The Turk Who Loved Apples (8 page)

I'd protest, noting that plenty of Vietnamese people were at Pho Hoa Pasteur. And then my students would backtrack. Oh, sure, they'd say, you can eat any Vietnamese food anytime you want.
Không sao
—no problem.

But it was a problem, clearly. And I knew the roots of it. At a Vietnamese restaurant in America, like Chez Trinh, all kinds of foods would be served together—noodles, soups, stir-fry, spring rolls. But in Vietnam, restaurants would often be devoted to a single dish or set of dishes. Pho Hoa Pasteur sold
ph
, and no other noodle soups—no
h
ti
u mi
, no
bún riêu
, no
bánh canh
. If I wanted
g
i cu
n
—known in English as summer rolls, they're rice-paper packets stuffed with thin rice noodles, veggies, herbs, and pork or shrimp—I could get them, and other combinations of rice noodles, veggies, herbs, and pork or shrimp, at a hole-in-the-wall behind the grandiose Ben Thanh Market.

Adapting to this was harder than I'd expected. Knowing only a small subset of Vietnamese dishes, and speaking only a few words of Vietnamese, I didn't even know what to commit myself to at one
of these single-specialty restaurants. And though I knew I should just blindly walk in, point to whatever I saw on other tables, and enjoy the result, fear and shyness kept me at bay. Is there anything more alienating than not knowing how to eat?

And “knowing how to eat” was a big deal. That was actually how the question was phrased in Vietnamese:
Anh bi
t ăn cá không?
meant “Can you eat fish?” but translated as “Do you know [how] to eat fish?” It was hard for me to escape the implication: Maybe I
don't
know how to eat fish, or anything else, for that matter.

Which is not to say I wasn't eating, or eating well. One night, I found my way to a restaurant that served nothing but
cua
, or crab:
ch
giò cua
(fried crab spring rolls),
mi
n cua
(glass noodles stir-fried with crab), and
cua l
t chiên
(deep-fried soft-shell crab, served with lettuce and herbs), a revelation to this young man who'd grown up not far from Virginia's crab lands. And even the second-rate
ph
at Pho Hoa Pasteur was light-years better than what I'd had in America.