all over that bread like sesame seed

alternative asian thanksgiving, celebrated on any public holiday.

last night was a warm-up.

the table next to us in a chinese restaurant, where all the staff was viet, as big as a luby's, was like ours: an asian family and one white guy, likely a sex tourist.

i was eating my crispy noodles and scallops in broth and there was a heated discussion where i kept hearing one of the words i have learned recently, xe. the younger brothers are not involved and one of them is a cheetah head; let's call him mauricio. duylinh turned to me and said

OK, it's done. we are officially living a lie.

everyone looked at me to finish my beer because we were in a rush to get to the bakery before it closed. i had one banh mi thit nuong and a square of nam chua. nam chua is raw ground meat denatured with some type of natural chemical, served with a slice of thai chili and garlic. it makes you cry. back at the house we had a small bowl of cocoyam curry.

i slept at my sister's house. she showed me pictures of new orleans. soup kitchen. in the morning she said that there was this awesome asian store that we should see. it was indeed large, and had a top-notch bakery. there were whole pigs roasted on a skewer cuius flesh you buy by the kilo. duylinh and i split a banh mi ba le, then my sister bought us two packages of spring rolls for the road.

"you've got to try spring rolls. this place makes good spring rolls."

back on the road. it is shorter when you do not get lost. 20 minutes instead of ninety. mauricio was watching a korean feuilleton and before i knew it i was hooked. mauricio is an aspiring womanizer so he was doing research. even though the subtitles were literal translations and it was never clear exactly what was happening. two hours and two beers passed.

it is called CATCH A KANGNAM MOTHER:

there are three mothers. we can situate each one on one of the following axes:

1. sophistication
2. snobbishness
3. intelligence

Mother 1: (-,-,+)
Mother 2: (+,-,-)
Mother 3: (+,+,-)

they are all hot. the drama concerns their efforts to make their children succeed in school so that they can get into Seoul University.

Something Mother 3 said kept echoing through Mother 1's head:

"father's economic contribution, mother's accompaniment, child's success. in jenbai district, is mothers study assistants indeed to child."

after a bowl of sharkfin soup and some sweetbread, we went to an asian shopping mall and had banh mi ba le, nam chua, and banh bot loc. then we had boiled crawfish and beer.

my final evaluation of Houston: come for the asian food, get the hell out because of the cars.