Grandma Phan Thi Mý’s Seabass in Tomato and Dill Broth

My mother’s mother had a round, beaming face. I always remember her smiling; the crow’s feet under her eyes were so deep the scorching Vietnam sun couldn’t reach their depth. She would wash herbs grown in her garden and cleaver fish on a stub of trunk under the shade of a jackfruit tree for a sweet and sour fish soup.

She’d buy the fish from a lonesome fisherman at the beach as he came onto shore. In the backdrop, a green, rusty American war tank sat abandoned, overgrown with pink a