The Turk Who Loved Apples (5 page)

Then you figure out what the story will cost to report—or really, how you can do it as cheaply as possible, since magazine and newspaper budgets are always tight—and when you can do it, and the editor has to see if it conflicts with any other stories in the pipeline, and then, finally, the editor says yes, and you sign a contract that specifies how much you can spend and how little you'll be paid—and then off you go to Tokyo!

More or less, that's how I got myself there in December 2009, and—after scouring Web postings and corralling Tokyo's ramen bloggers—I spent a week eating four bowls of ramen a day: pork bone ramen, miso ramen, cheese ramen. That was a pretty damn delicious trip. And I couldn't have done it, either the on-the-ground reporting or the actual writing of the story, without intense preparation.

But the hell with intense preparation! Maybe I was just getting old, but I seemed to remember a time, long before I became a travel writer, when I not only didn't prepare but couldn't prepare, when I didn't have the tools to plan ahead because those tools hadn't been invented yet. And yet those adventures seemed more real to me, more all-encompassing, more life-changing, more objectively important. I looked back on them nostalgically, knowing they'd made me the traveler I am today even though they seemed to have happened to an entirely different person. In short, I found myself facing questions that all travelers face, but now on a deeper, more existential level: How did I get from where I started to here? And how do I get back there again?

M
y first memory of travel is a simple one: I am four years old, or maybe five or six, sitting in the backseat of the family station wagon, looking out the window. It is raining, and fairly hard, too. Hard enough that the raindrops defy gravity, streaking up and rolling across the window just slowly enough that I can follow their
progress—trace their wobbly trails—until they dead-end in the slat of vertical rubber. Then I drag my gaze back to find a new droplet.

Where are we Grosses going? In my memory, it's always to my paternal grandparents' house, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, about a two-hour trip from our home in Amherst, Massachusetts. Two hours is a long time for a little kid, made longer by the abstractedness of the journey. What are Amherst and Bridgeport? How are they connected geographically? The fact is, I don't know, and I don't know enough to even ask the questions. There are steps I remember are necessary to take. We will cross the Connecticut River via the Coolidge Bridge. At some point, we will drive down something called the Merritt Parkway. Finally, we will turn onto Dixon Street, whose Waspy name always seems so proper and stately that it's almost a joke that people called Gross live there.

And that's it: the road, the rain, the minor details that drizzled into my consciousness, the sense that we would begin one place and end at another, and that if I were relatively patient, I would be rewarded with hugs and gifts from my grandmother. Beyond that, I knew—and expected—nothing. This was how journeys went. You started out at one place, and ended in another, and spent most of the time in between in a state of semi-boredom that constantly threatened to veer into fidgety, unrealistic anticipation of imminent delight.

That was how my perception of travel began, and for a very long time it remained unchanged. When my father, a historian specializing in Revolutionary War–era Concord, Massachusetts, first took me abroad—to Denmark and England at the age of almost-eight—I had no map or guidebook to prepare me, just a sense that, somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic, a paradise of Lego bricks and unseen
Dr. Who
episodes awaited me. And perhaps that was all I needed, for nothing of importance that took place on that adventure could have been predicted in a book.

And it was an important trip, maybe the most important of my life. The Matt Gross who arrived in Copenhagen one afternoon in the summer of 1982 was a strange, nearly feral creature: messy curly hair neither tamed nor touched by brush or comb; tough dungarees with grass stains at the knee; blue eyes huge and unblinking, like an alien. And, always at his side, a crocheted yellow polyester blanket, softened by years of love, that provided a sense of security, particularly when paired with a thumb in the mouth. Picture Linus from
Peanuts
, crossed with Pig-Pen.

The first thing this Matt did, upon arriving in his hotel room, was look out the window and spot the glowing red neon sign of a bookstore.
Books!
This was a treat. He hadn't really known where to start exploring, or what to do in the days before he and his father would make the trip to Legoland, in Billund (wherever that was), but now here was a bookstore. He could read, and pretty well, too:
Encyclopedia Brown, Dr. Who
novelizations, Tolkien. No surprise for the child of an editor and a history professor, really. So when he saw the bookstore, he leapt with excitement to show his father.

Only, there was a problem. A tricky problem that Dad didn't know precisely how to explain, or rather, he knew how but wasn't sure Matt would understand. And so he just said it.

“Matt, that's an
adult
bookstore.”

Did Matt understand? He did, somehow. It had something to do with sex, whatever that was, with a world that he'd sensed existed but that had been, until now, beyond him. Well, it was still beyond him, but here, on his first day in Denmark, it was closer. He could see it, he could be told where it was, and though he was denied entry, this one step, this knowledge was enough. He'd inched closer. He laughed, I imagine, and his father laughed with him. It was funny, that he could understand even though he didn't really understand. And besides, he'd brought other books to read anyway.

From there, the revelations and significant moments began to flow, seemingly at a rate of one per day. At Tivoli Gardens, the grand amusement park at the center of Copenhagen, Matt attempted to eat a fast-food burger from a kiosk—but rejected it as disgusting, inedible. His father, unbelieving, cajoled the tearful boy to finish until, at last, he himself bit into the foul gray thing. Into the trash it went; they dined on french fries instead. For the first time he could remember, Matt had been right about something in the grown-up realm: taste. And soon he was learning more. At Legoland, he had his initial plate of the heretofore exotic spaghetti bolognese, and liked it, enough that the dish became his mainstay, the food by which he could judge a restaurant, and on which he could rely in the absence of compelling alternatives. He was moving forward.

Although at times, it did not feel like moving forward. After a few days in Denmark, Matt and his father departed, by train and ferry, for England. It was an unbelievable journey—the train actually drove
onto the ferry
, Matt was stunned to learn—and despite the rocky seas and attendant nausea, he managed to play Centipede in the ferry lounge well enough to win a free game, another breakthrough. Once in England, however, Matt made a horrifying discovery: his blanket had vanished. Had he left it in Copenhagen? At Legoland? On the train? The only thing certain was that it was gone. But Matt did not cry, as he had over the Tivoli Gardens burger. Tears were of no use anymore, and besides, he was almost eight.

In the years since, I've often wondered about the disappearance of my blanket. It seems almost too perfect, in the context of this overly symbolic growing-up tale, that the most visible symbol of my babyhood—that frayed, ultrasoft blanket whose Cheerio-sized ringlets I can, thirty years later, still imagine against my bearded cheek—would go missing. My father, I've long suspected, must have removed it from our luggage, but whenever I've cornered him, he's pleaded innocent. I guess I have to believe him.

T
he point is that you can never really know what's going to happen when you travel. Or at least I never did, not when I set out on my heavy blue BMX bicycle to roam the hills of Amherst; not when, partly at my behest, my dad took a new teaching job at William & Mary and moved us all to Williamsburg, Virginia, in whose high school I was the only Jew, and a Yankee, and a skateboarder back when skateboarding was anything but cool; not when I chose to study math at Johns Hopkins, having visited the campus for a day and been so impressed by the focus with which students walked from quad to quad that I forgot that laziness and improvisation, not intensity and labor, were my natural modes of being. I was, for so much of my early life, either uninformed or ill-informed.

And I didn't care. The risk was what motivated me, though for a long time I couldn't have articulated that. The possibility of failure—of getting lost, hurt, ostracized—made the eventual successes that much sweeter, although again, this was an unconscious process. I'd hate for anyone to think I was some preternatural daredevil courting death, or humiliation, willy-nilly. No, I was the opposite—so unaware of what awaited me on the other side that it was only once I'd discovered what dangers lurked that I realized how lucky I'd been to survive them. That discovery, however, often came too late—or sometimes never.

Which is how I arrived in Vietnam: twenty-two, clueless, and lucky. From the air, Vietnam seemed instantly different from anywhere I'd been before. It wasn't the rice paddies or farming villages—images I recognized from movies and TV—but the trees. As the Air France jet coasted in toward a landing at Tan Son Nhat Airport, the trees looked tight and nubby, gnarled like broccoli florets, a shorter, denser carpet of foliage than I'd ever seen elsewhere. I don't know why this struck me so strongly. I'd never particularly cared about trees before. But the maples and birches and pines of North America had insinuated themselves so deeply into my consciousness that every
other kind of tree cover would instantly signify not just difference or newness but indelible foreignness.

This hadn't been in my Slovenian guidebook: the very
trees
will look different. Nor had anything else, from the Pepsi logos enveloping the shuttle buses that greeted the plane on the tarmac to the MTV playing on video screens throughout the terminal. These, at least, were easier to integrate into my consciousness—because
of course
this communist country making its first steps toward Western-style capitalism would immediately latch onto pop culture and fast food. I could stand back and safely reflect on the irony. I knew that pose.

Not so with the trees, or with the reality of Vietnam once I left the airport. Le Thi Thanh, a petite literature professor at Ho Chi Minh City Open University, a kind of community college, met me at the gate with Phuoc, one of her students, and we hustled into a taxi for the thirty-minute drive into the city. What I felt, in addition to the rainy-season heat and humidity, was the nearly overwhelming closeness. The streets were narrow, jammed with motorbikes and bicycles that darted and wove around the cars and pedestrians and each other, a writhing sea of transportation bound by rows of numberless concrete shop houses, all four meters wide, with businesses on their ground floors (“Product Consumption Store” was the English name of one) and living quarters above. Tangled skeins of electrical wiring hung between poles. A smell I eventually concluded was overripe fruit and exhaust filtered through the taxi's windows. The Vietnamese words printed on signs and billboards may have used a modified Latin alphabet, but I couldn't read a thing, and could barely muster a chuckle at phrases that should have had me cackling (e.g., “Mỹ Dung”). The city was loud—every motorbike honked constantly—and dirty, and while I was appalled by what I saw, I could also feel an unfamiliar energy pulsing through the streets, an activity so furious and ambitious it
both invigorated and frightened me, so much so that Ms. Thanh, Phuoc, and I barely spoke on the drive.

And then we arrived. The Lucy Hotel, just off Pham Ngu Lao Street at the edge of the backpacker quarter, looked not much different from its neighbors: narrow, seven stories tall, the sidewalk its driveway. It was, Ms. Thanh explained, what was known as a minihotel, a residential building that catered to both tourists and long-term visitors; the neighborhood was full of them. Yet even from the outside, the Lucy betrayed subtle signs of sophistication. Its concrete façade looked freshly painted, and a movable white picket fence separated the entrance from the terra-cotta-tiled parking area. A door opened for me. I walked in.

Inside was cool and spacious. Tiled floor. High ceilings. Water trickled in a fountain somewhere. A willowy teenage girl practiced piano, the notes echoing gently off the walls. I sat down in a lounge chair, its frame cast iron, its pillows fresh and soft and linen-white, and was handed water by a thin, kind, middle-aged woman who spoke excellent French. Maybe I was exhausted from the long journey, but I couldn't quite believe where in this New Vietnam I'd wound up—an oasis of peace and order. A somewhat illusory one, I would later learn, but for the moment that illusion was enough.

My room lay at the very top of the building, a thirteen-by-thirteen-foot square with a queen-size bed, a writing desk, an electric fan, a spacious bathroom (no hot water, alas, but it was 90 degrees outside), a large closet, and windows overlooking the sprawl of Saigon, as everybody seemed to call it—a ragged field of ochre buildings and TV antennas in which, if I looked carefully, I could pick out the aging, still-elegant curves of a French-colonial building or the bright fresh layers of paint on a Buddhist temple. The room was not exactly chic, but it had been put together by someone with an eye for aesthetics: Everything was either black or white—no garish colors, harsh fabrics, or plastic kitsch. Even better, I had maid service,
provided by Thuy and Duyen, two impossibly sweet-faced girls from the countryside who, giggling shyly, would scoop my sweaty clothes off the floor and wash them every day.