The Turk Who Loved Apples (11 page)

So much of what she told me at that lunch I've since forgotten, and I feel terrible about it, for Ms. Thanh would show incredible concern for me over the years. It wasn't just the introduction to the Lucy Hotel or the teaching job that eventually materialized, but the way she asked after me, like a teacher worried about a bright, naïve pupil: Was I healthy? Was I staying away from the dangerous motorbike taxis?

I can't quite explain why she cared so much, since at that first lunch I'm sure I came off deluded and self-obsessed. Back then, I didn't really know how to relate to people, to get them to talk, except perhaps by showing them how completely vulnerable and accepting I was. Did Ms. Thanh see this? Or was she simply amazed that this unsavvy American was trying to start a life for himself in Vietnam, to the extent that he'd nibble scrambled duck fetus without showing his distaste?

There's a lot to be said, I think, for repression. No one at the lunch needed to know how uncomfortable, confused, and lost I felt—least of all me. Instead, I muddled through, willing myself to enjoy, or maybe appreciate, the meal and the company, and I think that counted for something. I may not have been at ease, but by exuding
enthusiasm, sometimes honest, sometimes feigned, I put my hosts at ease, enough that they were willing to confide in me. And this is why in the ensuing years giardia would drive me so insane. By killing my appetite entirely, it left me unable even to fake being myself, to connect with the people and places I'd traveled so far to see.

It's such a tiny thing, isn't it? Ms. Thanh and her family served something unusual (for me), I calmly ate it (or tried to), and we got on with the process of getting to know one another. Yet eating the unfamiliar challenges people in ways they often aren't ready for. As Andrew Zimmern often points out on his show, what's normal to eat in one place is a cultural affront elsewhere. Violating food taboos hits us at deep levels—this is what we mean by disgust, not some innate biological response. By overcoming disgust, I tried to show I was making an effort—perhaps a pitiful, transparent effort, but an effort nonetheless—at fitting in to a new culture.

Still, it took another few months before I really began to fit in to the Vietnamese eating world. That was when I moved from my sixth-floor room at the Lucy Hotel to another on the fifth floor. The new room was larger and air-conditioned, with a weird bas-relief mural of ants climbing on vines across one wall, but I took it for the simple reason that it had a patio, lined with terra-cotta tiles, dotted with plants, and ideal for alfresco lunches.

But what to bring home for lunch? Ham-and-brie sandwiches from the French bakery? Or Thai ground pork with holy basil, served over rice with a fried egg on top? On a stroll around my neighborhood one day, I spotted a man grilling pork chops outside a
co'm bình dân
, an institution whose name translates as “the people's food,” a very communist ideal.
Co'm bình dân
are everywhere in Vietnam. For less than a dollar, you can have a plate of rice and a serving of, say, pork belly braised in fish sauce and sugar,
rau mu'ó'ng
(water spinach) stir-fried with garlic, or a soup of bitter melon stuffed with pork and mushrooms.
Co'm bình dân
were pretty much fueling Vietnam's economic boom.

But they'd never appealed to me. Maybe these little storefronts, with their folding tables, plastic chairs, and worn silverwear, looked too grotty, especially given my ongoing battles with giardiasis. Maybe the premade dishes, sitting in the humid open air, turned me off. Maybe I needed to read a proper menu—to perceive my meals first linguistically, and only then with my palate. Indeed, some of my earliest restaurant memories are of menus, of scanning them with my parents for amusing typos, of matching transliterated phrases to ingredients. The words were essential gateways; without them, my tongue was useless.

Or maybe I was just afraid. My palate could handle a challenge, my psyche—fragile from failure—couldn't.

When I smelled the
su'ò'n nu'ó'ng
, or pork chops, however, everything changed. Marinated in garlic, sugar, fish sauce, and shallots, they gave off an intense aroma of fat and caramelization, one I couldn't turn away from. So I ordered takeout—
su'ò'n nu'ó'ng
on a mound of rice, with
rau mu'ó'ng
and sliced cucumbers—and carried the styrofoam box to my fifth-floor oasis. There I ate a perfect, and perfectly simple, meal in utter bliss.

The
co'm bình dân
around the corner became my standby, a go-to spot for good, unpretentious food to bring home. Usually, I'd get the
su'ò'n nu'ó'ng
, but sometimes I'd change it up. The shop also had squid, stuffed with pork and braised until soft, as well as crispy-fried fish. And you could get a fried egg on anything.

Eating on my patio was nice, but more and more I began to eat at the
co'm bình dân's
flimsy tables, and noticing how other customers ate—with chopsticks, with fork and spoon, or with a combination of the two. I studied the way they prepared dipping sauces, either by filling dishes with blackly pungent fish sauce and a few shreds of red chilies, or by pouring
nu'ò'c ch
m
, a mix of fish sauce, water, lime juice, and sugar, from the plastic pitchers placed on each table. (I'd thought it was iced tea—whoops!) People ate without much ceremony. This was good cooking, but just as importantly, it was a
refueling stop. As I watched and copied them, day after day, at the corner
co'm bình dân
and at others around the city, I didn't even realize that, at last, for the first time, I was eating like a regular person.

Nor did I realize that mastering this one meal would have collateral effects. That is, now that I'd locked down lunch, I could eat however I wanted the rest of the time. No longer did I have to feel guilty about not having
ph
for breakfast; a few hours after my strong morning coffee and fresh croissants—delicious legacies of French colonialism—I'd be feasting on cheap pork chops.

And with that lunch literally under my belt, I could experiment at dinner, whether that meant testing dosas at the southern Indian restaurant that had just opened downtown, partying in the Siberian Hunting Lodge room of the overwrought Russian restaurant, or eating braised snails and grilled mussels with coconut cream on the oil-slicked floor of a converted auto garage near the Saigon River. Whether these meals turned out delicious or dull, authentic or artificial, I knew that the next day around noon I'd be eating a people's lunch.

There was, however, one casualty of my newfound cultural adeptness. Now that I better understood lunch, the restaurant that served sugarcane eel no longer fit into my new eating life. In that year I spent in Vietnam, I never returned. The
lu'o'n nu'ó'ng mía
, so fixed in my memory, seems like a heat-induced hallucination, almost as illusory as the man with the Uzi. Except it was real, as real as the charcoal smoke and caramelizing pork vapor that still billow forth from the
co'm bình dân
on Bui Vien Street, on a thousand other streets throughout Saigon, and wherever regular folks gather to eat.

I
n late 2011, I was working in my office in Brooklyn when I received some interesting news. Hugo Luján, a fifty-year-old Argentine medical researcher and editor of the book
Giardia: A Model Organism
, was perfecting a vaccine for giardiasis.

“Yeah, we are close, very close,” Dr. Luján told me from Buenos Aires when I called. “In fact, we have a vaccine that is now—it has been tested not only in laboratory animals but also in dogs, and cats, and bovine, which are the animals more close to humans that can be infected by giardia. And our vaccine is, in fact, the first one that is completely effective against any parasite.”

The problem with developing a giardia vaccine, Dr. Luján explained, is something called antigen variation. Giardia, he said, may look like a primitive creature, but it functions in quite a complex way. When a giardia cell attaches to the lining of your intestine, it does so using a specific protein code on its surface. Taking antibiotics essentially disrupts that code so that the bacteria can't get a grip and is flushed away. But giardia doesn't have just one code, Dr. Luján said, it has roughly two hundred of them. His innovation was to puzzle out every single possible code.

“From this organism we collected, we purified the two hundred variants, and that is the formulation of our vaccine,” he said. “So this is the first time in which antigen variation had been disrupted in any organism, and if we can vaccinate with all the possible variants, you are protected then. You won't need a treatment that has side effects.”

I wasn't entirely sure how to react. For fifteen years I'd suffered the affections of this awful protozoan. I'd learned to recognize its symptoms and to handle the physical and psychological discomfort. Sometimes I merely persevered, other times I sought medication, usually Cipro (recommended by my physician in New York), but sometimes metronidazole or its cousin tinidazole. Four or five days of treatment, and I'd be better. In 2005, I'd even discovered a fast-track treatment: A 2,000-milligram megadose of Fasigyn, a brand-name version of tinidazole, would—I was assured by a Cambodia-based friend who'd been sicker than I ever had—eradicate giardiasis within twenty-four hours. He was not wrong: Ever since, at the first signs of giardiasis (some unusual gas, a proto-diarrhetic loosening), I've downed those pills, avoided alcohol, and woken up cured.

More important, giardia had taught me that the delight of eating came with risks, that no market taco or icy lemonade was entirely safe, but that the risks were worth the delight—always. A giardia vaccine, however, would mean a life of eating without consequences, and that felt far too easy. I liked the fact that I'd gotten sick and gotten better, that I'd survived my mistakes and emerged, if not more cautious, then at least humbler. I was a human being, and I had my weaknesses. And because I had weaknesses, I had a life worth living.