagoda, connecting straight to the side gate of the pagoda. Every morning, the bell rang from the high mound to Ben Truc town at the same time Yen Nhi lit the stove, deck... deck... deck..., each ringing long and then fading into the mist still lingering on the canopy of trees, as if the pagoda and her small restaurant had learned to breathe in the same rhythm a long time ago, even before she was born.

She opened the rickety wooden door behind the kitchen and stepped out into a small yard with a trellis of thien ly flowers that her mother had planted since the restaurant first opened. Dew still lingered on each bunch of pale green flowers, falling onto the shoulder of her shirt when she gently touched the trellis to pick a few bunches to put in the soup pot this morning. The gentle and sweet smell of Thien Ly flowers, mixed with the smell of damp soil, the smell of moss on the old tile roof, the smell of kitchen smoke left over from the previous night - all blend into a smell that Yen Nhi calls in her head "the smell of home", although there are mornings when she is still not sure if she really believes in those two words.

She returned to the kitchen and started washing rice to cook white porridge for the first batch. Her hands move expertly, almost without thinking: pour the rice into the basket, shake lightly, drain the water, pour into a large pot, simmer over low heat. They were movements she had repeated thousands of times, since her time as an apprentice, and now they flowed through her like water through a crack in a rock—familiar, smooth, but also strangely empty. Yen Nhi cooks according to habit. She knew that clearly, even though she rarely dared to think it out loud. She adjusted the right amount of salt, the right heat level, the right time to simmer the mushroom bones for a sweet broth - everything was right, all correct, like a carefully programmed machine. But that right is not the same as her mother's right in the past. Her mother cooked as if she were talking to a pot of soup, as if each vegetable stem and each mushroom slice deserved to be looked at once before being put into the pot. As for Yen Nhi, she is just finishing her work.

The low firelight shone on her face, highlighting the lines that were much thinner than two years ago - not the thinness of suffering from lack of food, but the thinness of a person who had been exhausted from the inside, a dull exhaustion that could not be cured by a long sleep or a good meal. There were mornings like this morning, when she stood stirring the pot of porridge, a memory flashed through her mind as fast as a breeze: the sound of the chef shouting "Table five needs an appetizer in three minutes!", the constant sound of a knife cutting down on a wooden cutting board, the blinding white light, and the feeling of her heart pounding not because of excitement but because of fear — fear of being one second too late, fear of making a mistake in one detail, fear of the judgmental eyes of the kitchen manager standing right behind her. She had been the sous chef at one of the city's most prestigious restaurants, had stood in that kitchen six days a week, fourteen hours a day, until her body—and something deeper than her body—could no longer take it. She didn't want to remember more details about those days. Just one glance was enough to make her chest tighten slightly, enough to make her hand tighten around the handle of the wooden ladle.

She shook her head slightly, as if she could shake the memory out of her head, then turned to prepare a batch of deep-fried tofu for breakfast. Outside, the distant sound of roosters crowing from the working-class neighborhood echoed, mixed with the clattering sound of the newspaper seller's bicycle passing through the alley. The light began to fade from gray-green to pale pink on the eastern horizon, filtering through the leaves of the ancient Bodhi tree in the temple yard, illuminating thin streaks of light through the kitchen window.

An Tam restaurant is small, with only ten old wooden tables, the table tops are shiny from decades of cleaning, and the low stools are unevenly spaced because the floor is slightly tilted at an angle. On the wall, an old photo of her mother standing in front of the shop's opening day, smiling brightly, her hands still stained with flour. Next to it is a small wooden board with the menu written in chalk. Yen Nhi's handwriting has now replaced her mother's round handwriting. The restaurant serves vegetarian rice, porridge, sweet soup, and simple offerings to monks and nuns at the temple and people around the area — nothing fancy, no fancy decorations, but enough to feed three people for a quarter of a century.

At six o'clock, her grandmother - Cam Thi Nu - walked down to the kitchen with a walking stick, her silver hair tied neatly at the back of her head, her eyes still sleepy but she was able to smile when she saw her granddaughter standing next to the pan of boiling oil.

"You're up earlier than a chicken again," she said, her voice hoarse from just waking up, holding onto the armrest of the chair and sitting down on the familiar stool next to the vegetable basket. "Once upon a time, my mother was just like that. She kept saying that we were exactly the same, but she kept arguing."

Yen Nhi just smiled, did not answer, her hand still quickly turned the tofu in the pan. She had heard this sentence countless times since her return, and each time she heard it, part of her wanted to believe it, while another part felt alienated by the comparison itself — as if she was wearing a shirt that fit perfectly but still felt like it wasn't hers.

Mrs. Nu began to pick up spinach, her wrinkled but still nimble fingers separated each old stem from the basket, her mouth mumbling and singing an old song with unclear words. Occasionally she stopped, looked at her granddaughter for a long time and then bent down to the vegetable basket, as if considering something she wanted to say but hadn't said it yet.

Outside in the yard, the first sunlight of the day has spread a pale yellow layer on the Thien Ly flower trellis, sparkling on the remaining dew drops. From the side gate of the pagoda, the sound of bamboo brooms sweeping the yard rang out regularly, sizzling, sizzling, rhythmic like a living clock of the entire small alley. Yen Nhi knew that she didn't have to look back to guess who it was — but this morning she was still thinking about the batch of broth that wasn't as sweet as she wanted, about the list of ingredients that needed to be bought at the market, about the numbers in the expense book that were getting thinner each month.

At seven o'clock, the first customers began to sporadically visit the restaurant - a familiar motorbike taxi driver ordered a bowl of white porridge with braised radishes, two elderly Buddhist women came down from the temple to have breakfast before morning chanting, and a high school student quickly ate a plate of vegetarian broken rice before running to school. Yen Nhi is busy with the pan, with the pot, with the constant calls of food orders but still maintains the familiar rhythm, hands scooping soup, hands stirring rice, greeting each person in a gentle voice that has become a professional habit.

But in the midst of all that movement, there was a small silence that only she noticed: she was doing everything right, with the right recipe, with the right spices, with the right social smile for the guests - but she was not really here, in this kitchen, amid the steam rising from the pot of soup, amid the faint scent of incense coming from the temple. Her mind was still somewhere else, perhaps still stuck in another kitchen, much noisier and colder.

Mrs. Nu, as if reading something in her granddaughter's pensive look, gently patted Yen Nhi's shoulder as she passed by carrying a bowl of porridge to the table.

“Slowly,” she said, her voice soft but firm. "This kitchen won't chase you away."

Yen Nhi paused for a moment, looked at her, then nodded and said nothing more. She brought the bowl of porridge to the table for the motorbike taxi driver, smiled and said thank you, then returned to the kitchen, continuing the work of a normal morning like any other morning - although in her heart, a question still silently returned again and again, without an answer: will there be a day when she will cook not out of habit, but with her own heart, like her mother did for twenty-five years in this place.

The sun gradually rose above the mossy tiled roof, shining through the canopy of ancient Bodhi leaves in the temple yard, pouring shimmering streaks of light down the small alley. A new day at Quan Chay An Tam has begun, just like thousands of mornings before it, and just like it will continue — until something, sooner or later, forces a change.