Chapter 8 — Vegetarian Restaurant Behind the Temple Gate

Yen Nhi found that notebook completely by accident, on a Saturday morning when she decided to clean up the storage room behind the kitchen - a place filled with old spice barrels, large pots that were no longer in use, and a few stacks of old yellowed newspapers that her mother had kept because of the saving habit of someone who had gone through difficult years. She intended to clean up to have more space to store ingredients for the upcoming July full moon festival, but when she pulled an old wooden barrel out of the corner of the wall, she stumbled on a small rusty tin box, mixed in with the pile of rags used to line the pot.

She opened the tin box, not expecting much, thinking maybe it was just a few old buttons or needles. But inside, carefully wrapped in a layer of white fabric that has faded over time, is an old brown leather-covered notebook, the corners curled from being turned over many times. Yen Nhi picked up the notebook, her heart beat faster when she recognized the familiar handwriting on the cover - "Xuan's Notebook" - a soft, slanted handwriting, which was her mother's handwriting.

She sat down on the warehouse floor, completely forgetting about the cleaning she was doing, turning each page slowly, almost trembling. This is not the usual recipe book she has long been familiar with, the one that records the dosage and cooking methods of the restaurant's dishes. This notebook is different - interspersed between the recipes are short paragraphs, thoughts, notes that her mother wrote to herself, perhaps in quiet evenings after the restaurant closed, when Yen Nhi was still young and fast asleep.

The first page she read was dated more than twenty years ago, just a few years after An Tam Vegetarian Restaurant was established. Her mother wrote: "Today, I cooked the first pot of sour soup with chopsticks and did not season it according to my grandmother's old recipe. Standing by the stove, stirring the soup, I suddenly remembered Mr. Khiem's face when he left home that morning of the flood. Tears fell into the pot of soup without realizing it. Seasoning, tasting again, I saw that the sour taste today is stronger than usual. Perhaps sadness is also a spice, you can't hide it, you can only learn how to not let it overwhelm all the other flavors."

Yen Nhi had to stop, close the notebook, press it against her chest for a long time, feeling like she was touching a very private part of her mother that she had never known before. She had always thought of her mother as a strong, calm woman who rarely showed her pain. But these pages show a different Cam Thi Xuan — a woman who cried silently by the fire, who learned to turn her pain into a part of the dish, instead of letting it engulf her.

She took the notebook into the kitchen, placed it on the table under brighter light, and continued reading. There are pages with only a few lines written on them, like a diary hastily written during busy hours. Some pages are several paragraphs long, her mother writes about specific guests - one line notes about "Miss Tu in the fishing village, her husband died at sea, likes mushroom soup cooked lighter than usual because she often cries, her mouth is bitter", another line about "Uncle Bay carpenter, whose wife left him, can only eat braised scorched rice, perhaps because he misses the food his mother cooked when he was a child." Each dish, under mother's pen, is associated with a story, a specific person, not just numbers and ingredients.

In the middle of the notebook, Yen Nhi found a passage her mother wrote specifically about her cooking philosophy, perhaps written in a more calm period, with neater, more careful handwriting than on other pages: "Cooking vegetarian is not just about not using meat or fish. Cooking vegetarian is literally cooking with a mind that is not greedy, not angry, not ignorant - chopping vegetables with your hands without thinking about anything else, standing by the fire without looking forward to a break. Every time my heart is stirred, the dish that is cooked is also stirred. According to him, the person who eats, even without knowing the reason, can still feel that absence in each bite. The monk taught that mindfulness is not about meditating in a hermitage, but right here, the moment one's hand touches the vegetable or grain of rice.

Reading this, Yen Nhi understood why for many months she always felt like the dish she cooked was lacking something, even though the recipe was correct down to the gram. She cooked with the expert hands of a professional chef, but her mind, most of the time, was still wandering somewhere — in the old deadlines of the Saigon restaurant, in unresolved fatigue, in vague fear about the restaurant's future. She has never really been fully "present" in each cooking move like her mother did.

That afternoon, Teacher Thien Tam stopped by the shop, bringing along some leftover wood from the roof repair to ask Yen Nhi if she needed to build more kitchen shelves. Seeing Yen Nhi sitting thoughtfully next to an old notebook, her face still filled with emotion, he did not ask immediately but quietly sat down on the opposite chair, waiting.

"I just found Mom's notebook." Yen Nhi said, her voice still shaking slightly. She told him what she had just read, about the mindfulness notes, about the story her mother wrote in the pot of sour soup with chopsticks that year. Thien Tam listened attentively, occasionally nodding, without interrupting.

"Ms. Xuan is a real teacher, even though she probably never claims to be one." he said when Yen Nhi finished telling. "Monk Mr. Giac Vien still mentions her every time he preaches about the practice of mindful eating. People say Ms. Xuan understands the Dharma through the fire more than some monastics understand through the scriptures."

That statement made Yen Nhi curious. "Have you ever seen any conflict between studying the scriptures and practicing in real life, like cooking or carpentry?"

Thien Tam was silent for a moment, his eyes looking out to the yard, where the afternoon sunlight was fading behind the trees. "I think there is no contradiction, but I confess, sometimes I wonder if the path I'm on is really right for me." He spoke slowly, as if he were considering each word, a rare openness that Yen Nhi felt was not easy for him. "I came to the temple because I wanted to find a place to rest my mind, to better understand suffering and how to overcome it. In the first years, I felt like I had truly found that. But the longer I stayed, the more I realized that I still like working with my hands, like the feeling of fixing something broken, like seeing the concrete results of my efforts — like the corner of the roof of my shop the other day. I don't know if that's a normal part of monastic life, or a sign that I'm a monk. still more entangled with worldly life than I thought."

Yen Nhi looked at him and realized that this was the first time Thien Tam revealed a bit of uncertainty in his heart, different from the calm and steady look he always showed in front of Buddhists and people in the neighborhood. "Are you going to talk about this with the monk?" she asked, her voice gentle, not wanting to seem too curious.

"Perhaps, when the monk gets better." Thien Tam replied, then smiled, as if wanting to dispel the quiet atmosphere just now. "But I haven't thought this through thoroughly, it's just fleeting thoughts. Don't take it to heart."

Yen Nhi nodded, respecting the boundary he had just set, but in her heart she silently recorded this conversation as something precious — not out of curiosity, but because she felt the trust he had just given her, a silent trust between two friends who were both looking for answers to the big questions of their lives, each following a different path.

After Thien Tam returned to the temple, Yen Nhi sat alone in the kitchen, her mother's notebook still open on the table. She turned to the last pages, where her mother's handwriting was somewhat shaky, probably in the last years of her life when her mother's health was much weaker due to heart disease. One of the last lines reads: "Yen Nhi is now grown up, going to work in the kitchen in the city, she will probably be much better than my mother. I just hope that in the future, if one day I return to this kitchen, I will find my own way of cooking, without being exactly like my mother, as long as I cook with all my heart like my mother did."

Yen Nhi's tears fell onto the page, she quickly wiped them away, afraid of smudging that precious handwriting. She sat quietly for a long time in the gradually darkening kitchen, her hand on the notebook, as if holding her mother's invisible hand. She understands that from today, the way she works in the kitchen will no longer be the same. She will carry this notebook with her, not just as a reference, but as a companion, leading her to retrace the path her mother walked — the path of someone who cooks with all her heart, not just with her expert hands.

That night, before going to bed, Yen Nhi carefully put the notebook in a small wooden box, placing it right at the head of the bed, where she could see it every morning when she woke up. She told herself that tomorrow, when she stood at the stove cooking the first pot of soup of the day, she would try something new — slow down, breathe deeper, and let her mind be truly present, like the words her mother wrote more than twenty years ago.