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| German-Vietnamese Friendship by Joana Breidenbach (Extract from the catalogue Home:Sweet:City) |
She really wanted to name her restaurant, located in the Friedrichshain section of Berlin, “Vietnamesisch-Deutsche-Freundschaft,” or Vietnamese-German Friendship. A tribute to her feeling so at home in Germany and the fact that her family has lived here now for almost 20 years. But then she thought her place too small for such a name and her German too rough anyway, so she decided to call it “Asia-Euro Imbiss.” Imbiss means a place to get “a bite to eat”; “Asia-Euro” refers to the menu, which contains a lively mix of Asian and European, “everything Germans like to eat”: spring rolls, sweet and sour soup, and, of course, the ever-popular Chinapfanne, or stir-fry platter. There are over 600 Asian take-out restaurants in Berlin, not counting scads of sushi-bars and sit-down places, from Thai to Chinese and pan-Asian. An El Dorado of culinary diversity? Not quite. While Germans often assume that Chinese cooks are frying their Chinapfannen and Japanese sushi chefs cut their maguro maki, in most cases their food was prepared in restaurants owned and operated by Vietnamese whose origins remain concealed behind the word “Asian.”
Unlike London or Sydney, where everyone knows the classic pho and tasty rice paper rolls, German cities lack an authentic Vietnamese presence in their culinary landscape. But who among Germany’s Vietnamese population would openly declare their ethnicity? Most Germans, when they think of the Vietnamese, think of unscrupulous cigarette mafias and people traffickers. Or they portray the Vietnamese as victims. The advisory board on immigration in Berlin’s Marzahn-Hellersdorf recently published a worrying study that documents the failure of Vietnamese integration in its district. According to the study, many Vietnamese live in isolated pockets parallel to the rest of society where they are faced with increasing social, economic, and healthcare-related problems. Adults without health insurance are losing their teeth while their school-age children suffer under the double burden of high expectations and lack of help from their overworked parents.
The people who appear in Stefanie Bürkle’s video installation “Lo chao tu Vietnam” go beyond the simple narrative of perpetrator and victim and reveal the complexities of Vietnamese life in Berlin.
At first glance, the world of Ha Hong is oppressively small. Sitting on the leather sofa in her son’s room beneath a poster of Snoop Dogg, the 49-year-old Hong takes a rare break. Her philosophy of life is “work, work, work.” An apt description of the 17-hour days put in by the petite woman with dark hair and light-blond highlights. Hong, who together with her husband, Huy, runs the restaurant Jasminreis in Berlin’s Friedrichshain, rarely comes home before 3:00am. No time for Vietnamese friends and organizations, not to mention attending parent-teacher conferences or seeing something of Berlin’s cultural life.
In her scant free time, on Sundays, she likes to take her 14-year-old son shopping in one of the Vietnamese markets located in the urban industrial wasteland of Lichtenberg.
Yet once a year, Ha’s whole family goes on a month vacation. Usually, they go to Vietnam, where they visit family, and then continue on to Thailand, Singapore, or China. But Ha and her family have also taken trips to Italy, France, and Belgium, bringing along her older son, from her first marriage, who studies in Vietnam.
The loft apartment of Dat Vuong applies the same minimalist esthetic of his cult restaurant Monsieur Vuong, in Berlin’s Mitte district. At home, Dat says, he prefers to cook Italian. Almost all his close friends are German, he reads the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and he likes jazz and classical music, but he also has a great love of old Vietnamese battle songs. To stay in contact with the global diaspora community, he listens to Vietnamese Public Radio, which broadcasts from the U.S. Dat likes to travel, particularly to Thailand, and he wants to use his restaurant to introduce Germans to the flavorful and healthy Vietnamese cuisine.
Those interviewed in Bürkle’s video offer a representative slice of the immigrant scene, from former contract laborers to recently-arrived asylum seekers and students. Each of their lives offers its own set of surprises. Who would have thought that Kim Anh, a pretty flower vendor who came to Berlin in 1992 seeking asylum, pays for the university educations of her two grown sons in Vietnam? And who would have thought, as Bürkle discovered during one of her trips to Vietnam, that many of those who remain in the homeland pity their Germany-bound relatives? Life in Germany, they say, is simply too hard.
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