Trinity Nguyen’s debut novel was not what I expected—in the best way. Vivi, a Vietnamese American, lies to her parents about where she’s studying abroad. With a mother who refuses to speak of the Vietnam she fled as a young adult, Vivi is desperate for some connection with her roots and potential family she has never met. Lan hasn’t been the same since her ba died. She can’t write for the food blog they started together anymore, doesn’t take her entrance exams for college, and instead works every day at the family bánh mì stall. Her life has dulled, seemingly beyond repair. But when Lan meets her blog’s #1 fan, who happens to be Vivi, she falls in love with Sài Gòn and life again.
While A Bánh Mì for Two centers around the growing bond between Vivi and Lan, it is so much more than that. It’s also a love letter to Sài Gòn. Nguyen’s story takes readers on a tour of Vietnam and its culture, just as Lan shows Vivi around the city. Lan helps find the places shown in the few photos Vivi has of her mom’s youth in efforts to find her family. Vivi requests they go to sample each food mentioned in Lan’s blog to try to jumpstart her love for writing again. Readers are taken along for the ride, going to festivals to see the dragon dance and eat moon cakes. I fell in love with the city of Sài Gòn through A Bánh Mì for Two, and I loved learning bits and pieces of Vietnamese. However, Nguyen doesn’t shy away from mentioning the hardships in Vietnam. The reality is, the aftermath of the war changed the people and still affects the citizens to this day. Nothing was glossed over for the comfort of Americans or the French.
Besides food and heritage, Lan and Vivi bond over their relationships with their mothers. Lan feels like she has to stay to run the bánh mì stall now that her ba is gone and her mother’s health is declining. Vivi tries to convince her that she can and should follow her dreams of becoming a writer and travelling the world. Vivi is angry with her mother for not sharing any of her memories of Vietnam and for never telling her about the rest of the family. Lan helps Vivi realize that it isn’t that simple, and life was difficult for Vietnamese after the war. The parallels between Lan’s story and Vivi’s mother were particularly well done.
A Bánh Mì for Two is a dual first person POV novel. I appreciated that Nguyen opted to leave out any slow filler portions, and with under 250 pages, it makes for a quick read. Although it’s on the shorter side, the characters did seem to repeat themselves often, which was the only real negative of this book for me (the pages in the copy I picked up did have a pink border design which was distracting. Something to keep in mind when shopping for your own). The characters are young and make young choices, but overall it was a sweet love story and I would recommend it to a friend. Nguyen caters to the older crowd as well with meaningful themes of diaspora and the sometimes tumultuous relationships between mothers and daughters.
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