Alain Pham | 28/05/2025
The cold clung to me throughout my journey to the North, as if winter here still tried to hold onto people a little longer. Gentle but persistent, it slipped through the thin mist fogging up the car windows, soaked gradually into my coat, wove its way past my scarf, and whispered at my wrists. It crept into every silence in our conversations, into each feeling stirred by hesitant gestures—moments of giggles and mischief in the rising rhythm of a water puppet tale.
Out on the road, motorbikes sped past, their yellow headlights sweeping across the wet pavement. In that quiet, there was a certain rhythm-vague, yet present. Did it have a soul too? I wondered, standing by the Long Tri lake, facing the water pavilion of Thay Pagoda. The surface was still, a deep, dark blue, like a mirror without end. The air was so clear it felt as if everything had been suspended midair inside a transparent block of gel, preserving the echo of a temple bell ringing faintly behind me.
There was no performance. Yet the puppets appeared in my mind: they smiled, they swayed silently, needing no applause.
Do they have a soul? Perhaps not. But those who stood behind the curtain, faceless their entire lives, had placed into them something unnamed. Maybe it wasn’t the puppets themselves that held the soul, but the current of emotion from those “farmers of the arts”—who, almost unknowingly, breathed life into wood and lacquer. Precisely because their faces were unseen, what they left behind became even deeper, more expansive, as if it dissolved into the role itself.
“Bềnh bồng” came from that same feeling. A menu that does not seek spectacle, nor confines itself to any fixed form. I don’t wish to repeat the original. Nor am I trying to be different just to stand out. Some things only begin to speak when we stop trying to define them. And sometimes, the soul of an expression lies in the moment it is allowed to escape its former shape—when familiar materials are reimagined in a new, personal, yet still intimate way. A kind of freedom.
Perhaps no one remembers every dish. But if a single lingering taste returns, that is enough. Because not everything with a soul needs to be “loud” to be seen.
