A Cook's Tour by Anthony Bourdain

war, a lot of their ‘advisers’ and technicians walked around the country like conquering heroes, pretending they’d won the war for the Vietnamese. They were rude. They were loud. They were – it is said – lousy tippers. ‘I love to flirt with ze communism,’ said Madame Dai for the second time. She involved me in a well-known Vietnamese joke, very popular in the seventies, during the period of ‘reeducation.’
         ‘What religion are you?’ she asked.
         ‘Uh . . . no religion,’ I said – clearly the right answer for the punch line.
         ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed with mock horror. ‘You are VC!’
         Even Linh laughed along with this. He’d heard it, too. At last, we left Madame Dai out in front of her café, a tiny figure in a black dress and stockings, sweeping away a few bits of litter with a straw whisk broom.
     
    When I finally leave the market, the streets are dark, and I pass a few blocks where not a single electric light appears – only dark open storefronts and coms (fast-food eateries), broom closet-sized restaurants serving fish, meat, and rice for under a dollar, flickering candles barely revealing the silhouettes of seated figures. The tide of cyclists, motorbikes, and scooters has increased to an uninterrupted flow, a river that, given the slightest opportunity, diverts through automobile traffic, stopping it cold, spreads into tributaries that spill out over sidewalks, across lots, through filling stations. They pour through narrow openings in front of cars: young men, their girlfriends hanging on the back; families of four: mom, dad, baby, and grandma, all on a fragile, wobbly, underpowered motorbike; three people, the day’s shopping piled on a rear fender; women carrying bouquets of flapping chickens, gathered by their feet while youngest son drives and baby rests on the handlebars; motorbikes carrying furniture, spare tires, wooden crates, lumber, cinder blocks, boxes of shoes. Nothing is too large to pile onto or strap to a bike. Lone men in ragged clothes stand or sit by the roadsides, selling petrol from small soda bottles, servicing punctures with little patch kits and old bicycle pumps.
         The next morning, I’m right back at the market, where I have a healthy breakfast of hot vin lon , essentially a soft-boiled duck embryo, still in the shell, a half-formed beak and bits of dark crunchy matter buried in the partially cooked yolk and transluscent albumen. I eat it – but don’t exactly love it. It will not be replacing bialys on my breakfast table. I hear for the first time what will become a regular refrain in Vietnam, particularly when eating something that only a few days ago one would never have imagined putting in one’s mouth. While running my spoon around inside the eggshell, scraping out the last bits of goop and feather, a man sitting next to me sees what I’m eating. He smiles and says, ‘Make you strong!’ While he doesn’t make any rude accompanying gestures, I gather that hot vin lon is supposed to ensure an imminent erection and many, many sons. Not feeling too great from my embryonic breakfast, I soothe my stomach with a bowl of chao muk , a hearty soup made with ginger, sprouts, cilantro, shrimp, squid, chives, and pork-blood cake, garnished with fried croutons. This goes down well, and after a morning 333, I start across the street, until I’m stopped short.
         I’m already used to the amputees, the Agent Orange victims, the hungry, the poor, the six-year-old street kids who you see at 3:00 a.m. and cry, ‘Happy New Year! Hello! Bye-bye!’ in English, then point at their mouths and go ‘Boom boom?’ I am almost inured to the near-starving Dondis, the legless, armless, scarred, and desperate, sleeping in cyclos, on the ground, by the riverbanks. I am not, however, prepared for the shirtless man with the pudding-bowl haircut who approaches me outside the market, his hand out.
         He has been burned at some time in