Graphic by Megan Eloise/The Gazelle

“Don’t tell your mother, but…”

I was sitting with two women in a Saigon café last summer. They were both in their mid-50’s, kept calling each other stupid old hags and loved each other more than anyone else in their lives. They were my mum’s two best friends and they were teaching me about food, war and female friendship.

We had just come from a feast of snails. They wanted to try a new dish called fingernail snails — the shell a long grey blade like Guiness-World-Record nails, with a sliver of white meat inside, grilled and smothered in scallion oil.

“Don’t tell your mother,” they said, “but she used to cheat in her maths tests.”

“Don’t tell your mother, but I fucking hated her nagging. Does she nag you all the time as well?”

They were set on mocking my mum because she hadn’t come to see them in Vietnam this year. The three became best friends when they were high school teachers in their early 20’s, in the time before war. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, my mum and her family fled Vietnam. The other two stayed. Minh sells breakfasts to commuters at the mouth of the freeway and married a man who lives in the country. She stays in the city for work. Diep, in a turn of fortune, inherited money from some land in the confusion of postwar centralization and decentralization, and lives alone. She used to make money reading fortunes, but stopped because the worst predictions as well as the best ones kept coming true.

That night, I found out that my mum was caught the first time she tried to flee Vietnam.

“Don’t tell your mother, but when I went to visit her in jail, I almost didn’t make it back home.”

When the two women heard that my mum and Minh’s sister were caught trying to leave Vietnam, they pooled their money to go to Rạch Giá.

At Rạch Giá, they weren’t allowed to see the prisoners, but could only send in goods. The bribery money was more than they anticipated. After bribing some guards to send food into the jail, Minh stayed in town with relatives. Diep took the bus out to the island’s shore and, while paying the fee at the end of the ride, realized that she was broke.

She also found that the boat was not coming until morning.

Diep curled up on a bench at the port for the night. She had only a fistful of sticky rice in her pocket and ate it, finally calculating that the journey back to Saigon could take several days now that she had to beg her way through.

I met Diep as an older woman, but I’m told she has always been an avid food connoisseur, even in times of poverty. In times of prosperity, she doesn’t hold back. Last summer, she took me to bakeries, noodle houses and seafood restaurants all over Saigon, insisting on ordering all the best dishes so that I could sample everything, and then ordered for takeaway all the things I liked best. She and my mum have huge fights whenever they eat out together, my mum scolding her gluttony, and they would stop talking for weeks at a time afterward.

So at least I could be sure that the ball of sticky rice was a tasty one, with sesame sugar mix and boiled peanuts, and I could’ve predicted that Diep would eat it all in one go. In the same way I understood that Diep would, in a heartbeat, come running out to Rạch Giá just to hear of my mum’s health (in fact, my mother was bedridden the whole time she was in jail) and send her food.

Diep is a woman so smart that she makes people uncomfortable, a master in reading faces, but she is also ruled by her instincts for friendship and food.

I gauged from Diep this sense that I got from so many other storytellers of wartime; a carelessness made necessary by the insecurity of the time. How could Diep go off alone at night, without money, food or company? How could my mum decide to flee the country when it was illegal, when every second neighbor was a spy, and then to try again after getting caught? War makes everybody a gambler.

In the morning, Diep begged passersby for money, and then begged the ship’s captain when it came. She didn’t make enough for passage, so she bought a sandwich, the Vietnamese banh mi baguette stuffed with fatty butter, different hams, chilli and coriander.

By the evening, the ship had crossed the bay and come back three times, and the captain finally took pity on the young woman begging and snacking all day at the port. In this way, Diep made the next leg of the trip by bus, and the next and the next, until she finally got a rickshaw to my grandmother’s apartment in Saigon.

My grandmother only half-understood Diep’s frantic story when she opened the door, but gave her the money to go downstairs and pay the rickshaw driver. Diep often stayed over at our place, a one-room apartment that housed a family of ten. My relatives call her Master Diep, the way the best fortunetellers are master seers.

In Diep’s telling of the story, the most colourful part is her exchange with the rickshaw driver, the only one that would trust a beggar girl, and perhaps had a crush on her.

Diep never told my mum about her journey home, because she knew that my mum would scold her for making stupid decisions.

For the rest of the night, I heard more secret stories of family scandals, great romances and even greater meals. My mum and these two women share a story of friendship that spans over 30 years. At every turn — every loan to family that was unwisely given, every man that shouldn’t have been trusted and every dish that shouldn’t have been eaten (in such quantity) — they had each other’s company, advice, scolding, and mockery.

After 30 years, with the usual shocks and turns of adult life further twisted by wartime, what remained constant and reliable was their friendship, and little else.

What I have told here, with Diep’s journey, is a Great Romantic Story of Friendship. It has all the traits of a good romance — love, sacrifice, heroism and adventure.

Romantic stories of love are often valorized above those of friendship. In literature, in film and in the media, love stories have been generally more exciting and sellable than friendship stories. We gossip obsessively about love matches, but not so much about friendship matches.

I call them love matches here, even though friendship is based on love, because there are scarce terms in our everyday language to distinguish between kinds of love.

I know the life histories (so far) of these three women, and what inspires me most are their friendships. Each of their love stories are charred and worn by cynicism, disappointment and compromise, yet their friendship keeps its romantic spark.

Female friendship faces a number of obstacles, one of which is the undermining of their importance. Sometimes, friends are seen only as placeholders until love is found, only as amusing, chatty sidekicks to the romantic comedy protagonist until she gets married. Female friendships have often been belittled, reduced in their portrayal to superficial obsessions with shoes and mindless gossip. In this way, friendship has been seen as a less worthy goal than, say, the pursuit of candidates for marriage.

Toni Morrison’s novel about female friendship, of two friends who have known each other from childhood to old age, is simply called Love. This title works almost as a rebranding of love, a word that today usually doesn’t evoke friendship first, although we can agree that friendship is full of love, even romance (defined as expressions and sentiments of love), and that friends can be real life partners.

Growing up deeply aware of gender inequality, and in the age of Toni Morrison and Taylor Swift, I have been enamored with powerful women and alliances of powerful women. New spokeswomen are pushing female friendship to the cultural forefront, although not without complications.

Taylor Swift invigorated the trend for #friendshipgoals or #squadgoals with her Bad Blood video, making the case for friendship as a worthy pursuit. However, Taylor Swift’s brand of friendship is sometimes criticized as being a collection of individuals based on physical beauty and popularity, harkening back to the exclusive, vacuous female cliques of U.S. high school movies.

Madeline Albright’s brand of female alliance went wrong in her endorsement of Hillary Clinton last week. Albright infamously said that there is a “special place in hell” for women who do not support Clinton for president, making the mistake of suggesting that a woman is deserving of something only by virtue of being a woman.

A UCLA study showed that women find a healthy way to mitigate stress through friendships with other women — an alternative to the usual fight-or-flight response to stress that we had long assumed mandatory due to a history of stress research only on men. The study suggested that female friendships might be one of the reasons that women live longer, and showed marked improvements in women’s recovery from painful experiences if at least one female friend was around.

The release of a new app a few days ago called Hey! Vina, like Tinder but for women to find female friends, has inspired a few think pieces. One pointed out that we are, probably reasonably, suspicious of people who are friendless more than we are suspicious of people who are single.

Here is what I know: friendship is one of the most important and necessary things in my life. What I believe is that because of the many varied ways in which women everywhere are disadvantaged, women can be empowered through alliance rather than competition. What I hope is that my life will be full of many kinds of love and romance, including those of friendship.