A typical farmers market day for Bich Nga Burrill and her Vietnamese and Thai food business begins at 3 a.m.
She makes noodle and fried rice dishes. She harvests vegetables from her tidy garden at her home in Winterport, like Thai basil and mint for summer rolls, or garlic and squash for curry soup. She packages and loads it all up, and she drives herself to market to sell it.
“I’m there til noon. Then I get back home and I cook some more. Sometimes I’m not done til 8 or 9. My husband helps, but I’m the main engine. I’m the one that drives everything,” said Burrill, who immigrated from Vietnam to the U.S. in 1975. “It’s really a lot of work.”
Burrill, now 66, has been a familiar, friendly face with her business, dubbed Far East Cuisine, at the farmers’ markets in Northeast Harbor, Bar Harbor, Stonington and Orono for the past 15 years. She admits that at her age, she’s starting to get a little tired of 15-hour days, and is considering scaling back on the number of markets she attends next year.
“Sometimes, on the way back, I get so tired I have to pull over and shut my eyes for a minute,” said Burrill. “It’s a long day.”
Spend any amount of time with her, however, and it’s hard to believe she’s all that tired. She zips around the kitchen, dispatching a whole chicken into a pot or wrapping a few dozen egg rolls without breaking a sweat. She is animated when she talks, quick with a compliment, casting a conspiratorial glance when she lets you in on a little secret. She delights in telling stories, both in person and on paper. Over the past ten years, she’s published two cookbooks and two novels.
Slowing down doesn’t seem to be in the cards.
“I have a lot of stories to tell. So many. So many people I’ve known over the years,” said Burrill. “If I slow down, if I stop writing and reading and being busy, that’s when your mind starts to go. You’ve got to exercise your brain.”
For Burrill, food — whether it’s the pre-made dishes she sells at the market, or a family dinner with her husband and three grown daughters — is there at the start of every relationship, and is what sustains those relationships through the years. Though her market goods are the reason people come up to her stall, it’s Burrill’s personality that keeps them there.
“The customer is the reason I do the market. If you just stand there and do nothing and don’t talk to anyone, no one cares. No one buys anything. With me, they share their lives with me,” said Burrill. “Somebody came in and told me they got divorced, and I say to them ‘Honey, don’t bother to cry over spilled milk. It’s not your loss. It’s his loss. If he doesn’t know how special you are, then he’s an idiot.’”
A customer will often walk away with a container of noodles, and some Dear Abby-style life guidance.
“They come for egg rolls, and they come for advice,” she said.
The dishes Burrill sells at the market are many of the things she grew up eating in Vietnam and later cooked for her family — dumplings and spring rolls, sinus-clearing spicy soups, breaded tofu, deep-fried until golden-brown and crispy. It’s not far off from the foods you might find sold on the streets of Saigon today.
Burrill was born in Hanoi, in what was then North Vietnam, in 1950. While she was still a small child, her family moved to Saigon, not long before the outbreak of the Vietnam War. She lived there until she was 25, escaping the country just days before the fall of Saigon, arriving first in Guam and then in California, where she lived for two years. In 1977, she met her husband and moved to his home of Maine.
Burrill spent most of her childhood and adolescence in a war zone; Vietnam veterans often come to the market to share their stories of her home country with her regularly. But there are also light-hearted stories, like one about the time in the late 1970s, when she was still living in California, and she very nearly bought into the business that would later become Huy Fong Foods — the makers of Sriracha hot sauce.
“That’s the stuff we make in Vietnam. I’ve been using Sriracha way before it was popular. I could have been a rich woman. They asked me ‘Do you want to work for us?’ and I said “Nah.’” she said. “Instead, I met my husband, moved to Maine and had babies. What are you gonna do?”
Though she’s been in Maine for nearly 40 years, her memories of her childhood and young adulthood in Vietnam still live with her every day. In more recent years, she’s taken to spending the winter months writing — sometimes she wakes up in the middle of the night to write, at the computer at 3 a.m. with her tiny poodle-terrier mix, Tilly, sitting in her lap.
“I say Tilly is my co-writer on all my books,” said Burrill. “I cook for her. She likes Peking duck. She likes ginger chicken. She liked grilled steak. She eats first. She’s so spoiled. She’s got a really good life.”
In her cookbooks, 2005’s “Vietnam Memories: A Cookbook” and 2011’s “Friendship at the Farmer’s Market,” she weaves stories and anecdotes of both her home country and adopted country around her recipes. But in her two novels, 2014’s “Lily: The Beginning” and “Lily: The Haunted Game,” released this past spring, she goes deeper, using the character of Lily — based on a real woman she knew in Vietnam — to tell a fantastic, multi-part story about time, family and the ways the past can co-exist with the present.
The real Lily was a woman Burrill knew when she was 18, during the war years in Vietnam.
“This woman, she helped me so much. And one day, it was 1969, she needed my help. She showed up at my door and asked me for money. I never had money. But I had a diamond necklace. And I gave it to her,” she said. “She left, and I never saw her again. A year later, the diamond necklace came back to me in the mail, with no return address. I still don’t know what happened to her… I had to remember her. I had to write about her. She was so important to me.”
There are still a lot of things Burrill wants to do. She wants to write another cookbook. She wants give part of the proceeds from her book sales to area animal shelters. She wants to travel back to Vietnam. And she wants to write a thriller.
“A sexy thriller. Set in Bar Harbor. That’s all on my bucket list,” she said.
Food, writing, gardening, dogs, friends, family. Though she works very hard, for Burrill, it’s not about the money — it’s about the experience.
“Don’t think about what’s going to make you money. Think about what you love to do,” she said. “Money doesn’t mean anything. Money doesn’t matter. When you’re dead, what’s money gonna do?”
Food and writing may not have been the most lucrative career path, but Burrill seems pretty happy with it all.
“Work hard, yes, but do what you love,” she said. “You’ve got to love it.”
Far East Cuisine is at the Stonington Farmers Market from 10 a.m. to noon on Fridays, the Orono Farmers Market from 8 a.m. to noon on Saturdays, and the Bar Harbor Market from 9 a.m. to noon on Sundays. In the summer, she is also at the Northeast Harbor Farmers Market on Thursdays. The Bar Harbor and Stonington markets do not run in the winter, but Orono’s does. All of Burrill’s books can be purchased on Amazon; for more information, visit bichngaburrill.com.
