The Turk Who Loved Apples: And Other Tales of Losing My Way Around the World

by Matt Gross

  The wider world, however, presents its own challenges.

  If you are alone in a strange new place, where you don’t speak the language, don’t know anyone, and aren’t sure why you’re there to begin with, the last album you want to listen to, over and over and over again, is Dummy, by the English trip-hop group Portishead. With its slow, rumbling beats, oddly looped samples, and psychedelic instrumentation (heavy on theremin, supplemented by orchestral strings), Portishead’s music evokes a world of isolation, longing, regret, and misery—all of it made unutterably sweet by the spooky-sexy voice of Beth Gibbons.

  “Please, could you stay awhile, to share my grief,” she pleads on “Wandering Star.” “For it’s such a lovely day to have to always feel this way.” On “Strangers,” she asks, “Did you realize no one can see inside your view? Did you realize for why this sight belongs to you?” And at the end of “It Could Be Sweet,” as the bass line thrums quietly on and the electronic keyboard repeats a tranquil melody, Gibbons lets out a final, nearly inaudible sigh that seems to express both the bliss of desire and a certain variety of resignation, the understanding that desire may never be fulfilled but that the desire itself is enough, and maybe, in the end, more delicious than its fulfillment.

  For months, Portishead’s music echoed in my top-floor room at the Lucy Hotel, matching, assuaging, and amplifying my own deep loneliness. I owned not more than six CDs—quirky mid-’90s bands such as Cibo Matto and Stereolab—which I played on a boom box purchased with a fair chunk of the money I’d brought from home, but it was Dummy that provided the soundtrack for my Vietnam life. In the morning, it reminded me I’d woken up alone. After lunch, it reminded me I’d eaten alone. And at night, under the thin covers of my bed, it told me solitude was all there ever was, ever would be. “And this loneliness,” Gibbons sang, “it just won’t leave me alone.”

  I was not, however, entirely friendless. At the Saigon Café, where I’d drunk my first beer on ice, I met Dave Danielson, a squinty-eyed Californian who ran an English as a Foreign Language school called ELT Lotus. Dave had been a professional skateboarder back in the 1970s, when long-haired dudes carved surf-style across soft SoCal embankments, and I think I trusted him because we shared a four-wheeled past. Also, because I had an EFL certificate, he gave me a job at Lotus, which contracted with companies to teach English to their employees. I would be teaching an introductory course at AkzoNobel, a Dutch paint and chemical concern, earning $15 an hour—about a week’s wages for the average Vietnamese worker.

  On my first day of work, a Friday, I set off for AkzoNobel by bicycle, and promptly got lost. Maybe not lost exactly, but I couldn’t find the damn street the company was supposed to be on. It was hot, and I began to sweat in the dense traffic. Then it began to rain. I was fifteen minutes late, at least, and had no mobile phone to call the company or the school. Suddenly, the traffic parted, and there was squinty Dave on his moped. He pulled up next to me, asked what the hell was going on, and guided me to AkzoNobel, where my sweaty, scruffy appearance (tuck in my shirt? Never!) would turn out, over the coming months, not to be a function of the weather.

  That night, Dave took me out to celebrate, getting me drunker—on sour BGI beer—than I’d ever been in my short life. Thankfully, I remember little but the hangover, which lasted the entire weekend, and I’m not sure I ever forgave him.

  But meeting Dave proved useful, for he introduced me to another Lotus teacher, Adrian, who was dating the owner of the Bodhi Tree, a not terribly good Pham Ngu Lao café where expatriates congregated. Among them were two I thought I might be able to get along with: Jed, a sharp academic on a Ford Foundation grant, and Ted, like me a wannabe writer, but so argumentative, so New Yorky, so . . . Jewish (like me) that I instantly resented his presence in this country. He, I knew, would be my competition.

  Among Jed, Ted, Adrian, and their other friends, I was a peripheral figure—literally. Though I knew Adrian slightly from work, I wasn’t yet all that friendly with him, so I tended to sit one table over from the gang, hoping I’d overhear a conversation I could participate in. Occasionally, I did; often, I didn’t. These people, I sensed, would never be true friends.

  But this was Vietnam, and I preferred to make the acquaintance of actual Vietnamese people. I was, however, unsuited to that task as well. Phuoc—Ms. Thanh’s student—made an effort for a while, inviting me to lunch once or twice, and then to spend a weekend at his family’s house on the outskirts of the city. Phuoc spoke good English and was a stand-up guy, so nice and normal and sweet that his biggest problem in life was convincing his Catholic parents to accept his Buddhist girlfriend. I liked him fine, but couldn’t see how our interests matched up in a way that would let us be real friends. On the way to his parents’ place, for example, we stopped at a sort of fish-farm café, where we drank iced coffee and sat at the edge of a man-made pond trying to hook catfish. I liked this just fine, but was this Phuoc’s primary pastime? Who was this gentle character? Would he be the friend to follow me into the stranger corners of the city?

  When we got to his family’s house, however, I was thrown into amazed confusion. The house itself was unlike those deeper in the city: it was one tall story, wide and deep, with a ph stand out front, a small living room featuring the uncomfortable faux-leather sofas that are de rigueur for Vietnamese decorators, and, a bit farther in, a massive, room-filling industrial loom, fed by four huge spools of thread, beneath a high, corrugated-steel roof. I was transfixed. This . . . this was a typical Vietnamese home? What was it like to live here—to grow up surrounded by light industry?

  All through my visit the loom ran, spinning thread into bolts of thin white fabric that Phuoc’s family would sell to the burgeoning garment industry. Even after dinner, it kept humming, and when, on occasion, it stopped, due to an unhooked spool or tangled line, someone—Phuoc, a young cousin, a grandparent—would stroll by to fix and restart it. That night, I slept in surprising peace on the uncomfortable couch.

  But the next morning, I faced a challenge that proved too much for me: the toilet. It was a squat-style toilet, ceramic and clean, and although I was for the moment free of giardia, I knew that I didn’t know how to properly use it, and didn’t trust my legs to keep me stable. Worse, there was no way I could really communicate this to Phuoc; we were not yet close enough for toilet talk. And so, though I was supposed to spend another day and night with his family, I bailed on them, making vague excuses, utterly ashamed at my failure and unable to explain any of it to the open-hearted guy who would now never really be my friend. The only good that came of the episode was that I began practicing my squat every day, so I’d never fail again. Pretty soon, I could hold a squat, flat-footed, for thirty seconds to a minute, not long enough to, say, fix a bicycle, but certainly adequate for any emergency bathroom situation.

  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.

  Douglas* 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; bc 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!

  On 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.

  “It’s not for you to know,” Neko Case sang on the car stereo, “but for you to weep and wonder.”

  Weep and wonder I did. I almost felt I could not go on. The music, the landscape, the unfightable forward motion—they contrived to amplify my isolation. To sweeten it, too. I was a month into a summer-long cross-country Frugal Traveler road trip for the Times, zigzagging from New York to Alabama to South Dakota to Texas to Colorado to Wyoming to Seattle, avoiding all interstates, and for most of the twelve-thousand-mile journey, I knew, I would be alone in my car, a creaky silver 1989 station wagon, prone to overheating, that I’d purchased for $1,600 and named Vivian.

  Though not exactly alone. Music kept me company. Neko Case sang me across Wisconsin and Iowa, the Flaming Lips through New Mexico and Colorado. Bob Dylan got me past Kansas, Leonard Cohen past Nebraska, Cat Stevens into South Dakota. From my iPod to the tape deck to Vivian’s one working speaker, French rapper MC Solaar chanted out his combative prose.

  The miles would go by—one hundred, two hundred—and the music kept going. I gunned Vivian around the muddy Mexican borderlands (where her rear bumper fell off) and up Rocky Mountain dirt roads (where her transmission died) and through the persistent rurality of Indiana, and I listened to sad, simple songs all the way, the kind of minor-key music you’d never put on with a real, live friend at your
side. But this trip was different, and my solitude needed a soundtrack.

  At times, though, the beauty of the landscape and the sound scape would overwhelm me, and I’d be tempted to let go of the wheel and drift off down cliffs and ravines to certain death. The slick Black Hills of South Dakota, those winding pine-lined highways intercut with washboarded logging roads, were a Siren’s song. The Texas desert west of Mentone—no gas stations, no population, just empty rock and arid riverbeds—could have been my own personal wastelands. The death wish enveloped me, but not because I wanted this to end. On the contrary, I wanted to go on forever, to preserve this feeling of absolute perfection. As I hurtled across the land in my silver steel station wagon, the world was revealing itself to me, and to me alone, as the musical gods I adored sang to me, of me, for me. I was beholden to no one, in charge of my direction and my destiny, as urgent but unhurried as the loping rhythms of Portishead. And the only way to keep this moment from ending, I kept thinking, was to end it all—to stop any other moment from ever intruding. Sorry, Vivian!

  “Do you realize,” the Flaming Lips asked me, “that happiness makes you cry? Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?”

  Everyone? Well, yeah. But everyone’s death was not what concerned me—I was obsessed with my own fate, and still am. Early on, probably before I was ten years old, I lost whatever faith in a supernatural God I’d once had, and mortality became a pressing concern. At night, I feared sleep, because temporary unconsciousness seemed a mere prelude to an eternity of unbeing. Once in a while, the panic would rise in my chest and spread over my face, drilling into my skull the fact that one day I would be no more—and would not even know it, and would not even for a second be able to feel relief at having come to an end. The universe would, as far as I was concerned, cease to exist. Everyone I know someday will die? Yeah, sure, of course, I cared, but the day I died I would no longer be capable of caring.