Chapter 16 — Vegetarian Restaurant Behind the Temple Gate

The next morning, monk Thich Giac Vien called Yen Nhi into the hospital room to give instructions. She woke up half an hour earlier than usual. Not for cooking. She sat at the wooden table at the front of the shop, in front of her was a stack of A4 paper that still smelled of ink, and a ballpoint pen that she tried scratching a few lines on the edge of the table to make sure there was still ink. On the top of the piece of paper, she wrote by hand, as neatly as when she was in school: "PETITION TO PRESERVE TINH LIEN Pagoda AND BODHARD LANE COMMUNITY SPACE". After writing that line, she sat and looked at it for a long time, her hands shaking slightly, not because of fear, but because she felt like she had just crossed a line of no return - from a woman cooking behind the temple gate, she was transforming herself into a person who stood up to fight.

Uncle Nhan Duc Phong arrived at exactly seven o'clock, as scheduled by phone the night before. He was sixty years old, with the stocky figure of a man who had worked as a bricklayer all his life before being elected as the neighborhood leader. His skin was tanned, his voice was warm and resonant, and he had the kind of laugh that easily made strangers feel at ease. He was a close friend of Yen Nhi's father - Giap Van Khiem - from the time when the two of them were herding buffaloes on the Ben Truc River mudflats, and he still kept in his wallet a crumpled black-and-white photo of two young men standing in front of the old temple gate, grinning, not knowing that one would die in a flood twenty-seven years later because he rushed to save people in the neighborhood.

"If Khiem's daughter steps up to do this," Mr. Phong said, his voice lowered as he sat at the table, his hand lightly placed on the petition as if he were placing his hand on something sacred, "I'm very happy. I keep thinking, people like your father, who live and die for this neighborhood, but now let people raze the place where he grew up, he wouldn't be able to lie down there in peace."

Yen Nhi poured him a cup of hot lotus tea, the tea she brewed every morning with lotus petals picked from the pond in front of the temple, and was silent for a moment before answering. "I don't know if I can do anything, Mr. Phong. I just know that if I don't do anything, I will regret it for the rest of my life."

"Whether it works or not, we'll figure it out later," Mr. Phong rubbed his calloused hands together, "the important thing is to show people that this village isn't just a few old monks with a small restaurant that no one cares about. This hamlet has hundreds of people, thousands of people, grateful to that temple, to that restaurant of your mother. I've been around this town of Ben Truc for sixty years, I know who owes who what."

They talked all morning, between the times Yen Nhi had to get up and run to the kitchen to check on the pot of green bean porridge, between the sound of the vegetable seller's bicycle bell passing by the alley. The plan is simple but practical: a small table placed in front of the restaurant's yard, right under the Thien Ly flower trellis, with a petition, a few pens tied on a string to prevent anyone from taking it, a sign that Yen Nhi hand-wrote with colored chalk — "Sign to keep the pagoda, keep the shop, keep a peaceful corner of Ben Truc" — and Mr. Phong will personally go to every house in the neighborhood, every house he knows by name and face, to explain, to ask for signatures, to recall old stories that have happened. when those families themselves have forgotten.

By noon, the small table had more than twenty signatures. There was a woman selling vermicelli noodles at the market, her hands still stained with the smell of shrimp paste, smiling crookedly and saying "please give me two signatures, I don't know how to write my full name". There was a student who returned to his hometown for the summer. His parents were allowed to stay at the temple by monk Giac Vien when they were newly married and had no home. There was also a strange man, dressed in office clothes, who stopped his motorbike and asked curiously. After listening, he nodded and signed and then went straight without saying another word - Yen Nhi looked at his shadow disappearing behind the corner of the street, a strange feeling arose in her heart, half hope and half doubt, not knowing what these signatures ultimately meant in front of a corporation with planning drawings and numbers of hundreds of billions.

That same afternoon, when the shop was empty and Yen Nhi was cleaning the wooden tables, a young man stopped his motorbike in front of the shop gate, took off his helmet, and stood looking at the chalkboard for a long time before entering. He was in his late thirties, wearing a wrinkled linen shirt like a traveler, carrying an old camera strapped to his chest. His appearance was somewhat absent-minded but his eyes were sharp, quickly scanning the restaurant - from the old wooden tables, the black-and-white photo hanging on the wall of a woman standing next to a pot of steaming soup, to the handwritten menu board with faded ink.

"Give me a portion of rice, any dish is fine, give me the best dish you cook today," he said, his voice gentle, with a bit of sincerity that made Yen Nhi suddenly feel comfortable.

She served him a plate of rice with fried tofu with lemongrass and chili, pumpkin soup cooked in coconut water, and a bowl of sweet and sour pickled cucumbers made by hand. The customer ate slowly, without hurry, occasionally stopping with his chopsticks to look around, then took out a worn leather notebook from his pocket and wrote something down. When Yen Nhi went to clear the table next to him, he looked up and asked, his voice natural as if they had known each other before: "Sister, let me ask about the sign out there - is this pagoda really about to be cleared?"

Yen Nhi paused for a moment, then sat down in the chair opposite, telling the story from the beginning - not telling it like a story, but telling it like it was pouring out, as if in all these weeks she had never had a chance to speak completely to someone she didn't know, someone who didn't carry her own emotional burden like her grandmother, who didn't have management responsibilities like teacher Tue Thong, who wasn't an insider like teacher Thien Tam. She told about Dai Phu Khang Group, about Sai Trong Phat and the proposal for the meditation resort, about the deadline the Ho Tu Committee had to decide, about the monk who was lying on his hospital bed and still worried about this small shop more than he cared about himself.

The guest listened, nodded, occasionally wrote a few words in the notebook, his face becoming more and more serious. Finally, he introduced himself as Che Hoai Nam, wrote a blog and collaborated with several online newspapers on the topic of mindful cuisine - he traveled throughout the Western provinces, looking for small restaurants attached to temples, with stories of healing through meals, to write articles. He said he visited Ben Truc by chance, intending to just stop for lunch and then continue, but unexpectedly came across a story "exactly what I've been looking for all year but haven't seen it yet".

"Can I have your permission to take some pictures?" he asked, his voice still light but his eyes were different, like a hunter who had just smelled precious prey. "This shop, that sign, and if possible, your story too - I want to write an article. I don't promise that anything will change, but at least, more people will know this story."

Yen Nhi hesitated. She never thought she would become a character in a newspaper article, never wanted to - all her life she was used to standing behind the kitchen, behind the door, behind the role of a silent waiter. But she remembered Mr. Phong's words that morning: must show people. She nodded.

That afternoon, Che Hoai Nam went around the restaurant and the temple grounds, asking permission to take black and white photos of Cam Thi Xuan on the wall, the Thien Ly flower trellis, the signing table where Mr. Phong was sitting explaining to an old man with a cane, and the quiet face of Venerable Thich Tue Thong standing at the side gate looking out - Master Tue Thong did not say anything, just nodded slightly in greeting and then turned back inside, his gait somewhat heavier than usual. Nam also asked to meet Master Thien Tam, who at that time was planing a wooden plank under the shade of an ancient Bodhi tree to repair the door of his ancestor's house; The two talked for a long time. Yen Nhi stood far away and couldn't hear clearly. She only saw Master Thien Tam occasionally stopping his hand, looking far away at the lotus pond, then bending down to continue his work, as if considering something unrelated to the story of the earthen pagoda.

Before leaving, Nam stopped in front of the shop's gate, looking at Yen Nhi with the eyes of someone who had just found what he had been looking for a long time. "I will post an article in the next few days. Don't expect it to do anything big - my site is not a big newspaper. But I believe, true stories like this, once someone reads them, will go further than you think."

He started the car engine, waved, then disappeared down the dirt road leading out of Bo De Alley, leaving behind Yen Nhi standing hesitantly in the middle of the yard, still holding a tablecloth, her heart mixed between fragile hope and vague fear that everything might still be in vain. She turned around, looked at the signing table that was almost full of paper, looked at Mr. Phong laughing and chatting with a group of young people in the neighborhood who had just stopped by after work, and for the first time in many weeks, she felt like she was no longer alone standing on the line between losing and keeping.

That night, after cleaning up the restaurant, Yen Nhi sat alone at the wooden table, opening her mother's recipe notebook, not to find something to cook, but just touch the familiar handwriting, as if looking for a fulcrum. The page she opened happened to be the one with the recipe for mugwort mushroom soup. In the margin, there was a small line written by her mother: "Cooking for people to eat means cooking for people to remember that they are not alone." Yen Nhi read that sentence over and over again, then closed the book, feeling a little lighter, as if her mother, even though she had been dead for two years, was still standing somewhere behind her, witnessing her daughter begin to learn how to no longer suffer silently alone.