PUBLIC ESSAY:
shorter, accessible version of ongoing research

In the summer of 2021, in Tokyo, I was waiting in line to buy a bánh mì. The shop was small, the line was long, and I stood there thinking about which kind to choose that day.

Then a strange thought crossed my mind: Why am I here, in Japan, queuing for something the French once brought to Vietnam? A Vietnamese person, in Tokyo, waiting for a sandwich with French roots. Bánh mì had travelled through three or four lifetimes before reaching my hand. A moment later, a car came from across the street and hit me. I broke my leg, ended up in hospital, and had to take almost a year off.

When I woke up in the hospital, another strange thought kept coming back: I did not eat up that bánh mì. I used to joke with people that bánh mì is the food I could eat every single day for the rest of my life and never get bored. Every time I went back to Vietnam, I ate it: morning, noon, sometimes even at night. It was a kind of love without reason, like how you don't really know to explain why you love someone.

During those quiet days in the hospital, I started thinking more carefully about the question that had crossed my mind. Where did this bánh mì I love come from? And how did it travel from a French bakery in early-twentieth-century Hanoi all the way to a small Vietnamese shop in Tokyo?

In the late nineteenth century, the French brought the baguette to Indochina. Wheat was theirs; rice was ours. In her book Appetites and Aspirations in Vietnam, the historian Erica Peters writes that during the colonial period, eating bread was encouraged as a sign of being "civilised", of standing closer to the French and further from the "native". The bánh mì of that time was not less than food, but as a way of sorting social classs. What you ate told the world where you belonged. It struck me as strange. Something once used to say you are below us has become the food I love most. How did that happen?

The answer, I think, lies in a series of small substitutions. Pork liver pâté replaced foie gras, the rich goose-liver delicacy of the French upper class. Pickled carrot and daikon replaced cornichons, the small French pickles served with cold cuts. Vietnamese pork roll replaced jambon. The same shape on the outside, completely different on the inside. The bánh mì sellers in Saigon, Hanoi, and Huế kept the French shell and poured a Vietnamese filling into it.

Some might say it was just poverty: foie gras was expensive, so they used pork pâté instead. But if it was only about poverty, why not sell rice? Rice was much cheaper than wheat flour. Keeping the shape of the baguette while replacing everything inside was, I think, a decision - even if the people doing it weren't fully aware of it.

Frantz Fanon, a philosopher born in Martinique, wrote a great deal about colonialism. One of his ideas has stayed with me: decolonisation does not end when the flag is changed. It also has to take place in deeper layers: in how people eat, dress, and name the world around them. A bánh mì with pork liver pâté and coriander is, perhaps, a very small and very tasty example of this.

Then something stranger happened. In 2011, the Oxford English Dictionary added a new entry: bánh mì. Not "Vietnamese sandwich". Not "baguette vietnamien". Two Vietnamese words, standing on their own in what is probably the most powerful and reliable dictionary of the English language.

Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist, asserts that language is never just language. Every word carries a kind of capital - a symbolic power. When a name is admitted into the dictionary of a major language, it is not simply about adding one more entry. It is a recognition that the name has the right to stand on its own, without translation, without asking for permission. I remember reading this news and feeling a small but inexplicable kind of joy. The bánh mì I love had travelled further than I'd thought.

But the story doesn't end. When bánh mì appears in Western food writing, it is often told in a familiar voice. The British food writer Mina Holland, in her book The Edible Atlas, describes bánh mì as a kind of edible reminder of Vietnam's colonial past, where the bread of the coloniser 'meets' the filling of the colonised. The sentence is beautiful, almost poetic. But when you read it carefully, something feels off. The colonial past - as if it were something distant, neatly packaged. 'Meets' - as if both sides willingly walked into a friendly mixture. French colonial rule in Indochina lasted nearly a century. It left behind hunger, forced labour, thousands of deaths. And yet it gets folded into "an edible reminder", a "fusion" inside a single sandwich.

And even when bánh mì is written by its proper name, the diacritics often disappear. "Banh mi" without tone marks, sitting in the middle of a French or English sentence, has become so familiar that no one really notices anymore. The name has won its place in the dictionary - but the diacritics, the most intimate part of the Vietnamese language, are still often left at the door.

The name wins. But the story of the name is still told in someone else's voice.

I'm not sure whether to call this a victory or not. Perhaps it is both. Bánh mì has gone from being a colonial marker to a name that stands on its own on the world's shelf, and that is real. But it stands there on terms that the Vietnamese did not entirely choose. Maybe this is how most small struggles end, not with a clear victory, but with a small change in how the world names you.

For many years now, every time I come home, my family has come to pick me up at the airport carrying two bánh mì from a familiar shop. Two, not one. And both are eaten in the car. I don't remember who started this little rountine, and I don't quite know how the shop has changed over the years. I only know that when I get off the plane and walk through the customs, two bánh mì are waiting for me.

Maybe that is how bánh mì loves me back, not through anything grand, but through two loaves in a paper bag at the airport gate. A bread that has passed through colonial rule, through the Oxford English Dictionary, through The Edible Atlas: and through the small habits of a Vietnamese family.