Omai

A while back in January, when it was numbingly cold and I had taken up regularly wearing a green-brown scarf that Nathan dubbed “the vomit scarf”, I developed a prolonged cough. This was nothing new, as I’ve always been prone to coughing ever since a quarter spent on an island researching crabs. For whatever reason, I developed severe allergies, sneezing so violently and frequently that it became impossible to type or dissect, or really, anything activity involving basic motor skills. People became convinced that I was suffering from a malignant sneezing virus. At the end of the quarter, we discovered that the protective wax paper covering the countertops had also been covering up enormous growths of mold, which 1) was extremely disgusting and 2) convinced everyone that I was not going to die of sneezing.

Instead, I was left with a persistent cough, and now it only flares up whenever I’m feeling even mildly under the weather. And I was feeling under the weather. To compound things were Vietnamese people soberly muttering that I wasn’t adjusting to the rain and cold. As much as I wanted to point out that, ahem, actually, Seattle is actually not known for being sunny or mild, my vocabulary would have only permitted something like, “My city is also cold and wet like this.” Well, that would have gotten my point across, but I don’t think they would have believed me anyway.

My xe om driver, Kien, certainly didn’t believe me. Hanoi is so cold, he said, that it chills your bones. You’re freezing on the inside. He tsked at my fleece jacket and vomit scarf, and began lecturing me on proper outerwear, all the while weaving in and out of traffic. Mid-lecture on the importance of hats, he took a sharp turn into Hanoi’s Old Quarter, saying that he knew just the thing to make me stop coughing.

Omai refers to fruit that has been preserved in a variety of ways: pickled, dried, steeped in syrup. Usually sour and sometimes sweet, I used to eat sour ones by touching one to the tip of my tongue until the sour coating had been licked away. Only then could I stand popping the whole thing in my mouth. Kien bought me two types of gingered apricots: dry and sour, and sweet and sticky. He said they were from the best omai shop in Hanoi and he promised that the omai would make my cough go away.

It didn’t really help the cough, but it didn’t matter because the omai were so damn delicious. Nathan and I gobbled up the sweet sticky kind in a few days, and I managed to take a picture of the dry and sour kind before that disappeared too.