For love of tomatoes: Couple has cultivated a bountiful life

By Mark Reynolds
Journal Staff Writer

Saran Gnoato, originally from Cambodia, grows tomatoes in her garden at home
on Netop Drive in South Providence.

The Providence Journal / Sandor Bodo

PROVIDENCE — Saran Gnoato and her husband are an unlikely couple who came to
Rhode Island from opposite sides of the world, overcoming war and cultural
barriers to discover a mutual affection for a ripe, juicy, homegrown tomato.

The tomatoes they grow in the backyard of their Elmwood home from imported
seeds have resisted the blight that has affected many tomato crops this
summer. And they are big. Some weigh in at 2½ pounds.

The success the couple have had growing the fruit may have something to do
with the place tomatoes have had in their lives.

Gnoato says that tomatoes make her happy, and she realizes now that what her
mother and her grandmother told her when she was a little girl was quite
true. They told her that a homegrown garden would help her “eat good and
look good and see the flowers,” she says. She could do it herself and never
need to worry about anything, they told her.

“It’s true,” she says. “I have a happy life. You can see. My husband comes
home from work. We have a beautiful house and a great yard where everyone
wants to be. You can see.”

Her adoring neighbors, quite aware of the tomato-growing talents next door,
visit often. Gnoato, 53, sends them home each summer with their hands full.
Sometimes she even pushes her produce on strangers who pass by her Netop
Drive home.

Gnoato’s family never bought vegetables from the market when she was growing
up in western Cambodia in the ’60s.

Each morning when she headed off to school, she saw her mother and
grandmother tending tomatoes and cucumbers and rosemary in the garden.

The tomatoes were her favorite. She relished the flavor and texture of the
fruit’s skin.

This bucolic farming life came to a violent end in 1975 when the brutal
regime of Pol Pot came to power. She was 19 years old when the Khmer Rouge
took control of her neighborhood.

One of her older brothers, an army captain, was slain.

The Khmer Rouge corralled the family into a work camp, where she had to make
do without fresh vegetables. The Khmer would dilute two or three cans of
soup in a massive bowl of water to serve a large group of people. Death was
everywhere, she recalls.

“They wanted to kill us,” she says.

An estimated 1.7 million Cambodians died of starvation, disease, torture and
overwork in the camps during Pol Pot’s four-year reign, which focused on
creating a peasant society — the communist ideal in the view of the Khmer
Rouge.

Visions of a happier, more-nourished existence crept into Gnoato’s mind
whenever the work at the camp ceased and she had a chance to sit down, often
on a hillside. In those moments, she told herself she didn’t need to be rich
if she ever made it to a free country. No. She only needed good food.

Tomatoes.

She escaped with her parents and three siblings in the fall of 1979. They
hiked into southern Thailand, where they were held in an internment camp
near the Cambodian border.

A year later, the young woman arrived in Rhode Island. She was hired at
Scuccato Corp., an East Providence jewelry manufacturer.

Despite her malformed fingers, a birth defect, she became an expert jewelry
solderer, controlling a needle-like tool with a 3,000-degree flame. She
churned out bracelets, necklaces and other pieces of jewelry.

Her future husband, Daniel Gnoato, a toolmaker, arrived from Italy on a
Wednesday in 1984 and met her that Saturday at a wedding reception. He, too,
loved tomatoes. But the subject didn’t come up early on.

In general, they didn’t say much to each other because he didn’t speak
English and she didn’t speak Italian. His sister didn’t like the idea of him
dating a Cambodian, and her mother slapped her for going out on dates with
someone she hadn’t married.

She says she worried for some time that marriage would require the sort of
submissiveness that husbands frequently demand from wives in Cambodian
culture.

The couple didn’t discover their mutual tomato love until about five years
after they had met. By then, they were married and living on Netop Drive.

They planted their first crop on a St. Patrick’s Day.

He tilled an area in the yard and fertilized it with manure, moss and lime;
she planted the seeds and watered religiously, often early in the morning.

But the tomatoes from that garden just weren’t up to snuff.

“They weren’t meaty enough,” says Daniel Gnoato, a 58-year-old machinist at
Electric Boat in Quonset.

So about eight years ago, during a summer visit to see his family in Bassano
del Grappa, Italy, they picked up some high-grade European seed. They
planted the seeds the following March and harvested the new crop that
summer.