A Cook's Tour (34 page)

     He’s a professional, after all.

Can Charlie Surf?

I wake up in my room at the Bao Dai Villas, the onetime summer home of the last emperor of Vietnam. I hear reveille out the window, followed by patriotic music at a nearby school, and the sound of children assembling. Rain patters on leaves; roosters crow. Someone is chopping wood on the grounds and there’s the familiar shush of a straw whisk broom sweeping tile. Out on the water, just around the point, a freighter’s engines throb idly in the early-morning mist.

     All my clothes are soggy and beset by mosquitoes. I remain under the netting over my bed until I can remember where I put the repellent. There’s a knock on the door. It’s Lydia, wondering if I have any Lomotil. I went alone to Nha Trang beach yesterday, ate whole sea bream with my fingers under a palm tree. Chris ate crab soup at the hotel. He’s deathly ill with food poisoning. Of course I have Lomotil. The traveling chef’s best friend. I give Lydia a few and wish Chris well. I know how he feels. It looks like I’m on my own this morning.

     After locating the repellent, I spray down my clothes, find the driest ones I can, and get dressed. There’s a scooter and motorbike rental by the desk, and I pick out the one with the most juice, hop on, then head into town for breakfast. Technically, foreigners aren’t allowed to drive anything over a low-cc putt-putt, but the rental guy didn’t give me any trouble, so in a few minutes, I’ve joined the thick stream of morning cyclists heading in on Nha Trang’s main beachfront drag. It feels great. I’m surrounded on all sides by men and women in their conical hats, whipping by palm trees, a long stretch of white sand and gentle surf to my right, the beach mostly deserted. The Vietnamese are not really beachgoers. Pale skin is seen here – as it is in Cambodia and elsewhere in the East – as an indicator of high status and good family. A lot of money is spent on skin lighteners, acid peels, and various fraudulent and often-harmful procedures intended to make one whiter. Women in Saigon often cover themselves from head to toe to protect themselves from the sun’s rays. So Charlie, it appears, does not surf. Not in Nha Trang anyway.

     As I turn off the main road, away from the sea, the traffic intensifies. Cars, trucks, more and more cyclists – on motorcycles, bicycles, cyclos, and scooters – join the fast-moving pack. Crossing an intersection is a heart-stopping maneuver, frightening and thrilling at the same time, filled with the roar of engines all accelerating simultaneously as we swarm across a square, only a foot or two from people on both sides. I squeeze past a line of trucks on the bridge across the channel. In the water, the gaudily painted red-white-and-blue fishing boats are coming in toward shore.

     Local legend has it that when Nha Trang was the base for US military activity in the area, the CIA and Special Forces used to kick prisoners out of helicopters over this channel – wire a few tire rims to their necks and out the door. Now, there’s little evidence of what was once an enormous American presence. As elsewhere in Vietnam, there’s plenty of infrastructure, which the Vietnamese have all too happily adapted to civilian use, but the obvious signs are gone. No more shantytowns built out of cans hammered flat and scraps of military detritus, housing whores and cleaning ladies and laundresses. Quonset huts, officers’ clubs, barracks, and parade grounds are gone – or converted to more practical purposes. The large hotels and villas once used to house high-ranking military personnel are now the property of government officials or rented out to tourists. The only people on Nha Trang beach are a few French, Germans, and Australians, most staying in the modern foreign-built resort-type buildings clustered together at one end of the bay. Yesterday on the beach, a kid approached me with a box of used books in English. It was the ubiquitous Vietnam collection: pirated editions of Tim Page, Michael Herr, David Halberstam, Philip Caputo, Neil Sheehan, and Graham Greene – pretty much like the collection on my bookshelf at home. But among the crudely Xeroxed covers and the dog-eared copies of left-behind drugstore paperbacks, the kid extracted a novel by a Vietnamese author: Bao Ninh’s
The Sorrow of War.

     ‘Not legal this book,’ said the kid, looking theatrically in both directions.

     Needing a good beach read, I bought the book. The author, a war hero, served with the NVA’s Glorious Twenty-seventh Youth Brigade. Of five hundred officers and enlisted men who went into battle with him, only ten survived. It’s a remarkable document. Change the names and it’s an Oliver Stone movie. The members of the hero’s platoon have nicknames, just as in every American war movie you’ve ever seen. The conflicts described are bloody, pointless, and horrific. The soldiers are frightened and superstitious. They get high on weed, on any psychoactive substance they can, whenever they can. Innocents are cruelly and foolishly killed. The ‘good guys’ are responsible for brutal rapes and atrocities. The hero returns to Hanoi cynical, embittered, and hopelessly screwed up, only to find his girlfriend has become a prostitute. He spends most of his time with other similarly screwed-up veterans – all of whom spend most of their time drinking and getting into fights, having lost faith in everything they once believed in. It’s a remarkable book, mostly for its eerie parallels to similar American works. It’s a Vietnam book – like so many Vietnam books – only told from the other side.

     By a Cham temple on a hilltop, I turn right down a narrow dirt road, splashing through muddy puddles until I find the fish market. People are eating everywhere. Among the pallets of fish and fast-moving deliveries and the crowds of marketers, large groups of people – old, young, babies, and children – sit on low plastic stools and squat, leaning against walls, slurping noodles from bowls, drinking tea, nibbling rice cakes, and eating pâté between baguettes. There’s food cooking everywhere. Anywhere there’s room for a fire and a cooking pot, someone has food going. Little storefront
coms
sell
pho
and noodles and ‘roll your own beef.’ Street vendors sell spring rolls, shrimp on a stick, scary-looking pâté sandwiches, baguettes, fried fish, fruit, sweets, and steamed crabs. Others seem to have just settled down at random, fired up some soup or noodles, and dug in – along with a large group of friends and family. I’m taller, by at least a foot, than anyone for two miles. Walking through the fish market to the water’s edge, I get a lot of stares. A woman smiles and holds up her baby, a healthy-looking kid in a bright knit cap and new clothes. The woman herself is nearly in rags. ‘Hello!’ she says, holding the baby’s hand and showing him how to wave. ‘Bye-bye!’ She asks me, by pointing and gesturing, if she can use my camera to take a picture of her son with me. Sure. Why not? She hastily confers with a group of women from a nearby fish stall. Someone locates a stool and the kid is posed standing on top. I show the woman how to operate the shutter and she frames the photo, a large group of women gathering behind and around her, all trying to look through the viewfinder, all beaming with pride that their best and brightest is having his picture taken next to the freakishly tall and strange-looking American.

     Only women work here. The fishmongers, scaling and gutting at long wooden tables by the water’s edge, are all women. The people mending nets, unloading their catch from the colorfully decorated boats (they look like Amish barns), and cooking food at the stalls are all women. Women in
thung chais
, perfectly round dinghies made of woven bamboo and pitch, paddle their wobbly vessels toward the docks – a difficult balancing act (as I’d soon find out). Where are the men?

     I sit down at a table with a large group of fishwives and their kids. The cook smiles and carefully places some cooked fish, some rice noodles, a few fish cakes, chilis, sprouts, peppers, and cilantro in a bowl, then hands me some chopsticks, a dish of black pepper, a wedge of lime, some additional chilis, and
nuoc mam
and chili sauce. There’s a pot of coffee brewing over coals, and she pours me a cup. As with almost everything I’ve tried in Vietnam, it’s fresh-tasting, vibrant, and delicious. Women keep coming over to the table and introducing their children. What they want, I have no idea. They ask for nothing except to allow their babies and small children to touch my arm, shake my hand, wave, the kids gaping wide-eyed and confused as the women scream with laughter and obvious delight. All these women have been up since way before dawn, many of them out on the water for hours, hauling in fish, loading them into their little round basket boats, unloading on shore. Yet no one looks tired. No one looks beaten down or defeated by their work. New arrivals stand upright in their dangerously pitching basket boats, smiling broadly as they heave pound after pound of dripping fish onto the market floor. The cook asks me if I’d like more coffee and pours me another cup, making sure my can of condensed milk is not empty. Fish blood runs across the wet concrete floor; a basket of squid is dropped a few feet away, then another basket of fish. The channel is filled with incoming fishing vessels, the awkwardly bobbing
thung chais
. Clouds cling to the mountains surrounding Nha Trang like tufts of white hair. I love it here.

     Offshore are the islands of Hon Tre, Hon Tam, and Hon Mieu. Beyond those, farther out to sea, are a few tall rocks, surrounded by rough, dangerous surf, constantly patrolled by gunboats. This is where the salanganes (a variety of swallow) build their nests, high on the perilous snake-infested cliffs. The nests, formed out of the hardened salivary secretions of the swallow, fetch up to four thousand dollars a kilo from Chinese ‘medical’ practitioners and are much sought after throughout the East for bird’s nest soup. Chris and Lydia have already asked if I’d be willing to climb up a cliff, past poisonous snakes, and crawl hundreds of feet over jagged rocks and pounding surf so they can shoot a bird’s nest soup scene. I pointed out that bird’s nest soup is medicine – not really food – and that I have about as much interest in bird’s nest soup as I do in the next Steven Seagal ecothriller. The gunboat thing finally dissuaded them from having me attempt rappelling from any cliffs, but I feared the issue was not yet dead. I did, however, want to see some islands. Linh and his friend Dongh, our driver in Nha Trang, said they knew a place on Hon Mieu, a little fishing village called Ba Mieu, where the seafood is supposed to be spectacular. I put a lot of faith in Dongh’s opinions on food. He is a foodie, and as soon as he’d met me, he’d announced that I was a lucky man, for I was in the best town in the country for food. When we’d eaten dinner the first night, he’d kept pointing out highlights of the meal, asking if I’d noticed the amount of roe practically bursting from the green crabs, the freshness and flavor of the local lobsters, the clear eyes and noble conformation of the whole fish. He’d already fed me really well at a fish joint by the beach, and when Chris had asked about the food at our hotel, he’d rolled his eyes at the ceiling and given a decidedly lukewarm response.

     Chris, it appeared, would have been well advised to pay closer attention. I’m surprised Linh is willing to take me here, that he is allowing us to see this – and film it.

     As our hired boat approaches the surf off the island of Hon Lon, Dongh calls out to two thin, shabbily dressed men on the beach. A long, narrow launch sets out from shore, straight into the breakers, and eventually pulls alongside. There’s room for only two passengers at a time in the leaky, water-filled launch. Lydia and I clamber in and are ferried to shore, riding the waves the last few yards. Chris is still back at the Bao Dai, probably getting up close and personal with the plumbing. This is a Vietnam I haven’t seen yet.

     It’s a hard-packed, finely grained white sand beach around a small cove, strewn with trash, flotsam and jetsam, an absolutely godforsaken strip. A small village lies back among the trees on the muddy banks of what looks like a drainage ditch. Huts, hooches, shacks – as soggy and fragile-looking as you could possibly imagine – sag into unhealthy-looking brown water. There is no sign of electrical power, telephone communication, television, or any modern development dating after the mid-seventeenth century. There are a few bundles of sticks, and a
thung chai
resting upside down on the sand. I see no signs of life.

     Lydia and I are alone on the beach, and I’m thinking about a swim. The surf is high, with a nice shape, the waves breaking far enough out to get a good ride if I want to bodysurf. Suddenly, we’re under attack. Women come running from their huts, holding baskets of cheap seashell jewelry (the same Macao-made stuff you see on every beach in the world). The women are screaming, desperate-sounding, waving babies in front of them, shrieking, ‘Look! Look! Baby! Baby!’ They surround us on all sides, pressing in close, aggressively shaking fistfuls of necklaces and bracelets in front of us. It’s impossible to deter them. I shake my head, saying, ‘No, no . . . thank you . . . no . . .’ again and again, but it’s no use. They’re pushing in, tugging our clothes. I move away, but they follow wherever I go. Lydia looks nervously at the boat, Linh and Dongh still waiting for the launch to return. I make the mistake of buying two pieces, hoping that’ll satisfy the women, but it only makes them more desperate and inflamed. They begin arguing with one another, screaming, shouting, waving their fists. A woman presents me with her baby, a beautiful child with a single gold earring with a tiny gold bell – probably more valuable than the entire village – and begs me to buy a flimsy string of shells. I give in, which causes the others to redouble their frenzied efforts.

     ‘I have a plan,’ I say to Lydia. I run down to the water’s edge, peel off my clothes, and dive in, then swim as far out as I can. Lydia chooses to remain ashore.