by Matt Gross
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.
Chapter 2
A Model Organism
In Which, Craving Culinary Adventure, I Eat My Way Across the World and Figure Out How to Handle the Consequences
Giardia, blight of my life, fire of my loins. My germ, my joke. Gee-arr-dee-ah: the tips of my toes taking a trip of three steps to the toilet, to squat, to squirm, on the pot. Gee? Arr. Dee! Aaaahhhh . . .
Ho 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.
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 htiu mi, no bún riêu, no bánh canh. If I wanted gi cun—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 bit 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), min cua (glass noodles stir-fried with crab), and cua lt 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.
Still, however, I felt flummoxed at mealtimes, and too often wound up eating at the foreign restaurants in the backpacker and tourist districts. They were all surprisingly good: fresh tomatoes and basil made for excellent Italian, a devoted expatriate clientele demanded serious Japanese, and a century of French colonialism meant pâté, red wine, and onion soup were vernacular dishes. But put together, they all reminded me of my ongoing failure to penetrate Vietnamese culture.
Which still might not have been so bad—had I not been constantly sick as well. My guts had begun to rebel a few days after I arrived in Vietnam, during a trip to the Cu Chi Tunnels, where Viet Cong guerrillas hid underground during the war. The journey took forty-five minutes on the back of a motorbike, and at first I mistook my intestinal rumblings for vibrations from the rough road out of town. But once I arrived and started to clamber awkwardly through the tunnels, like any other less-than-limber Westerner, I knew something was wrong. Only through sheer sphincteric fortitude did I forge on:
I saw the underground hospital and the underground mess hall, and I was properly amazed that human beings had spent so much time—years, in some cases—down here, going about the day-to-day processes of their lives in the bowels of the earth. They ate, slept, plotted strategy, survived shelling, set booby-traps, and even, as I remember it, watched movies underground, until one day the war was over and they emerged, flowing en masse into the sunlight. The release, I imagined, must have been wonderful. For the ride home to the Lucy, I took a taxi, not a moped.
Returning to my home toilet was not enough, however. For days my guts cramped up, I belched unceasingly, and my diarrhea—well, let’s just say I had diarrhea. Finally, I’d had enough. Through the English-language newspapers, I located a Dutch doctor who diagnosed my troubles instantly: I had giardiasis.
Now, before I’d left the States, I’d taken some health precautions: vaccinations for typhoid, Hep A, Japanese encephalitis. On a Virginia doctor’s advice, I’d even started taking Lariam, a malaria prophylactic also known as mefloquine. (Neither of us understood there were no malarial swamps in Saigon.) But none of those had protected me from the shrimp curry I’d eaten that first night in Saigon. Or the ph I’d been eating daily. Or the ground-pork omelette at the cute little Thai restaurant around the corner. Or the tap water I used to brush my teeth. Or the fat chunks of ice in my beer—ice that had been produced in sterile factory conditions, then zipped across town on the back of a motorbike, protected from the grit and dust only by a filthy damp piece of canvas. Or the fact that I used to bite my nails unthinkingly.
Any and all of which could have installed in my gut the protozoan parasite known as Giardia lamblia. A single-celled creature that is one of the most primitive organisms on the planet, it lives in the intestinal tracts of both humans and animals, and passes from host to host through water contaminated with feces. Under a microscope, the flagellated anaerobe looks like a pair of buttocks with five legs and a cape. And its macro effects were precisely what I’d experienced, give or take a bit of vomiting.
In my case, the only strange factor was that I’d gotten sick so quickly: According to the Centers for Disease Control, it takes one to two weeks for giardiasis symptoms to emerge. But I didn’t care what Atlanta had to say—if the Dutchman said he could cure my giardiasis, I was willing to believe him. He prescribed a five-day course of the antibiotic metronidazole. I bought the metronidazole. I took the metronidazole. And voilà! I was better.
For a little while.
Within days, the diarrhea was back. I took more drugs, it went away. Then it came back again. For at least the first half of the year I spent in Vietnam, I had the shits.
This wasn’t quite as bad as it sounds. After all, there’s nothing travelers in Third World countries love more than discussing their bowels. The subject was an icebreaker at scuzzy cafés, and if you couldn’t top your tablemates’ tales of gastrointestinal woe, then it was like you were excluded from the club of real travelers. You hadn’t earned your stripes, even if those stripes were skid marks.
In more genteel establishments, outside the backpacker hangouts, digestion was a topic, too, but eased into via coded language. “So, how’s your health?” “Do you eat street food?” “Do you brush your teeth with tap water or bottled?”
These were tentative forays, designed to identify those like-minded masochists who reveled in their suffering. If the right response was given, then we could get down to business, describing foul squat toilets in the Mekong Delta, or a frantic search for Imodium in the Central Highlands. I’ll spare you the florid descriptions of exactly what emerged from whose rear end, and how, but trust me, they were rarely pretty.
But as much as gastrointestinal distress enabled us to communicate, I quickly got bored by these conversations. They were always the same: sad tales, misguided notions of health and hygiene, often tinged with racism—this idea that natives could and would eat anything, no matter how filthy, because their stomachs had been born into it. Which was totally ridiculous if you ever talked to any so-called natives, or watched young kids squatting uncomfortably at the edge of the sidewalk. In communist Vietnam, diarrhea was democratic.
Pretty soon, despite my own struggles with my guts, I began to shrug off those coded openings. The experience of diarrhea had a discouraging sameness, and I almost never heard any variations on the theme: tourist eats something, gets sick, complains, gets better, complains.
And besides, no one’s symptoms really seemed to match mine, because while I had diarrhea, I would also get . . . constipated. Yes, I would race to the bathroom, sit (or squat), and then nothing. Until later, perhaps, maybe, if I was lucky. My god, what frustration! Why couldn’t my body make up its mind?
Desperate, I eventually returned to the Dutch doctor, where I happened to mention for the first time that I was also taking Lariam, the anti-malarial medication. Immediately, he whipped out the Physician’s Desk Reference, the thick black encyclopedia of commercially available drugs. He flipped through to Lariam, turned the book around, and directed me to the section marked “Side Effects.”
Nausea, vomiting, diarrhea—and constipation. Hm. Dizziness. Sleepiness, insomnia. Anxiety, nervousness, light-headedness. Ah. Nightmares, hallucinations, psychotic episodes. Well.
I hadn’t experienced all of these, but taking a potentially anxiety-provoking drug when you’ve just moved to a new country where you don’t speak the language, don’t know anyone, and aren’t sure what you’re supposed to be doing seemed like a bad idea. I quit Lariam, and the intestinal problems went away . . . for a while.
Then they returned, and vanished, and returned again, a low-grade torture that wore on me mentally. Sometimes I would take more drugs, but usually I’d just try to tough it out. I remember one particularly sleepless, wretched night where that telltale gurgle in my lower abdomen would just not stop. I’d get out of my bed, in my un-air-conditioned room on the top floor of the Lucy Hotel, and stumble into the bathroom, and . . . nothing. Then I’d stumble back to bed until 20 minutes later the gurgle would return.
I did everything possible to relax myself, from breathing deeply to taking a shower (a lukewarm one, as I didn’t have hot water) to, at one low, desperate point, masturbating. (FYI: Didn’t work.) Somehow, though, I forgot that rich, intensely caffeinated Vietnamese iced coffee could be ordered from the street and brought to my room—a delicious laxative I never partook of in those hours of need.
Too toilet-bound to go out at night, I’d turn in early—and lie there, sleepless, listening to the churn in my bowels, wishing I could cure this blight with a single pill, but also knowing that if only I could hang on, keep my shit together (so to speak), I’d get better, become my old, robust self again, and get back to the important business of living and eating.
And I did.
But as I traveled farther and farther afield over the next twenty-five years, my health failed again and again, although, to be sure, this didn’t always happen. Many—most—trips have involved no sickness at all, but when they did, I never became the guy, sidelined by Montezuma’s revenge, who ruins everyone else’s good time. I was never hospitalized. I never cut the voyage short. I put up with it, as all travelers must at one time or another. We get sick—the rigors and discomforts and adjustments inherent in the experience of travel pretty much guarantee that some microscopic bug will eventually overcome our immune systems and wreak havoc. And it’s how we deal with the horrors of our own haywire bodies that toughens us as travelers, even as it weakens us as human beings.
More than once, it’s been the flu, the symbol of international contagion, that struck me down. For example, on New Year’s Eve 1999, when a group of friends and I traveled to Cambodia to watch ten thousand chanting monks welcome the new millennium in the sandstone temples of Angkor Wat. Or anyway, that’s what they did. I spent the night sweating and shivering in my hotel room, while my pals were busy partying until dawn with Malaysian princesses.
But I’ve also had colds—the kind
that simply rob you of energy and will without actually being severe—and allergy attacks and bug bites (including a yucky chigger infestation), not to mention the occasional extraordinarily close call. Near the end of my year in Vietnam, I visited the beach town of Nha Trang, where I spent a day scuba diving and snorkeling with no sunscreeen and little drinking water. By the time I returned to my hotel, I had a neck-to-ankle sunburn, a 103-degree fever, and a case of dehydration so severe my hotel called in a Vietnamese doctor to help. As I watched him fiddle with the I.V. saline drip, panic struck: Letting a Vietnamese doctor put a needle in you was the last thing the guidebooks said you should do! (By then I’d discovered guidebooks.) In delirium-addled French—my only means of communication with the doctor—I pleaded with him to make sure the needle was clean and that the tube had no air bubbles. He nodded and told me not to worry—he’d trained in Paris.
Reader, I lived! And throughout the next few weeks, when every crinkle of my lobstered back raked my nerve endings, I remember thinking—as I would think each time I caught the flu, or when my feet blistered as I walked from Vienna to Budapest, or when in Minneapolis bolts of pain shot through my skull during a stress-induced bout of shingles soon after my daughter was born—that there was only one consolation: at least I don’t have giardiasis.
Because Giardia lamblia never gave up its pursuit. In 2003, its visit left me pale and weak, perched on tiptoes over a railroad car’s toilet in a New Delhi train station, and four years later it had me vomiting all night into another Indian toilet, outside Darjeeling, in the Himalayas. Giardia intruded on a vacation with my wife as we drove from Mexico City down to Oaxaca and up the Pacific coast; while Jean ate tongue tacos at highway rest stops and backstroked in Acapulco swimming pools, I lay in pools of cold sweat, subsisting on Gatorade. And then, each morning, I would be the one to drive us to the next town, racing over dry roads and crushing lizards and curb-like speed bumps under the wheels of our rental car, wondering what was real and what I’d just imagined in my bacterial haze. Twice, giardia even ambushed me before my journeys began, one time striking the night before a flight to Switzerland, another appearing out of nowhere two days before a road trip to Maine. Once, in Kenya’s Rift Valley, giardia kindly waited until my last day there before enveloping me in its ungentle flagella.
