The Turk Who Loved Apples by Matt Gross Page A

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 . . .