The Turk Who Loved Apples (14 page)

If only I'd been as successful in learning the Vietnamese language! My second week in Ho Chi Minh City, I'd signed up for an intro course that met five days a week. From the beginning, I struggled. While Vietnamese is written with a modified Roman alphabet, the spoken language is tonal, so the meaning of a word depends on whether your voice stays flat, rises, falls, falls and rises, falls and rises sharply, or falls so far down it gets stuck in your throat.
Anh
, for example, is older brother, while
nh
is a photo. I could actually produce these sounds fairly well—or at least better than some of my Australian and Korean classmates—but I could hardly hear them at all, and the confounding preponderance of triple diphthongs and swallowed final consonants didn't help. As the teacher asked questions, I found myself calculating the possibilities of each individual word, trying to guess what made the most sense.
Where is the . . . umbrella? Do I want to buy a motorbike, or sell one? How many friends are in the room?

Wait, what? Did she really ask that? She did—and to me directly: “
Có bao nhìeu bạn
phòng?
” I looked around at the class, wondering how many people I could consider my friends after just a couple of weeks. I'd had lunch once with Eun-soon, a Korean supervisor at a
clothing factory, but that was about it. Did I dare respond, “One”? How pathetic. Or was I supposed to consider everyone here to be my friend? I opened my mouth. I closed it. I looked around in existential angst.

The teacher called on another student, a young Japanese woman whose language ability outstripped us all. “Nine,” she said.

“Good work,” said the teacher, then led us in counting all the tables in the room. The tables! Table, I remembered, was
bàn;
I'd heard
bạn
, friend.

Another couple of weeks and I quit the class. I told myself it was because I couldn't wake up early enough to arrive by 8 a.m. every day, but my ongoing failures were the real culprit. If I was going to have local friends, they would have to be English speakers. And as I realized this, I felt the old constraints creeping up—I would not be choosing my friends here. Circumstances would do the choosing for me.

But sometimes circumstances have a way of working out. In the early fall of 1996, the first cybercafé had opened in Ho Chi Minh City. Tâm Tâm, it was called, and it had been started by Tom Rapp, a gruff-voiced, mustachioed New Yorker in his sixties, and his partner, a wiry, hot-tempered young local named Minh. With a half-dozen computers, it was the only public place in the city you could send and receive e-mails, and I spent a lot of time there keeping up with friends and family back home, drinking strong iced coffee with condensed milk, listening to Bryan Adams and annoyingly sweet Vietnamese pop, and chatting about food with Tom, who owned a restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

“You should meet Douglas,” Tom told me one day. I'd heard this name before, maybe from Tom, maybe from others. Douglas, too, had recently moved to Vietnam, after working in the New York film and TV industry for several years. Right now, though, he was traveling around Cambodia and Laos. To me, that sounded brave. “You'll like him,” Tom said. “I'll introduce you when he's back.”

Then Tom handed me a CD. He'd bought it in the States, thinking Minh would like it, but it was too dark for Vietnamese tastes. The band's name was Portishead.

D
ouglas
*
and I met a couple of weeks later, at Tâm Tâm, as I was coming in and he was leaving, or maybe vice versa. Douglas was laidback and confident, a tall, blondish dude from the Pacific Northwest who'd spent time after high school in a Japanese monastery. About to turn thirty, he'd decided to take a year off from New York and simply see what happened in and around Vietnam.

All of this made him little different from me—or the other Westerners fumbling around Saigon. What linked us, I soon learned over drinks and multiple games of pool at La Camargue, a restaurant in an old French villa, was two things: a shared love of William T. Vollmann, an intense San Francisco writer obsessed with skinheads, prostitutes, homeless people, hobos, crack cocaine, guns, the Afghan mujahideen, the California-Mexico borderlands, and Southeast Asia; and our deep longing to explore.

This was what I'd been missing here—not just a friend but a travel buddy, someone who saw in the gray and empty streets of midnight Ho Chi Minh City an enticement, an opportunity, a dare. I had hung around the backpacker haunts of Pham Ngu Lao long enough. I needed to stretch my legs.

And with Douglas, I began to wander. He rode a Bonus, a big, cheap, traditional motorcycle, and I decided my $40 one-speed bicycle needed upgrading. In its place, I rented a 70cc step-through moped with a little basket on the front. Together, we sped around the city, often with his girlfriend, Dung, a cute youngster with a slightly snaggletoothed smile. In Cholon, Saigon's Chinatown, we marched into a nightclub called Artists, where we stood out in a
crowd of hip Vietnamese kids. With the Tâm Tâm crew, we cara-vaned on our mopeds to distant, verdant riverside restaurants where we wrapped herbs and grilled meats in rice paper. Frequently, we drove just to see which streets went where, and at the end of an evening we'd return to a Japanese-run downtown hotel, where we'd pay $30 apiece to soak in hot tubs alongside tattooed yakuza. Each night with Douglas was a chance to do something I'd never have done otherwise.

In Vietnam, hierarchy is built into the language. Everyone is either your superior or your inferior, and there's no one word for “you.”
Anh
—older brother—is how you address a slightly older male;
chú—
uncle—is a man a generation older than you, but younger than your father;
b
c
is the “uncle” older than your father. Women are addressed as
chị, cô
, or
bà
. Anyone younger than you (or just female) is
em
.

In this context, Douglas was anh, I was
em
. In Japan, you'd call it a senpai-kohai relationship. In Jedi terms, I was the paduwan. And for a long time, it was nice. I needed someone to teach me, to inspire me, to show me the way by dint of his experience and confidence—even to dress me. The Valentino button-downs Douglas had bought in Bangkok, but no longer liked, clad me for years to come.

But Douglas was not always there, or was always a little distant. When in the midst of a 2 a.m. battle with giardia I called him, he was taken aback.
Were we that close already?
Hanging out together was not a default mode. He had his own life, and Dung, and plans that didn't involve me. Once he got a job as a creative director at a Vietnamese advertising agency, there were work dinners and drinks to go to. I, his little brother, was not at the top of his list anymore, if I ever had been.

I understood this well. Back home, I was the older brother, and while I cared for my younger brother and sister, I didn't necessarily want them around me all the time. For Douglas to feel this way as well was only natural.

And so I continued to retreat to my little room to read weighty novels (Pynchon, Barth, Wallace) and listen to Portishead while contemplating this new variety of loneliness, one that ached ever deeper because it was not complete. I had friends and acquaintances; I spoke with people on a regular basis. But I was still an outsider, with no ties to either the foreign or Vietnamese communities. I might as well have been a tourist, here to drink a few ‘333' beers, see the Museum of American War Crimes, and bask in the fast-vanishing aura of danger. Vietnam!

O
n a golden June afternoon in 2007, the Driftless Hills of southwestern Wisconsin bulged with promise. Green woods carpeted the round slopes, fading in places to bald patches of prairie or giving way, abruptly, to the fields of organic farms. The road whipped through and around the hills, and I accelerated my Volvo at each sinuous curve, enjoying the comforting hug of centripetal force and the lush rhythm of late-in-the-day driving. The road, I knew, was dangerous at this time. Deer were coming out to forage. Already, one had dashed across the asphalt in front of me and leapt over a high fence, arcing so slowly it seemed almost to pause, midair, at its apex, backlit and burnished by the setting sun, before vanishing into the tall grass.