by Matt Gross
When I returned to Ho Chi Minh City after the winter break, Vietnam suddenly became much more manageable. Now I was working at the local bureau of the Viet Nam News, copyediting stories alongside my frenemy Ted Ross, the annoying New Yorker from the Bodhi Tree gang. The job was amazing: I’d show up every day at 2 p.m. and attempt to turn news stories—written in Vietnamese, then translated into pseudo-English by the paper’s Vietnamese staff—into readable prose. I’d cut, edit, and rejigger the stories, line by line, trying hard to figure out not only which facts were, in fact, facts but which were relevant to the story. Once, I reduced a four-paragraph story, about the failure of an experimental oyster farm, to a single sentence, retaining only the original headline: “Oysters Die a Lot.” (Oddly, it did not run the next day.) In articles like that, it was as if the original writer had just crammed in as many points of data as possible, maybe to stretch out the piece, maybe because a publicist had paid him or her to do so.
This happened all the time, my Vietnamese colleagues explained to me. A press conference would be held to discuss rice exports or a new hotel project, and the publicists would duly pay off the reporters—100,000 dong here, 200,000 there. This was essential. It was how you got coverage from journalists whose government-set salaries were unlivably low: $40 a month, $60 if they were lucky.
And many of the journalists at Viet Nam News were people with long, serious careers. Mr. Minh had been the foreign desk editor at Tuoi Tre, one of the country’s top papers, until a traffic accident landed him in the hospital; while he was recuperating, Tuoi Tre fired him. Mr. Hoanh, a good-humored fellow who every evening changed into a leather motorcycle outfit to ride his Harley home, had lived and studied overseas; he’d returned to Saigon to visit his family just weeks before the South Vietnamese government collapsed in April 1975. It seemed like a tragedy, but he’d laugh as he’d tell the story.
Naturally, not every employee was so illustrious. One young, pretty woman seemed to do nothing but gossip with friends all day—because, rumor had it, the head of the Vietnam News Agency, the national wire service, was her uncle.
But good for her! Ted and I, too, appreciated the leisurely aspects of the job. Between edits we’d all retrieve little pots of fresh yogurt from the fridge in the break room, and sometimes, as we struggled to reshape awkward copy, one of our colleagues would set a can of beer next to our keyboards. Beer! By 5 p.m., we’d be finished anyway, and it was time to have a glass of snake wine—strong rice liquor from a glass vat filled with dried cobras—with our bureau chief, Nguyen Tien Le, a kind man with a thick black mustache and a voice so soft we could barely hear it above the air-conditioning.
For my efforts at the paper, I was paid a salary of $700 a month—crisp hundred-dollar bills in a white envelope—with the standard ten cents per word for any additional restaurant or movie reviews I wrote. I wasn’t rich, certainly not compared with the admen at Q Bar, but I could, at last, upgrade my room at the Lucy to the air-conditioned one with the patio. Beyond that, though, my lifestyle changed little. I could splurge on meals if I wanted, but I ate Vietnamese food whenever possible. Buying a motorbike and a mobile phone would have been nice, but they weren’t strictly necessary, so I rented the former and did without the latter. If I left town, I took buses and slept in the cheaper (but never the cheapest) hotels. I didn’t have health insurance, but I was twenty-two—why would I need it? Above all, I was simply satisfied with what I had, as if my now-comfortable circumstances were a magical gift, a secular blessing.
And now that I was, officially, a journalist, more work came my way. A colleague passed word that Billboard was looking for a stringer, and I landed myself a couple of stories, about the impending U.S.-Vietnam copyright treaty and a new CD production facility. Another business magazine launched in Ho Chi Minh City, and I sold it a story about co’m bình dân, the “people’s food” restaurants. I e-mailed an editor at Might, a U.S. magazine started by Dave Eggers, to pitch an article on Vietnamese ear-cleaning; he said it sounded great but the publication was going out of business. With Ted, Douglas, and a couple of other creative expats, I started the Saigon Writers Workshop, which met each week to discuss (or destroy) the short stories and novels we considered our true calling.
My life was nearly ideal. I woke up late, read the International Herald Tribune (and did the crossword) over black coffee and fresh croissants, met people for lunch, napped, worked a few hours, and spent my nights eating, drinking, and exploring the city with an increasingly close circle of friends. I had renewed my study of Vietnamese at what I dubbed Đai Hc Đuong Ph—the University of the Streets. I danced until morning on a barge floating down the Saigon River, and I was planning to shoot a sixteen-millimeter short film, about love and mopeds, called “Honda Dreams.”
This is when I decided to pack it all in and return to America.
My thinking made—and still makes—a certain kind of sense. Although copyediting at the Viet Nam News was the best job I’d ever had, I could tell that it was not a job with a future. I could do it, I knew, for years without ascending the masthead or fundamentally changing the paper’s culture. Mr. Lê, the bureau chief, was proof enough of that: Though he certainly had the professional and political chops to take over the whole publication, he was—everyone knew—a southerner, and therefore limited. The Viet Nam News would always have as its editor in chief someone from the more historically communist north, and that was the way it was. If Mr. Lê could only go so far, what could I, a foreigner, possibly accomplish?
And although I had my new freelancing opportunities, I didn’t know how to develop them. What was a story? How did one pitch it to an editor? The answers eluded me (the questions, too), and there were few people I could ask. We were, I imagined, all competing to cover the same small, strange country, with clueless me at a great disadvantage. And what else could I, with my pitiful language skills and nonexistent network of local contacts, do here? Work for Saatchi? Open an import-export business? So I left—left Vietnam, my new friends, my hard-won independence.
My new apartment in Manhattan was on the edge of Chinatown and the Lower East Side, a converted two-bedroom tenement with windows between the kitchen and the living room. My roommate was Wayne, a gay Maori who worked in the TV and film industry and knew Douglas. My share of the rent was just over $500 a month. My New York life was about to begin.
Within six weeks, I had a job: copy editor at Shoot, a weekly trade magazine covering the TV commercial industry. (“Why did you hire me?” I later asked the managing editor. “Because,” she said, “you had copyediting experience—at the Viet Nam News.”) I had regular hangouts: Happy Joy, an excellent Chinese-Malaysian restaurant around the corner; Good World, a Chinese barbershop turned Swedish bar; Limbo, an East Village café whose customers would sometime O.D. on drugs in the bathroom. I even had a girlfriend, Jean Liu, a fellow Johns Hopkins alum whom I’d met when a visiting college friend invited me to a group dinner in Koreatown. Now a fashion student at Parsons School of Design, Jean had impressed me with her gorgeous smile, easy laugh, and enthusiasm for food (raw crab kimchi? no problem!), and we’d started dating soon afterward.
It was a good time to be in New York. The first Internet bubble was still inflating. Kozmo.com was delivering pints of Ben & Jerry’s all over Manhattan essentially for free (since new members were given $5 coupons, you’d create a new membership for each order), and Pseudo.com was hosting random, raucous parties in its building at the corner of Houston and Broadway. Not every corner of downtown had been gentrified, and relatively little of Brooklyn; a no-cover club like Fun could open under the Manhattan Bridge and fly under-the-radar for months. An Asian-style night market spontaneously appeared that summer in Sara D. Roosevelt Park, with permitless squatter-vendors selling everything from socks to pot stickers, until the city shut it down. Maybe this is every young person’s first feeling about New York, but it all felt truly new—newly invented, newly discovered.
The excitement of New York also s
erved to distract me from what was to become a series of only partially fulfilling jobs. At Shoot, I was learning the copyediting business in a far more professional way than I ever had before, but I had no inkling that copyediting—correcting prose for grammar and style—was going to be my métier. After six months there, I received an invitation, out of nowhere, to apply for a similar job at a Web site I’d never heard of before: FoxNews.com. In early 1999, no one had ever heard of it, not even the Fox News Channel, the conservative cable network it was supposedly run by. For the next two years or so, I would help manage the site’s front page, placing wire copy, writing headlines, and helping cover breaking news events like the Columbine massacre, the Serbia-Kosovo conflict, and the crash of the Concorde. Then, shortly after George W. Bush’s inauguration, the dot-com collapse hit FoxNews.com, and I, along with a few hundred other people, was laid off. Within a few months, however, I landed a new gig, as a copy editor at New York magazine, one of whose editors had also gone to Hopkins. Once again, I was inserting and deleting commas, perfecting verb tenses, and setting the titles of novels and feature films in italics.
Copyediting may not have been sexy, but it was at least stable. I earned a decent salary—never more than $50,000, if you’re wondering—but that was enough to cover my rent, eat out (in Chinatown more than at Le Bernardin) with Jean, and, most important of all, travel without going into debt. The first year in New York, for instance, I visited Jean in Paris, where she’d gone to study abroad, then a month later visited my family in Denmark for Thanksgiving. The following April I flew back to Vietnam for ten days, and I spent New Year’s Eve 1999 in Cambodia. Once Jean had returned to New York, she and I visited Mexico twice, enduring a thousand-mile road trip on which I was stricken, as usual, with giardiasis. One winter I even went snowboarding in Switzerland.
Was this extravagant? The thought never occurred to me. I bought my plane tickets online or through Chinatown travel agents, usually for less than $1,000, and I stayed with friends whenever possible. I ate street food and in small restaurants, and I rarely went on shopping sprees. All the things I liked were already inexpensive, so I didn’t have to stretch my budget.
More than making travel affordable, my incidentally frugal approach made it normal. That is, I never saw these trips as strange, as special, as my sole chance to see Angkor Wat or Oaxaca. I worked some job, I saved some money, I went somewhere. And yet even that cycle was not so consciously crafted. To fly halfway around the world was not a release valve for an otherwise staid lifestyle. Rather, these adventures flowed naturally into everything else I did, not least because I had a foreign-born girlfriend who wanted to see her family in Taipei every year or two. I traveled because . . . there was no because.
As the years went on, though, the return to life at home became ever more disappointing. At New York, I was not only copyediting but also editing the film critic, the theater critic, and the crossword page, plus writing short articles on smoked salmon, dictionary illustrations, and the mutant bicycle Olympics in Brooklyn. I freelanced a little, too, even writing a short piece for Travel + Leisure about the opening of Libya to foreign tourism. But rarely did I have the chance to write anything substantive, or even anything longer than a few hundred words. My old dream of being a writer—a real writer, whose words might outlive him—was fading.
The solution to that was obvious. As I had in Ho Chi Minh City, I put together a small writer’s group and embarked on a new novel, The Jungle Always Wins, a noirish detective story set in 1950s Cambodia, the hazy era of optimism and violence after the country won its independence from France. Every week or two, my friends and I met to share and discuss our work, and chapter by chapter The Jungle grew. By the time it reached 150 pages, in the summer of 2004, I knew what had to be done. I began saving money, writing as many extra articles as I could for New York, and by November I had $5,000 stashed away. I gave notice and bought a ticket to Southeast Asia.
(There were at least three other factors in my decision to leave: 1. Jean was living in Columbus, Ohio, for work, so I felt less tied to New York. 2. I’d hurt my knee while training for the New York City Marathon and was depressed. 3. George W. Bush had just been reelected president.)
The plan, as I saw it, was this: spend at least three months in Cambodia, studying the language, researching at the National Archives, and finishing and rewriting the book. I had friends of friends living there; I’d stay with them. Five grand would go a long way, and Jean would support me if I absolutely needed it. Eventually, I was confident, The Jungle Always Wins would find a publisher, and the book would come out. Then it would fail—as many, many books do. But, I hoped, my novel would also catch the eye of an editor at some travel magazine, who would then send me back to Cambodia to write a feature. Thus would begin my difficult, poorly paid career as a travel writer.
Before I left, though, my friend Andrew Yang, a design and architecture writer, suggested I e-mail Mary Billard, an editor at the New York Times. Mary was part of a team that had just taken over the Travel section, and they were making many changes, including commissioning several pieces from Andrew himself.
So I e-mailed her, dropping Andrew’s name, informing her I’d be in Cambodia (and Vietnam) for the next few months, and asking if there was anything I could look into. This was not a request for an assignment, I made clear, just a note to say that if she’d heard of something worth checking out, I could do it, I was in the neighborhood, it would be easy to see if there was a story.
Mary’s response came two days later—lightning-fast in the New York media world: No thanks. The Times already had someone in the region, Mary said, so don’t worry about it. But have fun!
Fine. I wasn’t pinning all my hopes on a New York Times assignment—I had a novel to write. And so, on December 1, 2004, I boarded the long, economy-class flight to Southeast Asia. If Mary wanted me to have fun, I would have fun.
The life I established for myself in Phnom Penh was bizarrely idyllic. After bouncing around the country for a couple of weeks, from the ghost town atop Bokor Mountain to the temples of Angkor (with a side trip to Ho Chi Minh City to visit old friends), I moved in with Gordon, an American writer and Web designer, his British girlfriend, Aarti, who worked for an anti-human-trafficking organization, and Peter, a Swedish writer researching a book on his country’s involvement in the Khmer Rouge era. They all lived together in a concrete house that, while not luxurious (no air-conditioning), was at least spacious and had both functional Wifi and an Xbox.
For several weeks, I was quite disciplined. In the mornings, I would ride my rented motorbike to the National Archives, a small building adjacent to the National Library, and pore over crumbling French newspapers and colonial government documents with the help of an archivist named Dara. The novel took place largely in Pailin, a small town on the Thai border that was later a base for the Khmer Rouge, and I was eager to find any reference I could. At noon, I’d break for lunch—chicken with rice at a Singaporean joint, American-style fast food at the shame-inducingly addictive Lucky Burger, or maybe a salad at the Foreign Correspondents Club. In the mid-afternoon, I went to my Khmer class, where the awful teaching did not diminish my love of the language, the way complicated aspirations and clipped triple diphthongs masked what was at heart an easy and playful tongue.
By five o’clock, I’d be running laps at the 1960s-era Olympic Stadium, inhaling the evening-ritual scent of garbage burning all over the city. I’d eat dinner with my roommates—we took turns cooking—or out with other new friends, but sometimes I stayed alone at home, playing Halo on the Xbox until I noticed the mosquitoes sucking me dry. I’d go to sleep under a thin sheet, an electric fan keeping the skeeters at bay, and in the moments before drifting off marvel at the distance—psychological more than physical—I’d traveled in just a couple of months. Here, tangled in routines and research unimaginable to my New York peers, I felt at home.
A surprise e-mail in early January changed all that: “just checking in . . . l
ooking for destination stories. . . .1000 or so words . . . any thoughts?” It was Mary Billard, and by now I definitely had some thoughts. Within two days, I’d sent her three story ideas: a general guide to Ho Chi Minh City, a report on the up-and-coming Vietnamese kite-surfing town of Mui Ne, and a piece on the developing area around Kampot, Kep, and Bokor Mountain, in southern Cambodia. Sounds good, she said over the next few e-mails: Write ’em!
And so I did. I put my novel aside and returned to Ho Chi Minh City to eat, drink, and shop, and I interviewed Mui Ne’s kite surfers and I ate Kep crabs and I drank Mekong whiskey with friends around a mountaintop campfire. I turned those experiences into words and sent them to New York. Mary liked them; so did her boss, Stuart. Even before they were published, she asked for more. Could I go to Chiang Mai, Thailand? I could, and I did.
On May 1, a week after my first two stories appeared in the Times, I flew back to New York. I’d spent five months in Asia—Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Singapore—and had accomplished a lot of research on the novel. But now I found it hard to focus on fiction. The Times was calling. I went in to meet Mary and Stuart in person for the first time: She was fair-skinned with an angular smile; he was a preppy Floridian with arched eyebrows; both were in their early fifties, and both seemed very excited about me. By the time I left the building, I had new trips assigned—snowboarding in Argentina, exploring the untouristed east coast of Jamaica—and was going to write an installment of a series called “The Frugal Traveler.”
As Stuart explained it to me, “The Frugal Traveler” was being reinvented. The previous columnist, Daisann McLane, had written the series since the mid-1990s, following from its originator, Susan Spano. Now that Daisann was gone, the column was up for grabs—anyone could pitch a Frugal—and Stuart wanted it to change focus. Henceforth, the column would be about famously expensive destinations done cheaply. The joke would be in the headline: Frugal Aspen. Frugal Monaco. Frugal Tokyo.
