A photograph of the dish described. Photo by Sergi Reboredo / Alamy Stock Photo
Escaping the Khmer Rouge, Chantha Nguon’s family moved to Saigon, where they lived as refugees. There, restoring flavor to the drab palate of their lives felt like a tiny act of rebellion. Lemongrass-fried fish lives on as a frequent dish, a simple and exquisite homage to Nguon’s mother.When I was nine years old, in 1970, I fled Cambodia with my older brother and sisters. A military coup had ousted the prince and installed a general who right away began inciting violence against ethnic Vietnamese. Because my mother (in Khmer, I called her Mae) was from a Vietnamese family, she felt her children would be safer in wartime Saigon than in Cambodia, where an even darker ideological unrest was rising.Mae escaped later, with the Khmer Rouge at her heels. In Saigon, we lived as refugees—during the war, and after South Vietnam fell. Even before the communists marched in, we had very little money and could not eat the sumptuous meals my mother had prepared for us in her Battambang kitchen, back when our world still felt safe.
But this new Saigon, brought to us by the North Vietnamese, was tasteless and colorless, devoid of the flavors I craved. Every month we received whatever combination of potatoes, cassava, rice, bug-infested bread, and substandard noodles the Party deemed fit. We sliced the cassava and dried it, then mixed everything together in one pot and choked down the gray, horrible mash. Eating it made us feel that we had devolved from human beings to pigs, content to devour slop from a trough. And the only fish we were able to buy was very small and very aged.We spent much of our time craving the ingredients we could not have and reminiscing about the delicious dishes from our old life. We cooked up schemes to make something tasty out of our dismal rations and the few decent items we managed to obtain by extralegal means. For us, restoring flavor to the drab palate of our lives felt like a tiny act of rebellion.
Shereen Malherbe 