I did something I don’t usually do today: I treated myself to my garden fresh tomatoes, and cooked my favorite Vietnamese comfort dish - tomato tofu.

Despite harvesting fresh vegetables from my garden everyday, you’d be surprised to know that I rarely treat myself to fresh harvest. Typically, they go straight to processing (canning, dehydrating, freezing, etc…) for the winter. 

And thus, the vegetables I typically cook are from last year’s preserve. I am the ultimate worker ant who always work and save for the future, with very little leniency for myself in the present moment. This overly cautious characteristic was passed down from my ancestors, and is deeply rooted in our DNA.

If you’ve read my family’s stories, then you know that they lived through an excruciatingly long and dark tunnel that spanned over 100 years of Vietnamese history. Whatever accomplishment they managed to achieve by sheer hard work and determination was almost always immediately wiped out by the next tragic event.

Spent 20 years building the most reputable Eastern medicine business in the region? Here are some French troops to raid and burn down your village and make you a pregnant widow with 5 children. Just created two prestigious newspaper publishers? Here come the Communist forces to burn them to the ground. Well on your way to becoming the next Senator of the Southern regime? Here comes the fall of Saigon and you will be a political prisoner for the next decade.

And because my family always expected the other shoe to drop, they rarely celebrated their accomplishments and always prepared for the worst. 

When my great-grandmother escaped with her family on the refugee boat in 1975, she astonished her son when she pulled out some sticky rice and meat she had prepared. She was always READY for anything, even when everyone around her was swept up in the chaos.  Because of the sticky rice and meat, her family had the strength to make it through the next 2 hellish days floating aimlessly on the ocean abyss.

I am grateful that I inherited their frugality, alertness, and conscientiousness. BUT I also recognize that I need to break the generational trauma of constantly torturing myself with wariness.

And so today, I treated myself to the fresh fruits of my labor, and I’m savoring my accomplishments. Winter can wait.