kim nguyen
Drinking Bird Spit
The word “disgusting” doesn't quite do it
justice. “Revolting”, however, may be too strong. It's somewhere in the middle.
More of a dis-volting. Or re-gusting. Either way it's not so much the taste
that makes it nasty because it's actually quite bland. It's the texture. Not as
viscous as human snot but not as flowy as water. It's a strange hybrid of the
two. Think Jell-O that hasn't been fully hardened. It’s runny with a bit of a
bounce. Occasionally you will find slivers of twig, like scratchy little
presents for your throat. My mom would always forget to take them out. She’s the reason I have to drink the bird
spit.
I grew up without medicine because my mother
doesn't believe in Aspirin. How anyone could deny the existence of an entire
category of medicines is beyond me. Her cure for a headache is a
fifteen-year-old tube sock filled with rice. Stick that in the freezer and it's
a cold pack for your head. Pop it into a
microwave for about two minutes and it’s a sock-shaped heating pad.
Tylenol was not allowed in my house either.
For backaches we had to rub a quarter-sized drop of an unnamed green liquid
onto our muscles. Later, I would discover that this substance was actually a
concentrated form of menthol which is illegal in the
But of all the ancient Vietnamese cures in my
household, bird spit was the most mysterious. When the rice-sock and the
contraband liquids didn't work, bird spit was the last stop. Apparently it
could fix anything. My aunt swears it cured her hot flashes, and my dad insists
that it re-grew six hairs in his bald spot. When asked how the drink worked, my
mom would reply, "No one knows. It's just magic."
I can't remember the first time I drank bird
spit. Mostly because it’s been a staple of my family's medicine cabinet since,
well, as long as I've had memories. I had just assumed that yen, which I
thought translated to "bird saliva", was simply a Vietnamese
euphemism for "magical drinking potion." I do, however, recall the
time I found out what it actually was.
It
wasn't until I was thirteen when I asked my mom what yen was made of. I was
slumped on my bathroom floor, train-wrecked with a case of the flu when my mom
said, "Yen is made of yen." My fevered mind thought she was making a
feeble attempt at some misguided Confucian proverb. She sensed my confusion and
then clarified by making a spitting motion and flapping her arms like a
chicken.
"Well, crap." was probably my first
thought. After a quick mental calculation, I concluded that over the course of
my life I had consumed 3.4 gallons of bird saliva. Unadulterated twig-filled
bird spit. Then I threw up in the toilet.
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