A Cook's Tour (21 page)

     Philippe and I settle for catching our own elephant fish in a murky, stagnant pond covered with green film, a small boy helpfully pointing out exactly where to drop our hooks. It takes about thirty seconds to catch our entrées.

     For appetizers, we go for the relatively benign curried frog legs, a little ground snake with shrimp cracker, peanuts, garlic, and mint, and some braised bat (imagine braised inner tube, sauced with engine coolant). We eat no animals with cute bunny eyes. I just can’t take that today. Philippe and I pick at our food unenthusiastically, a strong cloud of fermenting fish from the nearby
nuoc mam
factory doing nothing to improve our appetites.

     No one should come here.

     Our waiter is a friendly-enough young fellow, soft-spoken and attentive, but I can’t get it out of my head that if I should suddenly decide to order some monkey, he’ll happily slit the little fella’s throat with the same friendly expression on his face.

     I’m in much better spirits the next morning when we board a riverboat to go to the nearby floating market at Cai Rang. It’s beautiful out, the sun creating pink-and-orange coronas around the edges of the clouds, the light on the water hypnotic. Bamboo-frame houses with thatched roofs, tall palms, the crowded waterfront of Can Tho pass by. The river itself teems with activity. Net fishermen, their handwoven nets extended like the wings of giant moths over the water, dip and pull with ingeniously crafted levers of bamboo poles. Families in sampans pass by, sampans with lone women paddling from the stern and baby sitting aft, boats overloaded with cinder blocks and building materials. There are floating gas stations: a thousand-gallon floating gas tank piloted by a chain-smoking old man sitting on top. The river traffic gets more intense as we near Cai Rang. Sampans are so overloaded here, so low in the water, I can’t imagine how they stay afloat. Boats are piled high with sacks of rice, fertilizer, produce, potted palms, cages of live poultry.

     And there are floating food vendors.

     A chugging sampan pulls alongside our craft and inquires if we’d care for coffee. He’s got a whole Starbucks rig set up at the helm. Attaching his boat to ours with a frayed rope, he sets immediately to work filling our order, one hand keeping his boat aligned as we speed along the river, the other steaming, filtering, and pouring some of that fabulous Vietnamese coffee into tall glasses. Another boat, this one selling baguettes, comes along the other side, and we buy a few of those, too. They’re still warm, crunchy, and delicious, as good as any you’d find in Paris. A boat selling
pho
joins us and soon Philippe and I are digging greedily into bowls of outstandingly fresh spicy beef and noodles, a slice of liver, those brightly colored and crunchy garnishes making the flavors pop. I could eat here all day. Just float along and everybody comes to you. Pâté sandwiches, roll-your-own beef, spring rolls, sweets – all this in the middle of busy river traffic. At the market, there are floating fishmongers, livestock pens, fruit and vegetable wholesalers, bakers, plant sellers, all of them in waterlogged, porous-looking, questionably seaworthy vessels of indeterminate age. Slurping down the last of my morning
pho
, I’m thinking that this is living. Everyone smiles. Children shout ‘Hello!’ and ‘Bye-bye!’ and ‘Happy New Year!’ – all wanting nothing more than to practice the few words of English they know. A dessert boat sells candied mango and banana, skewered melon, chunks of pineapple, whole jackfruit, durian, mangosteen, dragon fruit, and custard apple. Boats chug by with bundles of beautifully wrapped square and triangular
banh
dangling from the wheelhouse, an entire convenience store aboard, selling cigarettes, sodas, beer, and fruit juices in plastic bags. Women cook in woks of boiling oil on fast-moving boats, grill little packets of ground meat wrapped in mint leaves, fry little birds, boil noodles. Everything smells good. Everything looks good to eat.

     Looking at the far shore, I can see doorless shacks built out over the water, nearly without furniture, except for an occasional hammock, the glow from a much-repaired television set. There are television aerials over medieval-style privies built out over the water. Watch the shore and you see every stage of domestic river life: mothers bathing their children, pounding laundry, scrubbing their woks in the brown water, laying out circles of rice paper to dry on rooftops, fastidiously sweeping their tiny primitive abodes, every inch clean and squared away.

     It’s something I’m seeing everywhere in Vietnam; what makes its food so good, its people so endearing and impressive: pride. It’s everywhere. From top to bottom, everyone seems to be doing the absolute best they can with what they have, improvising, repairing, innovating. It’s a spirit revealed in every noodle stall, every leaky sampan, every swept and combed dirt porch and green rice paddy. You see it in the mud-packed dikes and levees of their centuries-old irrigation system, every monkey bridge, restored shoe, tire turned sandal, litterless urban street, patched roof, and swaddled baby in brightly colored hand-knit cap. Think what you want about Vietnam and about communism and about whatever it was that really happened there all those years ago. Ignore, if you care to, the obvious – that the country is, and was always, primarily about family, village, province, and then country – that ideology is a luxury few can afford. You cannot help but be impressed and blown away by the hard work, the attention to detail, the care taken in every facet of daily life, no matter how mundane, no matter how difficult the circumstances. Spend some time in the Mekong Delta and you’ll understand how a nation of farmers could beat the largest and most powerful military presence on the planet. Just watch the women in the rice paddies, bent at the waist for eight, ten hours a day, yanking bundles of rice from knee-deep water, then moving them, replanting them. Take awhile to examine the intricate interlocked system of Stone Age irrigation, unchanged for hundreds and hundreds of years, the level of cooperation necessary among neighbors simply to scratch out a living, and you’ll get the idea.

     These people survived bombing, strafing, patrols. They outwitted the CIA, the NSA, satellites, AWACS, blacked-out C-130 cargo planes that had been tricked out with sensors and Gatling guns, staffed by whole teams of airborne intelligence analysts searching the ground below on winking monitors, B-52 strikes, hired killers, special units of ‘counterterror’ teams, regime after regime of clannish leaders who cared nothing for them. They survived
The Beverly Hillbillies
and Bob Hope and the worst that America’s lusts and America’s culture had to offer. They beat the French. They beat the Chinese. They beat the Khmer Rouge. And they’ll survive communism, too. A hundred years from now, the Commies will be gone – like us, another footnote in Vietnam’s long and tragic history of struggle – and the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta, this market, and this river will look much as they look now, as they looked a hundred years ago.

     I like it here. I like it a lot.

Tokyo Redux

I’d only been to Tokyo once before, but I knew that as soon as I hit the ground, I’d be tapping into that main vein again, a dead-bang, surefire, king-hell rush. For me, Tokyo is like one long film trailer – one of those quick-cut, fast-moving highlight teasers for a noisy action flick with only the best parts shown, in molar-shaking, heart-pounding surround sound, the pace getting quicker and quicker, the action more frenzied, leading up to sudden blackness and the promise of more excitement to come.

     No place I’ve ever been, or even heard about, is as guaranteed to cause stimulation in the deepest pleasure centers of a cook’s brain. No cuisine, broadly speaking, makes as much sense: the simplest, cleanest, freshest elements of gustatory pleasure, stripped down and refined to their most essential. Unlike Tokyo’s streets – and much of its popular culture – the traditional sectors of food and relaxation are austere, uncompromising, devoid of all distraction and repetition, beautiful in the manner of a single long-stemmed calla lily: unknowable, serene. The Japanese, hardworking, hyperregimented, obsessively well scrubbed, and painfully repressed, live lives of powerful – even lurid – imagination and fantasy. Over the centuries, they have given a lot of serious thought as to what, exactly, is needed and desirable in the taking of pleasure. The unnecessary, the extraneous, the redundant, the less than perfect – these are discarded. What is left is often an empty room, a futon, a single perfect flower.

     Their streets may be noisy, riotous Möbius strips of flashing lights, screaming jumbotrons, rank after rank of tightly constrained, identically dressed humanity (this year,
all
young women
will
dye their hair red!), their TV variety shows insanely over the top, hysterical assaults by break-dancing reindeer, hyperactive hosts, cloyingly cute, fluffy, pyschedelic-hued animal characters and doll-eyed cartoon heroines, their porn some of the ugliest, most brutal, and most disturbing on earth, their popular sexual obsessions may make even the Germans look well adjusted, and they may indeed teach their school children that all that nasty World War II nonsense never really happened, but from a cook’s perspective, who cares? I was there to eat. When it comes time to sit at a table, or take a long weekend relaxing in the countryside, no one on earth has figured things out so well or so thoroughly as the Japanese.

     It’s all about fish, fish, fish, daddy-o. You like fish? You’ll love Japan. They’ve scoured the world’s oceans looking for good stuff to eat. And they’ll pay anything – anything – for the good stuff. (I watched my friend Taka at Sushi Samba in New York unhesitatingly pay over eighty dollars a pound – wholesale – for a hunk of
o-toro
.) I actually get high walking through their fish markets; my pulse quickens even thinking about them. I missed a lot last time I was in Japan. I wasted a lot of time working and wandering blindly about. Early on, I’d been intimidated by the strangeness, the crowds, the different language, I’d been reluctant, at first, to throw myself into it, to plunge right into packed noodle joints and businessmen’s bars. This time, I was determined, at the very least, to miss less. My quest for ‘the perfect meal’ would be put on hold. This was Japan. I knew I’d be getting a lot of perfect meals here. That’s what they do.

     It was a packed flight out of JFK, and I was too excited to sleep. After three movies, three meals, and fourteen hours to Narita, with the plane’s engines droning on and on, it reached the point where I yearned crazily for that telltale change in the engine’s pitch, that moment when velocity slows, the plane begins its final descent, every ticking second of monotonous hum a fiendish form of torture. They ought to issue rubber chew toys in coach class. I needed one by the time the flight attendants started strapping down food carts and checking to see that our seats were in the upright position.

     I was staying at the Hotel Tateshina in Shinjuku, a tacky businessmen’s lodging on a side street. My dollhouse-sized room had a hard but comfortable bed, cheap bureau, a TV set, and a pillow that sounded and felt as if it were filled with sand. The walls were thin. Outside the room was a bank of vending machines selling my brand of cigarettes, coffee, Asahi beer, and plastic cards for the porno channels (Cherry Bomb). I showered in the hermetically sealed bath pod, dressed, and walked in the rain to Kabuki-cho, taking a hard right off a neon and billboard-lined street, ducking through a quiet Shinto shrine and into a bustling warren of pachinko parlors, hostess bars, pantyless coffee shops, yakitori joints, and whorehouses. Turning onto the Golden Gai, things were even narrower and the streets were bordered by tiny one- and two-table bars. Above, through a tangle of fire escapes, power lines, and hanging signage, skyscrapers winked red. Welcome to Tokyo. I squeezed into a phone booth-sized place, passed a bank of glowing hibachis, sat down, and ordered a draft beer.

     A hot towel arrived with my beer. I ordered pickles and crudités with miso paste, a bowl of
onsen tamago
(a soft-boiled egg with mountain potato and seaweed), cooked collar of yellowtail with radish, some chicken wings, stuffed shiitake mushrooms, and some roasted gingko berries. Life was good again. The grueling hours in cattle class, knees pressed to my chin, staring at Mel ‘Fucking’ Gibson and Helen ‘Two-Expression’ Hunt – you know them from such films as
What Tony Does NOT Want
, costarring Gene ‘He’s Good in Everything’ Hackman, playing (surprise) a gruff but kindhearted football coach, and Gene ‘Me Again’ Hackman playing a gruff but kindhearted former NSA agent – all of it faded into ugly memory.

     That night, I woke up at 3:00 a.m. and made myself green tea in my room, on the thoughtfully provided
denji
server. I tried to write. I attempted to telephone my wife back in New York but got the answering machine (Elvis Costello singing ‘sometimes I wish that I could stop you from talking’). I hung up, feeling, for the first time since I’d hit the road, truly and permanently cut off from my former life – a universe away from home, everything I’d ever been and done somehow an abstraction. I’d thought I was alone in the Tateshina annex, until a toilet roared through the thin walls. Soon I could hear the sounds of moaning. My neighbor was catching up on Cherry Bomb.

     I slept for a while, and had a vivid dream that Nancy had renovated our apartment and thrown me a surprise party. All the guests were Asian. Everyone was doing a lot of hugging. For some reason, Leslie Gore was there, singing ‘It’s My Party.’ When Nancy hugged me in my dream, I could feel it.

     I woke up early and bought a hot can of coffee from the vending machine. Out front of the Tateshina, I met my fixer/translator, Michiko, a pretty, smartly dressed, extremely capable young woman the TV people had hooked me up with. Behind the wheel of a rented van was Shinji, my driver, a longhaired guy in a Yankees cap. Both spoke excellent English, and Shinji was completely up-to-date on his Yankees stats and recent trades, so I knew I was in capable hands. On the ride to the Ginza district, Michiko kept up a steady stream of patter on a slim silver cell phone, making arrangements, while Shinji and I worried over the implications of a possible Brosius trade.