I’ve never been much of a morning person, my insomnia making early afternoon a preferable wake up time, but I fondly remember weekend mornings stirred from my bed by the smell of my parents’ cooking.
My favorite breakfasts were when Mom would make potatoes and eggs with either sausage or bacon, all cooked up in a cast iron skillet. The smell of sautéing onions would rise up from the pan laid atop the flame. The aroma and sound of sizzling would set my stomach to rumble, reminding me that such a late wake up time did my hunger no favors. Just as I loved falling asleep to the soft sounds of rainfall, I loved waking up to the sound of something sizzling in the pan echoing down the hall. What love to know someone is waiting for you when you wake up.
In grade school, Dad would bring us swan pastries on many a Saturday morning. As long as I’ve lived (and surely longer), I’ve never known my father to sleep in. Always awake before 7am, I still marvel at his internal clock—and remain thankful mine seems set to 11am most days. These swan treats were cream puffs filled with a light, whip-cream like filling, dusted with powdered sugar. The top was made to look like feathered wings, a delicate swan neck and head arising from the front of the pastry. It was one of the most beautiful desserts I’ve ever seen—and to this day my favorite pastry. He would get them from a French Vietnamese bakery by the name of Lan Vin. At the time when my dad would stop there on those Saturday mornings, their storefront was still in SE Portland, not very far from our neighborhood. The bakery eventually moved locations to NE Portland, in the same building as Pho Oregon. This is the storefront I became familiar with in high school. I was always so excited when I saw that pink box on the counter. It was my favorite part of Saturdays back then, and I found myself anticipating the treats once the week restarted.
These days, breakfast usually happens in a rush. My insomnia still has me cutting it close to when I need to leave for work, often only giving myself 30 minutes to eat. But on the weekends, breakfast remains a slow affair. I usually don’t start cooking until past noon. I’ll stumble out in an old t-shirt of my dad’s that falls almost to my knees, socks and slippers on my feet, and start my morning ritual.
I make my coffee first, using the French press that lives on my counter in the way Dad taught me, adding spices like cinnamon and nutmeg to the ground coffee beans. At some point I’ll remember to grab cardamom pods from the store to add as well. Then, I start on the actual breakfast, usually following in Mom’s footsteps, adding diced potatoes and onions into the pan with eggs, arugula, and bacon. The motions of cooking are peaceful, reminding me of those calm mornings of childhood. I sometimes wonder if nostalgia tints those days rosier than they were, but I know the memory of my emotions is a truer recount than my memory of events, so I lay that worry to rest. Dressed in my dad’s shirt as I stand over the stove in the way I often saw Mom do, I find myself caught between the past and present. An echo of my parents lingers in my kitchen, a step behind me in ghostly figures as I meander my way around the counters and stove. A funny thing, how the living can haunt as the dead do. Perhaps memory is really some strange land where life and death exist just the same, unable to tell each other apart.
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Feeding the Diaspora is a column created by Natalie “Lee” Arneson in March 2022 to share stories on multicultural identity and how food plays a large role in continuing and reclaiming cultural ties.
Defining ‘Diaspora’; a diaspora is formed when people belonging to a cultural and/or ethnic group are living in a place that is not their or their ancestor’s country of origin.
To check out more of Natalie’s work, go to her website wordpress.evergreen.edu/foodag-portfolio-sp23-arneson/
