Chapter 17 — Vegetarian Restaurant Behind the Temple Gate

Che Hoai Nam's article appeared online on a Tuesday evening, bearing the simple title "Small vegetarian restaurant behind the temple gate, where a woman cooks to remember her mother". Yen Nhi read it once at night, under the table lamp, her hands trembling as she scrolled each paragraph on the phone screen. Tears flowed out without her realizing it when she read the part where Nam wrote about the black and white photo of Cam Thi Xuan hanging on the wall - "a woman whose whole life only wanted others to be full, now her daughter is having to fight to keep that same kitchen". The article was shared more than she thought. By the next morning, the shop had a few more strangers, holding phones, asking each other "is this the shop in the article" before entering, some people asked to take pictures with the table to sign their names, some people quietly left a small donation saying "send it to the monk".

It should have been completely happy news. But at the same time, pressure from the other side also began to tighten.

On Wednesday afternoon, Venerable Thich Tue Thong called Yen Nhi to the living room of the ancestral house. The teacher sat behind the tea table, twirling the small bell he used to summon during classes, his face carrying a tired look that Yen Nhi had never seen on him before - not the usual stern look, but a real slackness.

"Miss Nhi," the teacher said, his voice slow, weighing each word, "Yesterday, Dai Phu Khang called me. Mr. Sai Trong Phat did not say it directly, but his meaning was very clear. He said, if the pagoda still hesitates and does not agree to the cooperation plan soon, then the company will have to review the entire land leasing policy in the planning area - including the land where your shop is located." The teacher stopped and looked straight into Yen Nhi's eyes. "He said, if we cannot cooperate in good faith, the company still has the right to ask the temple - as the landowner - to adjust the long-standing symbolic rent to the market level. Do you understand what I mean? That price, I'm afraid our shop cannot afford, even if we sell all the furniture in the house."

Yen Nhi sat quietly, her hands clasped together in her lap. She understood too well. It was not a direct, harsh threat - it was polite, indirect, in the same style as seen in Sai Trong Phat, but more toxic than any blatant threat, because it directly hit the pagoda as the landowner, and her family for many years had only rented symbolically out of gratitude and never had a strictly legally binding contract. One sentence from Tue Thong, even though he did not want it, was enough to make her realize: the autograph campaign, everything she and Uncle Phong were doing, could become meaningless before such a simple financial leverage.

"I'm grateful you told me frankly," Yen Nhi replied, trying to keep her voice calm even though her heart was churning. "But I'll keep doing what I'm doing."

Tue Thong nodded, not arguing. "I'm not stopping you. I just want you to know in advance, so you can prepare yourself. This thing is not as simple as I thought."

Leaving the living room of the ancestral house, Yen Nhi walked through the temple yard in the pale afternoon light, her heart heavy. She didn't tell anyone right away, not even her grandmother, not even Uncle Phong - she needed a night to absorb the news for herself, to find a way to think about it without collapsing. But her body, already exhausted after weeks of both worrying about the restaurant and the campaign, did not give her that peaceful night. She tossed and turned until dawn, her mind spinning with numbers, scenarios, imagining the shop being closed, her grandmother having to leave the house she had lived in for eighty years.

On Thursday morning, she woke up fifteen minutes later than usual — for Yen Nhi, fifteen minutes was an unprecedented time difference in the past two years. Her mind was as thick as a fog that had not yet cleared, her limbs felt heavy as if she were wading in water. She went into the kitchen, put on the pot of broth, but forgot to turn down the heat when she went out to the yard to pick vegetables - by the time she remembered, the bottom of the pot was burned, the burning smell was strong throughout the small kitchen, she had to throw away the entire pot of broth that had been simmering since four in the morning, and start again from the beginning while guests were already starting to arrive.

That whole morning became a series of mistakes, but later, when she remembered, Yen Nhi still didn't understand why everything could be so rushed. She mistakenly brought the braised tofu and pepper rice from table number three to table number five, causing two guests to quarrel loudly because they both ordered something else. She seasoned the sour soup by mistake, adding too much tamarind to the point that a familiar old lady, a regular customer who had eaten at the restaurant since her mother's lifetime, had to grimace and push the bowl of soup away, half-jokingly and half-seriously saying: "If you cook it this way, your mother must be very sad under the yellow stream." That sentence, even though the old woman had no evil intentions, was still like a knife cutting into Yen Nhi's heart.

The climax was at noon, when a strange customer - perhaps someone who came because he read Che Hoai Nam's article - ordered vegetarian braised scorched rice, the restaurant's signature dish, a dish associated with Yen Nhi's own childhood memories of her father. She made that dish hundreds of times without a single mistake, but that day, her hands were shaking so much that she burned the rice too much, the layer was scorched black instead of crispy and fragrant like usual. She realized as soon as she scooped it out onto a plate, but the kitchen had already piled up the orders, so she didn't have time to make it again, so she had to bring it to the table with an embarrassed apology. The guest tasted it, frowned, then politely said: "The rice is a bit burnt, maybe because the kitchen is too crowded." He didn't complain harshly, but right after that, Yen Nhi saw him quietly taking out his phone, not knowing what picture he was taking or who he was texting, and she suddenly panicked at the prospect of a bad review appearing somewhere online, right in the middle of the restaurant needing every bit of public sympathy the most.

While entertaining guests at noon, Yen Nhi stood in the kitchen, looked at the pile of dishes that had not yet been washed, looked at the floor covered in grease because she had knocked over the frying oil pan in her panic, and she sat down on a stool next to the stove, covering her face with her hands. It wasn't just because of the morning's mistakes. But because of an old, familiar fear that had tormented her during her last years in Saigon, it was now fully alive: the feeling that she was not good enough, not strong enough, not worthy of standing in this kitchen. She remembered her old teacher at the restaurant - the one who collapsed in the middle of her shift last year, the one she herself saw being carried out of the kitchen on a stretcher while she herself, even though equally exhausted, had to stand and continue cooking because there was no one to replace her. She remembered the night she almost had an accident on the way home after an eighteen-hour shift, her eyes closed behind the wheel, only to wake up just as the motorbike was about to crash into the median.

"Here I am again," she whispered to herself in the empty kitchen, her voice breaking. "I'm trying to hold everything, and I'm about to collapse."

Mrs. Cam Thi Nu, who was sitting on the porch picking vegetables, heard a strange noise so she walked in with a cane. Seeing her niece sitting huddled by the kitchen, she didn't say anything, just quietly pulled another chair to sit next to her, placed her wrinkled hand on her back, gently rubbing it in a slow rhythm familiar from Yen Nhi's childhood, every time she had a fever or cried.

"You made a few mistakes, it's okay," Grandma said, her voice hoarse with age but still unusually steady. "Once upon a time, my mother also had a meal where she ruined an entire pot of sweet soup, threw away the entire pot, and sat crying in the middle of the kitchen just like me. She still remembers, that day she scolded him, saying that you do this job and never allow yourself to be wrong, so can you live to be old?"

Yen Nhi looked up, her eyes still watering. "Then what did you say, grandmother?"

"He laughed, he said, Mom, I'm afraid I'm wrong once and people will stop loving me." Grandma gently stroked Yen Nhi's loose hair on her forehead. "Grandma just said it again, you cook to fill people's stomachs. Whether they still love you or not after eating depends on your heart towards them, not a pot of sweet soup. People love each other not by chopsticks and spoons, my child."

That old story, told in the middle of a kitchen that still smelled of smoke, did not resolve the pressure from Dai Phu Khang, did not make the land rent less threatening, and did not make the morning's mistakes disappear. But it made Yen Nhi, for the first time in many days, breathe out a long breath, no longer choking in her chest. She stood up, wiped her face with the hem of her shirt, and began to clean up the kitchen again, more slowly, without haste, as if deliberately going against the hurried pace that had worn her to the point of exhaustion in the past.

That evening, when the shop closed, Yen Nhi sat for a long time in front of the small altar with her mother's photo, lit a stick of incense, did not ask for anything specific, just quietly watched the incense smoke rising in the pale yellow light. She thought about Tue Thong's words, about the land rental price that could suffocate the shop at any time, about the disappointed face of the customer who tasted a plate of burnt rice, and about the story her grandmother had just told. She doesn't know where things will go tomorrow. But she knew, at least tonight, she wouldn't let that familiar fear pull her down completely like she did all those years in Saigon. She would get up tomorrow morning, light the fire again, and try again.