The Turk Who Loved Apples by Matt Gross Page B

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 bạnphòng? ” 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 aclothing 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.
    â€œGood 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.
    â€œYou 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.
    D ouglas * 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.