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Defusing Phở: Soup Stories and Ethnic Erasures, 1919–2009

From the first years of the twenty-first century, Didier Corlou, the celebrity chef of Hanoi’s Sofitel-Metropole hotel, made a point of declaring ph to be both the best soup in the world and his own favorite Vietnamese dish (Corlou; Nguyên Cao Duc 2). Certainly ph can be truly delicious, but Corlou’s ongoing adulation of the dish demands context. When did ph (a soup of beef broth, herbs, spices and rice noodles) emerge on the colonial street, and when did French speakers become enamored of the dish? And how did it become a symbol of Vietnam in the post-colonial period? As ph became more common outside of Vietnam, I argue that Francophone discourse about ph has solidified around a lacuna, an erasure of the soup’s origins. Ph now stands for a particular colonial relationship between the French and the Vietnamese, an idea that the French brought modern ingenuity to a traditionalist Vietnam. This use of ph obliterates any memory of the creative local responses to the colonial imposition of violence and economic dislocation. French appreciation of ph today entails little awareness of the resourcefulness of ph ’s original creators. Appreciating ph only appears to be the opposite of xenophobic rejection of immigrants’ varied smells and spices (Ben Jelloun 27). The practices are two sides of the same coin, as wealthy white French people decide which immigrant food is appetizing, with no sense of humility or gratitude for those who invented these delicious dishes.