Number Five: Learned to Make Bánh Khoai

and we're on to number 5!...

5. Learned How to Make Bánh Khoai:

Every Tuesday evening from 5:30-7:00 I teach a free community pronunciation class at the university where I work. My students range in age from 9-45 with skill levels from virtually no English background to upper intermediate/bordering on advanced, both of which add plenty of excitement and challenges. This class is pretty exhausting to teach for a few reasons beyond the great variety in the class makeup. First, teaching English pronunciation is just plain hard. As a native English speaker, I obviously have no difficulty pronouncing English words (besides, perhaps “accompaniment”—I’ll just never get it right) or using the correct rhythm, stress, and intonation when I speak, but the fact that I picked up these things naturally and never officially learned them in a class setting makes them a challenge to teach. Just as I expected when I came to Vietnam, therefore, I have learned a lot (particularly about my own mouth) while teaching students how to distinguish a voiceless sound from a voiced sound, that you must put your tongue between your teeth to make both of the correct “th” sounds, and many, many other tricks and rules to help students make their thoughts in English heard. Even though I am always tired after a very long day when I go into my evening class I always have fun trying to make pronunciation a fun (and not just extremely difficult) thing for the students, which usually involves candy, games, and, last week, a James Taylor song. Another one of the exhausting elements of teaching this class is simply that I’m usually hungry by the time class starts! Well, I suppose I should say that I was always hungry, until the bánh khoai club started…
Many of my students during the day attend my pronunciation class (which regularly has about 30 students crammed into a small classroom) so they were also quite hungry at the beginning of class, until we all found ourselves complaining about it one evening on the way into the classroom. Loan, one of my more hilarious students, suddenly started jumping up and down and talking excitedly and rapidly in Vietnamese to the other students around her, and, upon receiving their enthusiastic approval, turned back to me and said that the next week we were all going to go eat a snack before class started. I told her I was already looking forward to it. The next Tuesday, Loan, Van, Duong, Trang, Hue, and Minh all arrived at my office around 4:30 to get me to walk over to get a snack. On the way over, they told me that we were going to eat bánh khoai, which I correctly translated (to their great delight) as meaning something like “potato cake.” As it turns out, bánh khoai is one of the most delicious snacks I’ve ever had—essentially, it is sliced sweet potatoes dipped in a flour, water, and sugar batter, and then deep fried in a pot of oil boiling over bricks of charcoal on the sidewalk. Usually, it is eaten with this sweet and spicy hot sauce that is also really delicious. YUM. We sat and talked about life, laughed at each other for the silly things we had done and said that day, and enjoyed some time sitting on small plastic seats on the side of the road in Thanh Hoa before we had to go back into the building to go to class. I told them that this was the beginning of a weekly tradition, and they agreed wholeheartedly. Since then, we’ve gone almost every week to eat and enjoy one another’s company—I absolutely love those 25 or so minutes of sitting and chatting—sometimes in English, others in Vietnamese--- while eating deliciously fried food.
One Friday a few weeks ago, I was drinking smoothies with some of the students in one of my classes and Loan and some others asked me if I wanted to learn how to make bánh khoai. I responded with something like “absolutely!” and a plan was hatched on the spot. The next day, a group of girls came to my door around 3:30 and we went over to the market to buy the needed supplies—sweet potatoes, all purpose flour, a liter and a half of oil (we used it all) and sugar--- (plus some bananas, because you can do the same thing with bananas, but as many of you know, bananas are probably my least favorite fruit…) and then came back to my room to begin the preparations. I learned how to correctly slice a sweet potato (apparently I’ve been doing it all wrong for years…) and watched as the girls mixed the flour, water, and sugar simply to taste—no real measurements. Then, the frying began! During all of this, I did my best to spread the word around the dorm that we were having a spur of the moment “small party” in my room to make and eat bánh khoai, calling various students and inviting everyone I saw. Soon, my room was packed full of my students, all taking turns to cook (the boys who showed up actually really got into it!), and eat the delicious snacks that were being cooked on my two small burners as quickly as possible. I turned on some music, and we all stood out in the area in front of my door (it was too hot in my room) and listened to the sounds of the Avett Brothers, Indigo Girls, Van Morrison, and, of course, the Beatles, while we talked, laughed, and ate. Around 7:30, everyone pitched in to scrub my kitchen, which had become a slippery, oily, dirty, wonderful mess and then went back to their rooms for the night, and as I did some cleaning after they left, I thought about how lucky I was to have been placed among such incredible, funny, and caring students—it was truly one of my favorite nights since I’ve been in Vietnam, and I came out of it with the ability to make bánh khoai… if you’d like to learn (or maybe just enjoy eating it with me) I’ll be happy to share my food, and cooking duties with you… so long as you slice the sweet potatoes correctly.

Well, I still have one or two things I’m planning on writing about during this streak of blogging, but I’m leaving town tomorrow to visit Cần Thơ, a city on the Mekong River in the south of Vietnam tomorrow (it is one of those “you must see this place before you leave Vietnam” places, and, thought it is hard to believe, I’m to the point in my stay here that I’m going to have to really start checking off places on the list if I’m going to get through it!) and I’ll be leaving my computer behind. Don’t worry though, I’ll be back in touch at the beginning of next week when I’m back in town.

Lots of love to you all,

Hayley