The Turk Who Loved Apples (19 page)

This was intriguing. In college, I'd been a serious movie geek: film society, student shorts—the whole mid-nineties cinéaste schtick. But I knew movies, and in a way I figured few others in Vietnam did, and I hatched a plan to exploit that knowledge.

A week later, I'd quit all my jobs—to no one's real surprise, it seemed—and was on a Vietnam Airlines plane to Hanoi. At my side was Ms. Thanh, who had an academic conference to attend in the capital. Her visit gave me the perfect opportunity to combine job hunting and sightseeing; if the former didn't work out, well, I was going to do the latter anyway. For the next few days, she and I rode cyclos down tree-shrouded lanes (Ms. Thanh didn't trust motorbikes), strolled past the cafés around Hoan Kiem Lake, ate remarkably good vegetarian “duck,” and toured the Ho Chi Minh Museum, whose exhibits included a replica of Uncle Ho's one-room cottage and a selection of industrial products manufactured in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The electric fan behind one display window was, I noticed, identical to the fan blowing humid air in front of it.

One day after lunch, I took a break and visited the offices of the
Viet Nam News
, in one of the gray concrete buildings, stained with damp, which contrasted so sadly with the capital's surviving French colonial structures. I climbed a few flights of stairs to the newsroom, a wide-open space where young Vietnamese and a few older foreigners were bustling around computer terminals. It looked, it felt like a real paper—the first I'd ever visited.

I introduced myself and asked to speak to Nguyen Cong Khuyen, the editor in chief, and was led over to a thin, distinguished man with smart glasses and a sharp black mustache. In careful but perfect English, he asked what I was doing here. And I told him—about my background, about my love of film, about the festival, about my desire to write. I handed him a résumé. I explained that I hadn't come empty-handed: I'd brought some fodder for Dragon Tales, the weekly humor column written by one of the paper's expatriate staff; it was a copy of a hilariously mistranslated menu from one of Ho Chi Minh City's most expensive French restaurants. Dishes included such delights as “Brains to the citrus fruit” and “Pave of wolf in his sauce Dutch.”

“Okay,” Mr. Khuyen said calmly and quietly. “Our features editor has just quit. You can have her page.”

Features page? Sure, why not? And so, like that, I became a newspaper columnist. A night or two later, after Ms. Thanh had flown back south, I attended my first film festival screening:
Aguirre: Wrath of God
, the Werner Herzog masterpiece in which Klaus Kinski plays an increasingly unhinged conquistador in search of El Dorado. On grainy video. Without subtitles. In a mostly empty theater whose air-conditioning was set somewhere between “walk-in freezer” and “Arctic whaling station.” The result, as I hurriedly wrote a couple of hours later in an attempt to fill up my page (
my page!
), was absurdity—a frozen theater playing an insane and unintelligible (but awesome) movie to a bare handful of shivering weirdos.

For two and a half weeks, this was my approach—to write not only about the movies themselves (which were playing only once or twice) but about the weird delight of watching them in this foreign context. One afternoon, I found myself in a theater full of hyperactive Vietnamese eleven-year-olds who, when they discovered me, rushed up to practice a single sentence in English: “Give me money!” Another day, another theater, I sat down next to a small, round eighty-something-year-old Vietnamese man bundled up in vest, jacket, and beret. He and I were seated next to each other, and when we began a conversation in French, I had to tell him repeatedly I was American—whether because he couldn't hear well or simply couldn't believe it, I don't know. Then the old man reached into his jacket pocket, removed a small notebook, and handed it to me. I opened it to find page after page of French poetry, written in a neat hand. I picked a poem at random and as I read through it realized: this was serious stuff, precise in its rhythm and diction. Then I flipped the page, reached the end, and saw how he'd signed it: “—Charles Baudelaire.” The whole notebook, it turned out, was transcribed, with contributions from every major French poet. For a moment I
was disappointed—but only for a moment. Okay, so he hadn't written his own poems, but his dedication to poetry, his obvious love of the language, and his attachment to this foreign culture were in some ways more impressive, more touching, more beautifully sad.

Every evening I'd rush back to the newsroom to pound out my reviews and lay out my page. Occasionally, I'd supplement the reviews with reported sidebars—about how ticketless foreigners were often let in but paying Vietnamese customers turned away, or an interview with an Italian director, conducted in a three-way mishmash of English, French, and Italian. I loved the adrenaline rush of working late at night, fighting the approaching deadline.

Frankly, I don't know if the writing was any good, but it served a purpose. Most of the time, the
Viet Nam News
was heavy on the Viet Nam part, light on the News. Official visits by minor foreign functionaries, dubious agricultural statistics, abstract health initiatives—these were the paper's meat and potatoes, not the kind of hard reporting (I thought) the country needed. “Ca Mau Province Gets New Tractor” was the joke headline I'd use to convey the tedium of the paper's subject matter, and it's not far off from a real one I read today: “Children and Mothers Given Vitamin A and Iron on Micro-Nutrient Day.”

In this context, the mildly humorous writings of a young, movie-mad American—and, moreover, a native speaker of English!—were a balm, something that the paper's expatriate audience could actually read, beginning to end, and understand. So what if it was rushed, juvenile, or at times inaccurate? It was at least a break from socialist propaganda and a glimpse of the strange fun lurking under official surfaces.

Occasionally, those official surfaces thickened and hardened. One movie I loved was
Back to Back, Face to Face
, an obscure Chinese comedy in which the acting director of a local cultural center fails, due to corruption, cronyism, and bureaucracy, to officially take over the organization. When Mr. Khuyen read my review, however, he
asked me to tone it down—the governmental system stymieing the movie's protagonist was awfully similar, he said, to that of Vietnam. But if I praised the movie in less universalist terms—this particular fictional theater troupe, not the Chinese communist bureaucracy—all would be okay. So I did. His paper, his country, his call. Also, I liked Mr. Khuyen's quiet, fair attitude, and would have hated for him to get in trouble with the paper's censors, who allegedly gathered each morning to go over every word of every story—an after-the-fact strategy to encourage self-censorship.

And, naturally, I would hate to lose this gig that was putting money in my pocket. The
Viet Nam News
paid ten cents a word for articles—barely a tenth of American standards, but since I was writing roughly a thousand words a day, every day for more than two weeks, the cash was building up faster than I could spend it. The hotel I was staying in, on one of Hanoi's ancient 36 Streets, cost $8 a day, and the Halida beers and fat burgers at the Roxy, a dark, funky theater-turned-nightclub, didn't add much more. By the end of the festival, I was being handed thick white envelopes full of cash—enough so that, when I went back to America for a brief visit after Christmas, I had more than $800 to spend on whatever I wanted.

Finally! I had money. Finally! I didn't have to depend on my family for support. Finally! I was doing work that I loved, that I had some measure of talent for, and that gave me a certain status in the eyes of my peers. I wasn't just a college grad bumming around Vietnam—I was a writer, a working journalist, living off the words I put together.

When I returned to Ho Chi Minh City after the winter break, Vietnam suddenly became much more manageable. Now I was working at the local bureau of the
Viet Nam News
, copyediting stories alongside my frenemy Ted Ross, the annoying New Yorker from the Bodhi Tree gang. The job was amazing: I'd show up every day at 2 p.m. and attempt to turn news stories—written in Vietnamese, then translated into pseudo-English by the paper's Vietnamese staff—into readable
prose. I'd cut, edit, and rejigger the stories, line by line, trying hard to figure out not only which facts were, in fact, facts but which were relevant to the story. Once, I reduced a four-paragraph story, about the failure of an experimental oyster farm, to a single sentence, retaining only the original headline: “Oysters Die a Lot.” (Oddly, it did not run the next day.) In articles like that, it was as if the original writer had just crammed in as many points of data as possible, maybe to stretch out the piece, maybe because a publicist had paid him or her to do so.

This happened all the time, my Vietnamese colleagues explained to me. A press conference would be held to discuss rice exports or a new hotel project, and the publicists would duly pay off the reporters—100,000 dong here, 200,000 there. This was essential. It was how you got coverage from journalists whose government-set salaries were unlivably low: $40 a month, $60 if they were lucky.

And many of the journalists at
Viet Nam News
were people with long, serious careers. Mr. Minh had been the foreign desk editor at
Tuoi Tre
, one of the country's top papers, until a traffic accident landed him in the hospital; while he was recuperating,
Tuoi Tre
fired him. Mr. Hoanh, a good-humored fellow who every evening changed into a leather motorcycle outfit to ride his Harley home, had lived and studied overseas; he'd returned to Saigon to visit his family just weeks before the South Vietnamese government collapsed in April 1975. It seemed like a tragedy, but he'd laugh as he'd tell the story.

Naturally, not every employee was so illustrious. One young, pretty woman seemed to do nothing but gossip with friends all day—because, rumor had it, the head of the Vietnam News Agency, the national wire service, was her uncle.

But good for her! Ted and I, too, appreciated the leisurely aspects of the job. Between edits we'd all retrieve little pots of fresh yogurt from the fridge in the break room, and sometimes, as we struggled to reshape awkward copy, one of our colleagues would set a can of beer next to our keyboards. Beer! By 5 p.m., we'd be finished anyway,
and it was time to have a glass of snake wine—strong rice liquor from a glass vat filled with dried cobras—with our bureau chief, Nguyen Tien Le, a kind man with a thick black mustache and a voice so soft we could barely hear it above the air-conditioning.

For my efforts at the paper, I was paid a salary of $700 a month—crisp hundred-dollar bills in a white envelope—with the standard ten cents per word for any additional restaurant or movie reviews I wrote. I wasn't rich, certainly not compared with the admen at Q Bar, but I could, at last, upgrade my room at the Lucy to the air-conditioned one with the patio. Beyond that, though, my lifestyle changed little. I could splurge on meals if I wanted, but I ate Vietnamese food whenever possible. Buying a motorbike and a mobile phone would have been nice, but they weren't strictly necessary, so I rented the former and did without the latter. If I left town, I took buses and slept in the cheaper (but never the cheapest) hotels. I didn't have health insurance, but I was twenty-two—why would I need it? Above all, I was simply satisfied with what I had, as if my now-comfortable circumstances were a magical gift, a secular blessing.

And now that I was, officially, a journalist, more work came my way. A colleague passed word that
Billboard
was looking for a stringer, and I landed myself a couple of stories, about the impending U.S.-Vietnam copyright treaty and a new CD production facility. Another business magazine launched in Ho Chi Minh City, and I sold it a story about
co'm bình dân
, the “people's food” restaurants. I e-mailed an editor at
Might
, a U.S. magazine started by Dave Eggers, to pitch an article on Vietnamese ear-cleaning; he said it sounded great but the publication was going out of business. With Ted, Douglas, and a couple of other creative expats, I started the Saigon Writers Workshop, which met each week to discuss (or destroy) the short stories and novels we considered our true calling.

My life was nearly ideal. I woke up late, read the
International Herald Tribune
(and did the crossword) over black coffee and fresh croissants, met people for lunch, napped, worked a few hours, and
spent my nights eating, drinking, and exploring the city with an increasingly close circle of friends. I had renewed my study of Vietnamese at what I dubbed Đai H
c Đuong Ph
—the University of the Streets. I danced until morning on a barge floating down the Saigon River, and I was planning to shoot a sixteen-millimeter short film, about love and mopeds, called “Honda Dreams.”