Chapter 12 — Vegetarian Restaurant Behind the Temple Gate

The night after the meeting at the temple, Yen Nhi could not sleep. She lay in the small room behind the kitchen, heard her grandmother tossing and turning on the other side of the paneled wall, heard the sound of insects rustling outside the Thien Ly arbor, and every time she closed her eyes, the image of a white projection screen with dancing numbers appeared, and from there, like a door being pushed open, the memories of seven years ago rushed back, so vivid that she could smell the hot cooking oil on the cast iron stove in Saigon.

The restaurant is called Ngoc Trai, located in a small but luxurious alley near the center of District One, specializing in serving high-class Vietnamese cuisine to businessmen and foreign guests. Each table must be booked at least a week in advance, the menu changes seasonally, and the price of a meal is equal to the entire month's salary of a normal salaryman. Yen Nhi worked there at the age of twenty-three, at first she was just a kitchen assistant, cutting and preparing, standing for eight hours next to the cold sink, her hands numb from the ice water marinating the seafood. But she had rare talent and meticulousness. Only three years later, she was promoted to the position of assistant chef, right under the man she respected most in her professional life - Chef Hoang.

Uncle Hoang at that time was in his fifties, thin, with a slightly bent back from twenty years of bending over the kitchen, but his eyes were always bright like there was fire inside. He is the one who taught Yen Nhi how to hold a knife so that the blade can "hear" the meat fibers, how to season by smelling the steam rising from the pot before tasting with your tongue, how to keep a dish from cooling for thirty seconds from the kitchen to the guest table. He was so strict that many apprentices left after just one week, but to Yen Nhi, that strictness was like a form of quiet love - he never praised her in front of others, but always left the hardest, most delicate part of the menu for her to take care of, as a way of implicitly saying that he believed she could do it.

But the pace of Ngoc Trai restaurant doesn't allow anyone time to feel anything other than speed. Every peak evening, the kitchen has to produce nearly two hundred meals within three hours. The shouts of orders from the counter resound continuously, the sound of knives and chopping boards, the sound of pans hitting the fire, the bell signaling the time to steam fish, all blend into a chaotic sound that outsiders think is "the exciting atmosphere of a large restaurant kitchen", but insiders call it a battlefield. Yen Nhi used to have shifts lasting sixteen hours in a row, from five in the morning preparing ingredients until nearly midnight cleaning up the kitchen, only getting a few hours of sleep on a temporary folding chair in the warehouse, before having to get up again to prepare for the next morning's shift. There were months when she couldn't remember what time the sun rose, because it was always dark when she stepped out of the kitchen.

The pressure comes not only from speed, but from the almost cruel harshness of the investor - an F&B corporation that manages to score every minute, every plate, and every customer complaint to be reduced to a number deducted from the salary and bonus at the end of the month. Chef Hoang, who stood between two bullets - the pressure from above and the fatigue of the team below - gradually changed. Yen Nhi clearly remembers about half a year before everything happened, he started to forget small things, one day he mistakenly added salt to the almond sweet soup that was supposed to be sweet, one day he stood in the middle of the kitchen for ten seconds, his hand holding the pan hovering over the fire, his eyes looking into space as if he had just forgotten what he was doing. She asked him if he was okay. He just smiled and brushed it off, "I'm old, a little confused, it's okay."

But not old. It was exhaustion, a form of exhaustion that silently gnawed from the inside, with no wounds to show, no one in management willing to acknowledge it as a problem, because on paper, the restaurant's revenue was still growing steadily, customer reviews were still five stars. Until one Saturday night, in the middle of the week's peak rush hour, Chef Hoang suddenly collapsed right next to the blazing gas stove, his head hitting the edge of the stainless steel table before Yen Nhi could rush to help. She still clearly remembers the feeling of her hand shaking as she pressed the bleeding wound on her uncle's forehead, the sound of ambulance sirens echoing in the small alley, and the panicked eyes of the young kitchen assistants standing frozen in the middle of the still-smugging kitchen smoke, no one daring to turn off the fire for fear of ruining the half-cooked dish for the VIP table.

Chef Hoang was hospitalized for nearly a month, diagnosed with severe nervous breakdown due to prolonged overwork, accompanied by a mild arrhythmia. When he was discharged from the hospital, he never returned to the kitchen. The management sent a bouquet of flowers and an envelope, calling it "early retirement for health reasons", but everyone understood that was just an euphemism for a broken machine being replaced by another. Three weeks later, a new chef was transferred from another branch, younger, more productive, and the wheel continued to run, as if no one had ever fallen in the middle of it.

It was around that time, when Yen Nhi had to shoulder the missing work alone, that everything inside her began to fall apart. She slept less, ate more quickly, and had nights standing in the kitchen with her mind so blank that her hands followed inertia and could no longer feel the smell, taste, or even the temperature of the oil pan in front of her. That was the night she almost lost a part of her life.

That day was a tropical depression evening, and there were unusually many guests because a group of foreign guests had booked a private party. Yen Nhi stood frying a large batch of spring rolls in a deep pan of oil, her hands shaking because she hadn't had a rest for more than fourteen hours, her eyes stinging from lack of sleep for four days, worrying about the kitchen being understaffed. She remembered that she was leaning over to pick up a batch of spring rolls, when in a moment she lost control, her whole body suddenly wobbled, her mind turned white as if someone had pulled out all the electrical wires, and her legs collapsed. In just that split second, the boiling oil pan almost hit her, hot oil splashed onto the back of her hand and sleeve, leaving a long blister that still has a faint scar under her left elbow to this day. If she had fallen half an inch forward at that moment, the entire pan of boiling oil would have spilled onto her face and chest.

A colleague standing nearby was able to pull her away, pour cold water on the burn, and call someone to take her to the emergency room. The burns weren't serious enough to require a long hospital stay, but that split-second moment of losing consciousness, the feeling of her body betraying herself right when she needed to be most alert, stayed with her longer than any scar on her skin. That night, sitting in the emergency room, her hand wrapped in a white bandage, Yen Nhi looked up at the hospital ceiling, suddenly remembering Chef Hoang's face lying motionless on the kitchen tile floor a month ago, and a cold question swirled in her heart: if I continue like this, will I be the next to fall, or will I be the first to die completely?

She did not quit her job immediately after that night. It took nearly another year of torment, hesitation, and fear of quitting the job she had poured all her youth into before she actually submitted her resignation, right at the time her mother - Cam Thi Xuan - fell seriously ill and needed someone to take care of her. Many people, including some former colleagues, still simply think that she returned home because of filial piety and family circumstances. Only Yen Nhi knows, deep down, that decision was planted a long time ago, from the night the boiling oil pan almost swallowed her face, from Chef Hoang's empty eyes before he collapsed, from the feeling that the profession she was once so passionate about that she forgot to eat or sleep has silently turned into a machine that crushes people from the inside, sparing no one, even the best and most dedicated people.

That's also the reason why, even though she's been coming to An Tam restaurant for nearly three years, standing in her mother's kitchen, cooking the simple dishes her mother used to cook, Yen Nhi still hasn't been able to regain the feeling of serenity that her mother once had. In her mind, the kitchen still carries an echo of speed, of pressure to be perfect, of the invisible fear that if she is negligent for just a second, some disaster will strike. She cooked the right recipe, with the right spices, at the right time, but her hands still maintained a tense and alertness that her mother, who lost her husband in a flood and built a vegetarian restaurant from the ashes, never seemed to have.

Lying in the dark, Yen Nhi raised her hand touch the faint scar under her left elbow, feeling the slightly rough skin different from the rest, like a silent reminder that her body carried with her for the rest of her life. She thought about Chef Hoang, wondering where he was now, whether he was still cooking at home to feed his children and grandchildren, or whether he had regained the simple joy of cooking like in the early days of his career. She thought of the meeting at the pagoda this afternoon, of the two words "integration" that Sai Trong Phat said lightly, and suddenly realized that the fear that had been simmering in her heart for the past seven years was not only fear of exhaustion, but also fear that a wheel bigger than herself would swallow up a place she loved, just like it had swallowed up the most beautiful years of her youth.

Outside, the first sound of a rooster crowing echoed from the market, signaling that a new day was about to begin. Yen Nhi turned over, closed her eyes, trying to soothe herself to sleep by imagining her mother's face standing next to the fire, her hands moving quickly without being in a hurry, her eyes peacefully watching the boiling pot of soup. She wished she could borrow that peace, even just a little, to bring into her own kitchen tomorrow morning.