I did not want to yell at Kathy, but I had to. She had brought home a bunch of plastic objects with soft tops—“bottles,” she called them. She wanted me to fill them with powdered milk and feed them to my baby. She told me that the milk from my body was not enough. She said Phuong Lien was not getting enough food! Kathy never had a baby. What did she know?
In Vietnam, we did everything naturally. Once Phuong Lien was old enough to eat something besides my milk, I figured I would put food in my mouth, chew it, then feed it to her. That was what I had done for Bà Nội, who had no teeth, and that was what we had always done for babies. But Kathy came home with jars of food that was already ground up. I just left them on the counter. I wanted to cook my own food for my baby. I could make dishes that were more delicious, such as chicken soup with rice or stewed carrots.
