Writer’s Digest 92nd Annual Competition Inspirational/Spiritual Essay First-Place Winner: “White Rose Dumplings”
Congratulations to Genevieve Flintham, first-place winner in the Inspirational/Spiritual Essay category of the 92nd Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition. Here’s her winning essay, “White Rose Dumplings.”
[See the complete winner’s list]
White Rose Dumplings
by Genevieve Flintham
Their fingers are wet. They scoop globs of gungy crustacean between pink-stained digits and drop them into pre-flattened white cases. They move so quickly that I can barely see the flick of their wrist as they close the case, their worn fingerprints pressing frills along the edge.
Like tiny, ivory pastries.
Above them, Jesus watches. He is in the midst of crucifixion, and yet his lips are serene, his hair is scooped behind his head. The pain is all in his eyes, which are red-raw.
The oldest of the ladies purses her lips. She looks away from Jesus’s eyes, down at the steady whittling of her fingers. Scoop, drop, press, frill.
There are eight of them. They make White Rose Dumplings, a speciality in Vietnam’s port town of Hoi An. Traditionally, they are filled with pulverised prawns, but a recent surge in vegetarianism has one lady scooping purple aubergine into little damp cases. Her arms are stained past the wrist; the heady colour of bruising climbs over the back of her hands.
They work ten hours a day, six days a week. I know this because the owner, a woman with dark circles and fine white hair, boasted of it earlier. She had the air of a prostitute’s madam. She looked as if she conducted autopsies on the side.
“They work very hard,” she stated, her missing teeth creating a whistle to this understatement.
I ordered six dumplings. I had no idea whether this was the going amount, or whether I was creating more work for the tired women, who muttered to each other when the madam wasn’t looking.
The toilet of the restaurant was the stuff of horror films. The restaurant opened 30 years ago; I suspected the basin hadn’t been cleaned since the inauguration. The towel, hanging limp and once-white from a rusty nail, had developed a stain in an almost-perfect outline of Africa.
I imagined complaining. I imagined complaining about the state of the toilet to the madam, who might drag one of these women, who were lagging towards the end of their ten-hour shift, to the bathroom. The bleach might ease some of the crustacean blood from her skin. I felt sick at my own imagination, as if these were intrusive thoughts and not the product of privileged Western hygiene.
A few of the women stirred; they were looking up at Jesus again. Jesus didn’t look back. It didn’t deter them.
Vietnamese Catholics have had a hard time, to use the understatement of the whistling teeth.
In August 1798, more than 10,000 Catholics were massacred in Hue, caught in the egoic imaginings of a Toy Son Emperor. More recently, after overthrowing French rule, Catholicism was often seen as the antithesis to the communist ambitions of the North of Vietnam. While the South encouraged Catholicism to some extent, it came at the price of Buddhism, with the demolishment of sacred Buddhist temples and pagodas under the hands of Catholic paramilitaries.
While Catholics fled from the North to the South of the country, the communist rubric grew in factions, stabilising the identity of a country that has withheld countless periods of turbulence.
To counter the persecution of well-known religions, which often carry stereotypes of their own and can be misconstrued by governments as battle-worn tools, the majority of the Vietnamese public took to adopting agnosticism or folk beliefs. Adopting the folk religions of their ancestors enabled the sense of community and hope to manifest, without the risk of direct persecution, owing to the ‘vague label’ on the packet.
I had enjoyed Tet in the town previously. Tet is a public holiday, the aim of which is to celebrate the many folk tales that provide comfort and joy to the masses. It is a holiday complete with singing, dancing, and giant, caterpillar-like dragons. The children know the stories; the elders let the haunting cries of the opera attempt to fictionalise them. In the absence of political stability, the country built solidarity and community on the back of another metaphysical entity: belief.
Belief has held the country together, through French rule, through a long and bloody war that still stains much of Vietnam today. When the physical reality is too harsh to see, we find that one most important feeling – hope – in that that can’t be seen or proven.
As they glance up at the picture of Christ, his bloodshot eyes glaring at his nailed left hand, I wonder whether they feel power coursing through them, or if they feel similarly persecuted.
Because this is 2023. Thousands of years ago, our homo sapiens ancestors lived lives of hardship and hunger. Foraging and killing, fighting and whittling, battling for a position in the middle of the food chain. But now, we’re at the top. Now, we have created a society that shouldn’t allow elderly women to work sixty physical hours a week; we have created borders that are as metaphysical as the community of belief, and yet we stand by them because it suits us.
In the West, religion is a declining practise, and yet, if we take the common elements from religion – a community of individuals who bond over common, non-proven beliefs – then we arrive fairly swiftly at the law. A set of guidelines that we all believe in, that we all implement, and, by all intents and purposes, worship, to some extent.
As the lined lady with the pink hands and the stooped shoulders, wearing a tabard that is striped through with thin red thread, considers her saviour, so I consider employment laws. Tribunals. Unions.
They should not have to work sixty hours a week, because the law should forbid it.
I explore my own religion, the guidelines of regulations and constitutions, and come up short. Instead, I turn my mind to other levels of folklore that are widely known in my country. My mind stops at Robin Hood; the tale of the man who steals from the rich to feed the poor. We all know of this tale, and yet our knowledge of it does not cement a community as strongly as that of the folklore genus.
My brain struggles to grasp the comforts of belief because I think that I do not need to. I imagine that we have solved it – that our Western world knows of things that these women in archaic Hoi An cannot know – and conveniently ignore the truth; that we are not looking at a picture on the wall; that we are wealthy and drowning.
A well-dressed man stumbles into the restaurant. It is raining outside and he carries the smell of the alleyway and floating lanterns. He leans on the French architecture while the Chinese lanterns above our heads sway. He shoots the madam a look that I imagine he thinks is charming.
“So sorry to bother you,” he says, rubbing his wet hair with one hand. The ladies pause in their dumpling spinning; they all watch with vague interest in their dark eyes. “It’s just that we’ve been waiting twenty minutes for our dumplings, and the kids are hungry. Do you think you could speed things up?”
He doesn’t see me. He doesn’t see the women, who don’t understand English but understand the madam’s eyes; they quicken, as if an invisible button has been pressed. Their arms are all sinew and bloodspots; their wrinkled fingers catch smells that I will be washing from my clothes as soon as I’m home. He doesn’t see the picture of Jesus on the wall, the picture that stands above the mashed prawn innards, the cleaved hunks of hewn aubergine, the fine red thread that severs necks from bodies.
I don’t look at Jesus either. I don’t look at the madam, who is apologising, even though she hasn’t sat down in seven hours and is the age of my grandmother. I don’t look at the neat set of dumplings that sit, waiting to be steamed, or the stream of angry customers who look at their Rolex’s and tap their leather brogues on the floor, no doubt thinking of our Western religion – law – and how it might apply if expected timings aren’t met, or the standard of the goods isn’t up to scratch.
I look at the women. Their arms delve and process, spin and recycle, press and purse. Their eyes are dark but powerful, crackling in this ruined den, spinning magic from tragedy, putting their faith in the picture on the wall; showing us all how faith is maintained, how hope manifests.