A Cook's Tour (10 page)

     At the beginning of a fierce compulsion to eat everything in sight, I bounce around like a hungry pinball from stall to stall. A woman crouches by a doorway with a wok of oil sizzling over a few coals. Crisping on the surface are a few tiny little birds, head, feet, wings intact, their entrails bursting yellow, billowing out through golden fried bellies. They look good. They smell good. I buy one, pick it up by the feet, the smiling woman urging me on, letting me know I’m doing it right. I wolf the thing down, gnawing it right up to its feet, beak, brain, tiny crunchy bones and all. Delicious. And again, so fresh. Everything, everywhere, is fresh, astoundingly fresh. And not a refrigerator in sight.

     Another woman beckons me over and offers me a slice of jackfruit. I accept and offer her money. She declines, simply watches, smiling as I eat. I am loving this. I am really, really loving it. I order a spring roll at another stall, watch as the owner wraps freshly hacked cooked prawn, mint, basil, lotus root, and sprouts in rice paper, then eat that and order a shrimp kebab, a sort of shrimp cake wrapped around a stick of sugarcane and grilled. It’s a wonderland of food here. Tiny intricately wrapped and shaped
banh
– triangular bundles of rice cake and pork inside carefully tied banana leaves – dangle from stalls, like the hanging salami and cheese you see in Italian markets. I try some. Smashing. There’s food everywhere, inside the market, outside on the street; anyone not selling or cooking food seems to be eating, kneeling or squatting against walls, on the floor, in the street, tucking into something that looks wonderful.

     I leave the market and head toward one of the many little coffee joints, picking my way through the stream of motorbikes and cyclos, past more food vendors, men and women carrying yokes, a pot of
pho
hanging from one end, utensils and garnishes from the other. Everything I see, I want to put in my mouth. Every pot of soup or noodles over a few sticks of burning wood is fresher and better-looking than any stuff in a New York market.

     Sitting down on a tiny plastic stool, maybe a foot off the ground, I order coffee. I feel short of breath from the rapidly building heat, the humidity, all those delicious, intoxicating smells pulling me in every direction at once. An empty coffee cup and a banged-up strainer over a tin receptacle hits my wobbly little table. The grounds strain slowly, drip by drip, into the lower container. When it’s all gone through, I pour my coffee into my cup and take a sip. It’s simply the best coffee I’ve ever had: thick, rich, strong, and syrupy, like the dregs at the bottom of a glass of chocolate milk. I’m instantly hooked. The proprietor, a toothless old woman, has a suggestion. She brings out another coffee, this time with a tall glass of ice and a can of condensed milk. When the coffee has filtered through, it’s poured over the ice. Mingling with the milk below, it’s a slow, strangely mesmerizing process, delightful to watch and even better to drink. As the black coffee dribbles slowly through and around the ice cubes, swirling gently in dark-on-white wisps through the milk, I feel Vietnam doing the same thing to my brain. I’m in love. I am absolutely over-the top gonzo for this country and everything in it. I want to stay forever.

     Are there any more beautiful women? They drive by on their motorbikes in tight white silk
ao dais
, slit to the tops of their thighs, black silk pants underneath, driving gloves that reach beyond their elbows, white surgical masks covering their faces, bug-eyed dark sunglasses, and conical straw hats. Not an inch of flesh is visible, and I’m totally enamored with them. Sitting on my stool drinking iced coffee and watching them, I feel a twinge of pain for Greene’s hero in
The Quiet American
, so hopelessly in love with a young Vietnamese girl who can never and will never return his affections in kind. It’s a paradigm for the whole American experience here in some ways. Poor LBJ, shaking his head, unable to understand that that little Uncle Ho fella over there, offered a badly needed dam and hydroelectric system for the Red River Delta – in return for selling out his dream of a united country – turned him down flat. All those well-meaning Green Beanies in the early days of the war, the would-be Lord Jims, warrior priests, idealistic CIA officers, AID specialists, medics and mercenaries, hurt, wounded, confused that these people just wouldn’t love them back the way they thought they deserved to be. We took out our lover’s pique later, by sending in the marines.

     I sit there for a long time, sipping iced coffee, smelling motorbike exhaust, freshly baked baguettes (they’re really good here), burning joss, the occasional waft from the Saigon River, thinking back to Madame Dai and my first night in town.

     ‘
Les Français
,’ she began, listing all the regimes she’s lived through, ‘
les Japonais, les Français
–
encore!
–
puis les Américains, le Président Diem, les Américains, Thieu, les communistes
.’ She smiled, shrugged, casting a skeptical glance at my translator, Linh, who, as Madame Dai was well aware, would later have to report this conversation to the ominously named People’s Committee.

     ‘Le Président Thieu wanted to put me in jail,’ she said, ‘but he . . . could not. I was too . . .
populaire
. His cabal said I would become a hero in jail.’ The first female lawyer in Vietnam under the South Vietnamese government (now referred to as the ‘Puppet Regime’), she saw her law practice shut down when the North Vietnamese rolled into town. Eventually, she was allowed to reopen – as a café, still operating, as she does today, out of her musty law offices, the walls lined with law books, memorabilia, and photographs of better days. She’s on some kind of governmental advisory committee, she explained, which was perhaps why it was okay for me to visit. She still entertains visiting dignitaries from the West.

     ‘I love to flirt with communism,’ she said, giggling and goosing Linh. ‘The “Government of National Reconciliation,” ’ she scoffed. ‘Reconcile what? I was never angry!’

     She served a choice of two menus to guests – most of them visiting Westerners: French or Vietnamese. I hadn’t come here to eat escargots bourguignonne, so I chose Vietnamese. Madame Dai floated back into a rear kitchen, where a few loyal retainers were preparing a spread of
ban phong tom
(shrimp crackers),
goi sen
(lotus salad with chicken and shrimp),
cha goi zoua
(fried spring rolls),
ba la lop
(beef wrapped in mint leaves),
com duoung chau
(Saigonese rice with pork, egg, and green beans),
mang cua
(asparagus soup), a mint, pineapple and cucumber salad, and pork grilled over charcoal. The meal ended with crème caramel, an innocuous but delicious reminder of colonial days. Madame Dai was educated in France, and she led the conversation toward fond memories of cassoulets,
choucroutes, confit de canard
, clearly enjoying simply pronouncing the words after so long. Occasionally, she paused to put a finger to her lips, then delivered a tap on the table. ‘
Les meecrophones
,’ she stage-whispered, making sure that poor squirming Linh – who does not speak French and was not enjoying when we did – heard every word. ‘I am CIA?’ she asked sarcastically. ‘
Non
, I tell zem. I am KGB!’ Both acronyms made Linh sit upright with barely concealed alarm. If there’s anyone the Vietnamese hate, it’s the Russians. Apparently, after the war, a lot of their ‘advisers’ and technicians walked around the country like conquering heroes, pretending they’d won the war for the Vietnamese. They were rude. They were loud. They were – it is said – lousy tippers. ‘I love to flirt with ze communism,’ said Madame Dai for the second time. She involved me in a well-known Vietnamese joke, very popular in the seventies, during the period of ‘reeducation.’

     ‘What religion are you?’ she asked.

     ‘Uh . . . no religion,’ I said – clearly the right answer for the punch line.

     ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed with mock horror. ‘You are VC!’

     Even Linh laughed along with this. He’d heard it, too. At last, we left Madame Dai out in front of her café, a tiny figure in a black dress and stockings, sweeping away a few bits of litter with a straw whisk broom.

When I finally leave the market, the streets are dark, and I pass a few blocks where not a single electric light appears – only dark open storefronts and
coms
(fast-food eateries), broom closet-sized restaurants serving fish, meat, and rice for under a dollar, flickering candles barely revealing the silhouettes of seated figures. The tide of cyclists, motorbikes, and scooters has increased to an uninterrupted flow, a river that, given the slightest opportunity, diverts through automobile traffic, stopping it cold, spreads into tributaries that spill out over sidewalks, across lots, through filling stations. They pour through narrow openings in front of cars: young men, their girlfriends hanging on the back; families of four: mom, dad, baby, and grandma, all on a fragile, wobbly, underpowered motorbike; three people, the day’s shopping piled on a rear fender; women carrying bouquets of flapping chickens, gathered by their feet while youngest son drives and baby rests on the handlebars; motorbikes carrying furniture, spare tires, wooden crates, lumber, cinder blocks, boxes of shoes. Nothing is too large to pile onto or strap to a bike. Lone men in ragged clothes stand or sit by the roadsides, selling petrol from small soda bottles, servicing punctures with little patch kits and old bicycle pumps.

     The next morning, I’m right back at the market, where I have a healthy breakfast of
hot vin lon
, essentially a soft-boiled duck embryo, still in the shell, a half-formed beak and bits of dark crunchy matter buried in the partially cooked yolk and transluscent albumen. I eat it – but don’t exactly love it. It will not be replacing bialys on my breakfast table. I hear for the first time what will become a regular refrain in Vietnam, particularly when eating something that only a few days ago one would never have imagined putting in one’s mouth. While running my spoon around inside the eggshell, scraping out the last bits of goop and feather, a man sitting next to me sees what I’m eating. He smiles and says, ‘Make you strong!’ While he doesn’t make any rude accompanying gestures, I gather that
hot vin lon
is supposed to ensure an imminent erection and many, many sons. Not feeling too great from my embryonic breakfast, I soothe my stomach with a bowl of
chao muk
, a hearty soup made with ginger, sprouts, cilantro, shrimp, squid, chives, and pork-blood cake, garnished with fried croutons. This goes down well, and after a morning 333, I start across the street, until I’m stopped short.

     I’m already used to the amputees, the Agent Orange victims, the hungry, the poor, the six-year-old street kids who you see at 3:00 a.m. and cry, ‘Happy New Year! Hello! Bye-bye!’ in English, then point at their mouths and go ‘Boom boom?’ I am almost inured to the near-starving Dondis, the legless, armless, scarred, and desperate, sleeping in cyclos, on the ground, by the riverbanks. I am not, however, prepared for the shirtless man with the pudding-bowl haircut who approaches me outside the market, his hand out.

     He has been burned at some time in the past and is now a nearly unrecognizable man-shaped figure of uninterrupted scar tissue beneath the little crown of black hair. Every inch from the waist up (and who knows how far below) is scar tissue. He has no lips, no eyebrows, no nose. His ears are like putty, as if he’s been dipped and melted in a blast furnace, then yanked out just before dissolving completely. He moves his jack-o’-lantern teeth, but no noise emanates from what used to be a mouth.

     I feel gut-shot. My exuberant mood of the last few days and hours comes crashing down. I just stand there, blinking, the word
napalm
hanging inevitably over me, squeezing every beat of my heart. Suddenly, this is not fun anymore. I’m ashamed. How could I come to this city, to this country, filled with enthusiasm for something so . . . so . . . meaningless as flavor, texture, cuisine? This man’s family has very possibly been vaporized, the man himself transformed into a ruined figurine like some Madame Tussaud’s exhibit, his skin dripping like molten wax. What am I doing here? Writing a fucking book? About food? Making a petty, useless, lighter-than-air television fucking show? The pendulum swings all the way over and I am suddenly filled with self-loathing. I hate myself and my whole purpose here. I blink through a cold sweat, paralyzed, certain that everyone on the street must be watching. Radiating discomfort and guilt, I’m sure that any casual observer must surely associate me and my country with this man’s injuries. I spy a few other Western tourists across the street in Banana Republic shorts and Lands’ End polo shirts, comfortably shod in Weejuns and Birkenstocks, and I want suddenly and irrationally to kill them. They look evil, like carrion-eaters. The inscribed Zippo in my pocket burns, no longer amusing – suddenly about as funny as the shrunken head of a close friend. Everything I eat will taste like ashes now. Fuck writing books. Fuck making television.

     I’m unable even to give the man money. I stand there useless, hands trembling, consumed by paranoia. I hurry back to my refrigerated room at the New World Hotel and sag back onto the still-unmade bed, stare at the ceiling in tears, unable to grasp or to process what I’ve seen – or to do anything about it. I go nowhere and eat nothing for the next twenty-four hours. The TV crew thinks I’m having a breakdown.