A quick trip to Vietnam in A Bánh Mì for Two

Let’s all say this together: I got this book from Gay’s the Word in London simply after seeing the vibrant cover and the pretty splayed edges to the pages. I’m very easily pleased, and I absolutely do judge a book by its cover. Well, I don’t judge it by its cover, but a nice cover inspires me to physically pick it off the shelf. I also read the entire thing on two train journeys lol.

The blurb says that in Sai Gon, Lan is always trying to be the perfect daughter, dependable and willing to care for her widowed mother and their bánh mì stall. Her secret passion, however, is A Bánh Mì for Two, the food blog she started with her father, but has stopped updating since his passing. Vietnamese-American Vivi has never been to Vietnam. Her parents rarely even talk about the homeland that clearly haunts them. Now a college freshman, Vivi has secretly chosen Vietnam for her first semester study abroad program. She’s hungry for the truth about why her parents left – and for everything she’s seen on A Bánh Mì for Two, the blog that inspired her to come. When Vivi and Lan fatefully meet, they strike a deal. Lan will guide Vivi through the city, helping her piece together the mother’s story through crumbling photographs and old memories. Vivi will help Lan start writing again so she can enter a life-changing food blogging contest. They’ll help each other achieve their dreams… and falling in love wasn’t supposed to be part of the plan.

Chapter one opens up on Lan at an internet café with her cousin and she’s lamenting over her self-diagnosed writer’s block. Immediately loved that she felt like the need to try and diagnose her writer’s block, like it’s not a very real thing, but her followers on her food blog (the name of the novel lol) are anxiously awaiting when she’s going to return from her hiatus – which was caused by her father’s passing. They’re fine with her Instagram posts, but they’re desperate and gagging for some actual written content. Then chapter two pops over to Vivi’s (Vivian) POV where she and irl oomf (as an aside, I use the word oomf, because this book is the first one I’ve read that has legitimately included the word “oomf” in its pages), Cindy, have just landed in Vietnam for their study abroad program in university. And miss ma’am is actively lying to everyone at home, saying that she went to Singapore, when in fact she has gone to Vietnam because she’s trying to find out what in the hell is going on with her family and why her mum won’t tell her anything about Vietnam. But Vivi is conveniently staying in a dorm across the road from where Lan’s bánh mì stall is that’s run by her mother.

The book is short, 217 pages, and in that, it definitely gets to the point of what it’s doing quickly. There’s no fiddly-faddly diddly-daddly. In fact, Lan literally mentions in the book that Vietnamese people don’t have the same mindset that Americans do when it comes to talking and saying what’s on their mind. She mentions how blunt Vietnamese people are in saying what they think compared to Americans, piddling around what they really mean. And in that, I appreciated that everything in the book was for something overt. If it wasn’t for getting Lan her spark for writing back, it was for helping Vivi find the people in her family. There was very little room for much else. So while I appreciated how to the point the book was, I noticed that the book didn’t mention whether Lan goes back to writing on her blog at the end, and I fully didn’t realise that until I’d finished reading the book (nearly cried at the ending, by the way) and took a second while I was thinking about what I’d read and was like, “Oh yeah, wait!”. But the thing is, while it would have been nice to get some closure on that, with what I’ve just mentioned, like I was so into what was happening, I didn’t even notice it when the book ended. It was only when I thought that I realised.

I kind of loved Vivi’s mum. She was puss. There’s a TikTok trend, or concept, of outrageous women. She gave me that vibe. You see throughout the book that she left Vietnam for a reason, but that doesn’t really get shared. You do find out why, and what happened throughout the course of the book, from people that Vivi and Lan talk to, but Vivi’s mum was so dramatic, I was obsessed. Like, towards the end, Vivi and her have one single fight over a video call, and do you know what her mum’s reaction is? She immediately flies to Vietnam. Never mind the fact she might have a job at home – on the first flight to Vietnam. Diva behaviour.

I love a good trope. I don’t know whether you could call lying to everyone in your family about where you’re going and what you’re doing a trope, but it was one of those things where I could tell what was coming from a mile away. Like, obviously, it was all going to blow up for Vivi, or she was going to have to tell her mum, or her mum would somehow find out, that she was in Vietnam one way or another. That’s a given. I’ve said previously that I don’t think that predictable in a book is a bad thing, especially in romance. These predictable tropes exist for a reason – it’s tried and true – and most of the time I love them all. They did do the riding a motorbike and having one character just oh so desperately need to cling onto the driver. That’s a trope I so often see in BL, specifically Thai BL.

This was a short little thing, but damn did it hit. I feel like it hit all the beats that it needed to and got its job done. I definitely think there were some details that could have been expanded on throughout the book to make it even better than it was (considering it was 217 pages) but I still definitely enjoyed what I read.

Okay, bye!