68 Time November 16, 2020
TimeOff FoodWhen quaranTine Times began, everyone around me
started making sourdough. I baked cakes. Nothing against
bread; I just crave the precision of a layer cake, the fiddly
work, as it’s called on The Great British Baking Show, a
comfort series that I rewatched while making comfort cakes,
tarts and galettes. Bread is a staple, but cake brings joy.
For me, it’s always been that way. My family arrived in
the U.S. as refugees from Vietnam at the end of the war, in
- We were resettled in Michigan, in a conservative town
where I grew up not knowing what to do with all the racism
we experienced. I was a shy child who had nightmares and
fears. My whole family was anxious, but no one talked about
trauma. We didn’t know the concept of self-care. But surely
that’s why we loved to gather around the TV set with ice
cream and potato chips. We loved little treats: candy, packs
of gum, the rare Sara Lee pound cake and Entenmann’s
coffee cake.
When I was 10, my mom enrolled me in a senior citizens’
cake- decorating class as an after-school activity. There,
in a community- center kitchen, I learned how to shape
buttercream into roses and leaves on little squares of wax
paper. We did this over and over, flower after flower, lines
of leaves until the frosting ran out. It was satisfying, doable
magic. I would listen to the ladies gossiping and laughing,
and feel included in their warmth, gaining secret knowledge
about the world.
Baking brought me comfort as a child.
Now it’s getting me through quarantine
By Beth NguyenAnd so I became the baker in
my family. Though my childhood
was filled with the tension of not
understanding identity and of feel-
ing like an outsider, I knew two
things for sure: everyone feels a
little better when presented with
cake, and everything feels a little
better when there’s cake.Now, all these years later,
I’ve returned to the Midwest—
Wisconsin, the other side of Lake
Michigan—and I’m teaching my
own kids how to bake. I thought
their childhoods would be so much
safer and more stable than mine,
but I didn’t know we would be in
a pandemic, living in a state that
currently has one of the highest
numbers of COVID-19 cases in the
country. Like so many people in
America, we are stressed out. We
haven’t gone to restaurants, haven’t
gone anywhere.
But at least we can bake.I am a
person who
still carries
fear all the
time. But my
children think
I am fearless
because I can
cook and bake