N’gao’s Mother’s Saigon Fish Soup

In 1972, I received a letter from my school friend N’gao, who, at the time, lived back in Saigon with her family. In the letter she described a fish soup prepared by her mother, asking me to think of her if I ever prepared it. N’gao did not survive the events of 1973, a great emotional loss for me. Probably out of self-defense, I never tried the recipe until, one day in 1993, it fell out from between the yellowed pages of the little old cookbook my mother used in our home i