Constellations // One Table, Many Bowls
No matter your faith, community food nourishes the soul
by Diana Lu
EXCERPT //
Before I could put words to the tenets of Buddhism, I built muscle memory in rituals.
Honoring the deities and our ancestors, at home or at temples, involved food ritual. Food offerings accompanied our chantings to our ancestors; we honor and keep them well-fed in the afterlife with their favorite foods, auspicious fruits, wine, tea, and rice. I find the delicate smell of steamed rice alongside the gentle furls of smoke from the incense very comforting. It is also very fitting that incense is sometimes held in place in a bowl filled with uncooked grains of rice instead of sand. While monks and nuns observe a strict vegetarian diet, lay Buddhists typically eat vegetarian in observance of holidays such as Lunar New Year and the first and fifteenth days of a new moon (roughly a month in the lunar calendar). Folks would pray and dine together at the temple.
As a child, my young mind didn’t pay attention to dates. What I remembered were the best vegetarian spring rolls stuffed with taro, just like how my Aunt 9—in my family, we kids address our aunts and uncles by birth order—made hers. I remembered feeling so short and small watching grownups scoop clear noodles mixed with veggies, mushrooms, and tofu and hoping that I got a helping with lots of my favorite braised fried gluten. I remembered marveling at the tiny vegetarian chicken drumsticks, complete with a little wooden bone, and playing with my food.
When I return home to Monterey Park, California, I still visit the temple where an old photo of my grandmother has a place on the wall among the ancestors; I visit the deities at their altars and eat a vegetarian meal with my family at a big communal table.
In San José, my Aunt 9 is spending more time volunteering at her temple. She cooks meals for the monks—First we serve the deities, my aunt says, then the monks eat at lunchtime—and helps serve food to those who come to worship on the fifteenth day of the new moon. Other volunteers will do the same, and a more masterful cook makes food en masse. Vietnamese temples will do vegetarian versions of some of the most comforting foods: bún bò huế (a spicy beef and pork rice noodle soup), canh chua cá (sweet and sour catfish stew), chicken and rice, chả trứng hấp (egg meatloaf made with tofu), a dramatic display of whole fish with sweet and sour sauce, and a main course with tofu. Next to the food by the altars, “some deities like tea and some like wine, so we offer them both,” my aunt explains. Rice wine, sake, as long as it is light in color. Auspicious citrus, especially oranges, tangerines, and kumquats, are a festive offering during Lunar New Year in particular, as “tangerine” in Mandarin and Cantonese dialects sounds like “luck” or “gold.” //
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