The Turk Who Loved Apples (7 page)

Or perhaps just lingering ignorance, for I really should have known better—this had all actually happened before, in the fall of 2006, a few months after I survived Kyrgyzstan. I'd gone on assignment with my friend Michael Park to Jost Van Dyke, a tiny island in the British Virgin Islands, and within minutes of arriving, we'd settled into a rickety beachside bar for a late lunch, a beer, and a cup or two of local rum. As happens in the Caribbean, we soon wound up participating in a bar-wide argument—they called it a “discussion”—that ranged from who was worse, Saddam Hussein or Idi Amin (“Idi Amin ate children,” I declared), to one man's rant about, as Michael later put it, “how violence against all white people was justified because of the area's history of institutionalized anti-black racism or something.”

I don't recall the precise details of Michael's response to this, but apparently it included the word
ignorant
. The gentleman's response was predictable—or would have been predictable, had Michael or I known what we were doing. He was angry—rum-drunk and fighting angry—and things might have escalated to actual fisticuffs had not someone stepped in and calmed things down on both sides. (Michael, too, has temper issues.)

That peacemaker, oddly enough, was me. Why don't I remember this—what I did, what I said? Why is that not as vivid to me as the mistakes I made? Why do the memories of failure, pain, and humiliation nag with undying ferocity, while the successes—my successes, the moments when I performed admirably—fade into oblivion?

I can only imagine that this is some self-preservation protocol, a subconscious subroutine that reminds me how fallible I am, on the off-chance that overconfidence—or even mere confidence—will bring about my end. I am probably not quite as ignorant as I claim
here to be, but I will never allow myself to think otherwise. At most, I will acknowledge a kind of Rumsfeldian progress: I have left the land of the unknown unknown and entered the realm of the known unknown. I do not know what I am doing, or what will happen next, and accepting those limitations has brought me incredible, unexpected joy.

In Kyrgyzstan, the horse budged, and Bakut and I descended the slopes into an apricot grove fed by a natural spring, where we lounged in the shady grasses, ate almost-ripe fruit, and slaked our daylong thirst.

On the flight to Tunisia via Paris, I breathed the clean air of an Airbus A380, drank red wine from little bottles, and stretched my legs as much as I could.

At the Saigon Café, I poured my bottle of beer into a glass filled with a fast-melting chunk of questionable ice, and wondered what might happen tomorrow.

H
o Chi Minh City had never been a particularly quiet place. In the first half of the twentieth century, Saigon—as it was then known—was the bustling business heart of French colonial Indochina. In the 1960s and '70s, it was the hard-partying base of the American-supported South Vietnamese government. And by the time I'd arrived, the city was buzzing harder than ever, aswirl with new motorbikes, construction crews, and tourists gawking at how this nominally communist stronghold of seven million was transforming itself into a capitalist powerhouse.

The only time Ho Chi Minh City ever seemed to calm down was just after noon, when everyone was either eating lunch or post-prandially napping through the midday heat. For an hour or two, you could hear electric fans chopping at the still air, you could flip through today's
Viet Nam News
or last week's
Time
magazine, you
could breathe and relax and think. This respite from the perpetual chaos is probably the only reason that one day, two weeks after I landed in Vietnam, as I sat awaiting my own lunch at a downtown restaurant, I noticed the man with the gun.

He was across the street, emerging from one storefront into the brilliant clarity of the sunshine. He was Vietnamese, and maybe in his thirties or early forties. He wore sunglasses. And at his side, in one of his hands, he held an Uzi—or what I, who knew submachine guns only from movies and music, recognized as an Uzi. Then he disappeared into the next storefront. If the street had been full of 100cc Honda bikes, as it had been an hour earlier, I would've missed him entirely.

It was a very odd sight, especially in a country as tightly controlled as Vietnam, and I wanted to ask someone—anyone—about it. Was the man a gangster? A cop? This was a mystery that needed solving.

Then my food arrived. I hadn't known quite what to order, but something on the menu caught my attention:
lu'o'n nu'ó'ng mía
. A variation on
chạo tôm nu'ó'ng
, the popular dish of shrimp paste wrapped around sugarcane and grilled over charcoal, this was made instead with freshwater eel—held in place with a chive tied into a bow—and as I bit in, I fell in love. The eel was rich and oily, caramelized from the charcoal heat, infused with garlic, fish sauce, and the raw sweetness of the cane. And the cane itself, when I gnawed it, released a burst of sugary juice tinged with the meaty slick of the eel.

This, I knew, was what I couldn't get back at Chez Trinh, the only Vietnamese restaurant in Williamsburg. This was why I'd picked up stakes and moved to Vietnam—for the food. The eel, in fact, was so great that I wanted to tell strangers about it, to turn to my neighbors and tell them—in English if they were tourists, in pidgin Vietnamese if not—that it justified everything.

But I had no neighbors. I was alone in this restaurant—alone and confused. After all, this seemed to be a quality spot; the eel was
proof of that. So where was everyone? Or, really, what was I doing wrong?

It was a question I asked myself often in those first months in Vietnam. I'd told everyone I'd moved there for its cuisine—the grilled meats, the startling herbs and crunchy vegetables, and, of course,
ph
, the aromatic beef noodle soup that is the national dish. And it was true I liked Vietnamese food. But liking a cuisine is not the same thing as understanding how to eat it—how to order it, and where, and when, and why. And I understood none of it. I'd eat
ph
for lunch, for example, usually going to the famous (and overrated and overpriced) Pho Hoa Pasteur for a bowl and a few small, sweet bananas as dessert. But when I'd tell the students in my English classes about my lunches, they'd look at me quizzically. To them,
ph
was breakfast, not a major midday meal.