Biting Your Share

[Osaka, 11/25/18]

Vietnamese in Pakse live in seven neighborhoods, several of which they’ve named themselves. There are hoods named Rock [Đá], New Serenity [Tân An] and New Abundance [Tân Phú]. This morning, though, I wandered into Thà Hín.

Even with a Lao name, it’s mostly populated by Vietnamese, and this I only found out by meandering through it. There was a Vietnamese temple with an attached kindergarten. Near it, I had an 87-cent breakfast of cháo canh, a Nghệ An udon soup that’s practically unknown in most of Vietnam.

Walking by a house, I heard a familiar song, played loudly enough to indicate it didn’t annoy the neighbors. Everyone around was Vietnamese. “Destined to be lonely, I cannot love anyone” [“Đời tôi cô đơn nên yêu ai cũng không duyên”], and it kept going along that line. I must have heard that at eight or nine years old.

Seeing a curious stranger, the man who played this sappy song came out, so we chattered. Born in Laos, his Vietnamese was nevertheless perfect, and though seventy-years-old, his hair was less white than mine. When told I was looking for a cafe, he said he would just make me a cup.

Where was I staying, he asked. Lankham Hotel, I said. Of course he knew that entire family. The owner’s husband died rather young in Vietnam when his vehicle overturned.

The richest Vietnamese in Pakse, though, is Đào Hương, a coffee magnate. Pointing to a fine villa across the lane, he said it was built for her parents. Her own house, a virtual palace, is by the river.

“I can take you down there to see it,” he offered. After my ten days in Lankham, I can even stay with him, he said.

When I remarked about all the nice houses in the neighborhood, he said yes, many Vietnamese in Pakse were doing very well, then Covid came. Before, he himself could take trips to Vietnam, but not anymore.

“What’s interesting, though, is there’s no panic or desperation,” I said. “I’ve seen almost no beggars in Pakse.”

“There are very few.”

“In Saigon during the 90’s, there were so many, including so many children begging.”

“Now, there are no more.”

“Almost none.”

“I remember a trip to Hue. I went to the Perfume River to hear music on a boat. Suddenly, I was surrounded by children, all with horrible scars on their faces. One was missing an eye. I had about three million dongs [roughly $200] on me, so I gave each 200 thousand [$13], but so many more appeared. They were all disfigured or crippled. Before I knew it, all my money was gone!”

Like many others, he didn’t realize these children had been kidnapped, purposely maimed then sent out to beg. You don’t have to believe it, but socialism or collectivism has created similar hells all over. Left alone, many Vietnamese thrive.

As said, Jewish thinking has no purchase in nominally Communist Laos, so here in Pakse, charity is voluntary. Đào Hương has helped many Vietnamese and Laos, but with a special focus on her birth neighborhood, Thà Hín. There each New Year, she gives 850,000 kips [$49] to anyone older than 60. She gave money to upgrade the hospital where her husband worked as a doctor. She gives bags of rice to the poor.

“If she doesn’t give, who can say anything?” my new friend pointed out, “but she does, regularly.”

Walking away from Thà Hín, I was still hungry, and a bit annoyed at my cháo canh breakfast, frankly. I never had it as a child. Even some baked beans would have been more satisfying. Near my hotel was Daily Donuts, but it was closed when I got there. Though obviously junk, glazed or frosted fried dough has been dunk into my bio.

In Don Det, there’s a man from Hamburg with hair dyed red who owns Torture Sandwich Bar. When his sausage machine isn’t broken, he makes wursts to serve with Dijon mustard. He also has imported ham, olives and cheddar cheese, and he makes his own pesto. Bread, he has delivered daily from a bakery nearly four hours away.

Torture is clearly a labor of love. Who can doubt this since currywurst is also available? I’ve already mentioned the Canadian who tricks unsuspecting Thais into ordering poutines in Bangkok. Here, we have a sadistic German who can’t wait to stuff blood red wursts down Lao throats!

It’s a dish born of Germany’s defeat. Drenched in alien seasonings, it became popular with construction workers rebuilding a razed Berlin. Each sweetish mouthful, then, is an embrace of humiliation, not unlike your first try at oral sex. I can’t believe I’m eating this.

If you’re raised on currywurst, however, it’s nearly synonymous with childhood, mom, love and an apparently permanent home. Into eternity, it seems, she’ll feed you currywurst again and again. You, mom and currywurst, then, are fixed in this torturous zone of comfort until, suddenly, you’re ejected from home, your mom dies or has a sex change or your nation is bombed, etc.

Finding yourself in Laos or a new, unrecognizable Berlin, you serve currywurst.

Food as heritage or identity is a theme I keep revisiting. At the end of this article, I’ll append a story, “Food Conjuring,” from my 2004 collection, Blood and Soap. Cancelled, I must self-publish and push myself, but this is nothing. We’re still in the flirting stage of totalitarianism.

Though millions have been Jewjabbed to death, they’re just playing footsies with us, though with a nasty kick every so often to indicate who’s the boss.

For a while, there was a lot of buzz about fake meats and bugs as the hip cuisine of the nouveau pauvre, but that has died down. Perhaps, they’re thinking, so many of us will die off from Jewjabs, war, civil disorder and old fashion starvation, it won’t matter too much what the survivors will eat. For all they care, we can dine on corpses.

[Hong Kong, 11/8/19]

[Bengaluru, 12/7/22]

[Gjirokaster, Albania on 5/24/21]

[koshary in Cairo on 1/4/21]

[Vung Tau, Vietnam on 11/28/19]

Food Conjuring

In China, they bury eggs for a thousand years so their offspring can enjoy them later. In India, holy men dine on the cremated remains of angels. In America, buffaloes have wings and the cowboys gnaw on them between chaws of tobacco. They also snack on oysters that tumble down the rocky mountains.

I have a friend who lives on the twelfth floor of a filthy high-rise. The elevator has been broken for years and so, several times a day, she has to trudge up and down a dank, dark stairway reeking of human spillage. Her tiny apartment, though, is monastery clean. Its walls are lined with shelves of cookbooks in several languages.

Much of this woman’s ridiculously small salary, from working in a shoe factory, is spent on these books. She loves to brood over the fantastic dishes described in them. Their ingredients are often so exotic, so bizarre-sounding, she can only imagine what the words are referring to, what they must taste like. (These cookbooks are so cheap they have no photographs or illustrations.) What is basil exactly? Or parsley? Pone? Pimento? Cumin?

Each word offers a different taste. Some have volume but no density. Some emit crude, rustic sensations. The most intriguing leave paradoxical, even tragic, consequences on the tongue.

By calling an old dish a new name, my friend believes (or allows herself to believe), you’re already changing its taste. One does not eat bread but baguettes. One does not eat instant noodles but pasta. A beautiful girl with a hideous name becomes a hideous girl. An ugly girl with a pretty name becomes a pretty girl in print and in memory.

One can also overlay a dreary dish by conjuring up an exotic one. Each night, as she is slurping her usual dinner, Ramen Pride, you will find her hunched over the recipe for stracci integrali, an Umbrian buckwheat noodles smothered in truffle oil and chicken livers. Or Odessa stew, tender beef cubes simmered in a dark sauce sweetened with prune skins. Or pollo en mole, a Mexican dish of boneless chicken in a broth of chocolate, raisins, almonds, and nutmeg . . .

“Do you know cheese has been around for 5,000 years?” She asked me once, her eyes sparkling, “and I have yet to try even one variety! Their very names excite me: Gorgonzolla, Bel Passea, Gjetost, Raclette, Sap Sago. If you say Sap Sago over and over, Sap Sago! Sap Sago! Sap Sago! you have already tasted Sap Sago, whatever that is. A foreign word, like a foreign dish, resists the tongue at first, but you must learn how to swallow it anyway. To acquire someone else’s taste is a moral act. A bigot loves his mom’s cooking and nothing else. Do you know a wheel of Parmigiano weighs as much as a man, and must be cut by a saw?”

When talking, my friend has a habit of suddenly lunging forward, like a thoroughbred exploding from the gate. It is as if she wants to leap out of her clothes. Her arms are also swimming constantly to keep her body from drowning. I told her I have only experienced one kind of cheese, Laughing Cow, and cannot imagine any other. One kind of cheese is enough for me, I thought.

My friend shot me a brief, snorting laugh. She then declared that the variety of foods  available in the world is the clearest proof that a person’s range of experiences is indeed infinite, and that there’s always room for change. A strange dish will transform a person. If Uncle Ho had tried guacamole, for example, he wouldn’t have turned out the way he was. Only a sick man pretends he has never eaten peaches.

“Sexual promiscuity will dull the senses,” she continued, her eyes enlarged and darkened, “but the reverse is true of one’s appetite for food!”

“But you’re not eating new foods!” I shouted, “only reading about them!”

“So be it! Cookbooks are my travelogues. They point to a truly vast universe, unlike pornography, which rehashes the same-old-same-old from three or four angles. That’s why each day I must swim in these verbal stews. I’m sick of all the old words. A foreign word hints at, makes us conjecture, new adventures!”

To illustrate her point, she brought her sweating face closer to mine and scatted: “Pomodorifarcitimugginiarrosto!”

I very much wanted to interject that the reality behind a strange word is often just ordinary, or even less than ordinary, but I did not dare to contradict her.

There are times I suspect my friend would never actually try an exotic food. She’s infatuated with words, not with matters. Words are all she’ll ever eat. She’s like a lifelong virgin who’ll spend each night thinking about what other people are doing, the close-ups, the different combinations, whereas the rest of us, who fuck all the time, never think about sex anymore. She is sadder than the prisoners who regale each other with drawn out descriptions of meals from their distant past. At least they have eaten something. My friend wants to renew her interest indefinitely by keeping the actual experience at bay.

“What’s more,” she continued, “when you sample a new dish you are cannibalizing an entire culture. When I suck in a single strand of spaghetti I’m swallowing forty generations of Italians.”

My friend’s last thought conjured up several suggestive sentences in my head. I stared at her thin, open lips. I’ve often wondered.

“Do you know what olives are?”

“You must think I’m a complete idiot,” I chuckled. “Everyone knows the story of Noah’s ark. There was a pigeon on it that ate olives.”

“Exactly! But have you ever seen an actual olive?”

“No! But neither have you!”

“The big difference between us,” she declared, “is that I care about olives although I have never seen them. It’s important to me that there are olive trees shading distant countries, and that somewhere, someone is eating olives.”

To her mind, cookbooks are superior to any other kind of literature. “You will learn more about the English,” she announced, “by pondering the recipe for grilled kippers than by reading all the plays of Shakespeare.”