The Turk Who Loved Apples (18 page)

Each day I wished I could figure a way to wrap my head around this town, to find something new and exciting, to fit into its strange rhythms, and each day I failed. The problem was, I didn't understand what I wanted to do here, and when you don't know that, it's impossible to even begin looking for a solution. I kept hoping I would stumble upon it by chance, but instead I simply kept stumbling. And although I was living within my $100 budget, I was barely living.

Still, I had a job to do, and Monday morning, after four days in Bologna, I punched out my Frugal Traveler column: 1,200 words that covered almost everything you've just read, minus the maundering. I e-mailed the story and photos to my editors in New York, dealt with their queries and changes on Tuesday, and prepared to return to Venice for another shot at conquering La Serenissima.

Wednesday morning my Bologna column ran—“In Bologna (Thanks to a Cheap Flight) on My Trip Around the World” was the not-written-by-me headline—and I awoke to a long e-mail from Stuart, the editor of the Travel section. Its subject line was Your Column, and its point was this: get your shit together.

With my stomach churning in fear and embarrassment, I read Stuart's criticisms. The column, he said, was turning into a picaresque account of Matt Gross's adventures, not at all the colorful-but-useful series of narrative travel tips he'd hoped the Frugal Traveler would be. By accepting free accommodations from my alma mater, I'd done something no reader could do—a grave violation of the column's precepts. The writing was flat. I'd even failed to provide the names and addresses of the aperitivo bars I'd liked so much. And this wasn't the first time. My two previous columns, from Lisbon and Galicia, were just as disappointing.

What, he asked, was the problem? Was I taking on assignments for other publications, and thus ignoring my primary responsibilities? Or did I just not get it?

“If things don't improve,” he wrote, “both in the quality and depth of your reporting—if I am not convinced by the next couple of columns that you are taking this assignment as seriously as we are—then I am going consider pulling the plug on it. We'll get you home—as promised—but I am not going to continue to subsidize a column that doesn't meet our needs or give the readers (or my bosses, to be frank) what they expected when they responded so enthusiastically to its launch. To do so would undermine the progress
we are making on the Travel Web site with Web-only material, and also risk tarnishing the name ‘Frugal Traveler.'”

I packed my bags for Venice, trembling. This was serious. Stuart was right: My columns had been terrible—lacking in both relatable, replicable adventures and money-saving advice for would-be frugal travelers. I thought of excuses. The too-brief word count of each column meant I had to squeeze too many things together: The Lisbon story was, for half its length, about the basic premise of the trip—circle the globe, living as well as I could on $100 a day—and my attempts to price out airfare, followed by an account of my first days in Portugal. My material circumstances, meanwhile, were frustrating: I was writing not on a laptop but on a Palm Pilot, with a flimsy, erratic wireless keyboard, and I had neither a reliable Internet connection nor a calm place to work. I was constantly on the move, constantly reporting, constantly collecting experiences. How could I write decently at the same time?

Those excuses, however, were just excuses. I couldn't go back to Stuart with such lousy complaints. But what could I do? What did he and the
Times
expect from me? It's not like I'd ever trained to do this work. I'd become a travel writer almost entirely by accident. I'd become a writer because I didn't know how to do anything else. And I'd learned how to travel frugally because I had no other choice.

T
he lecture hall was a cement cavern that stretched at least fifty feet, and my voice would have echoed throughout the space had it not had to compete with the roar of trucks, the honking of motorbikes, and the barking of wild, sad dogs that bled through the paneless windows and open doors. My students—young, fresh-faced, barely able to understand a single word I said—filed in and took their seats among rows of wooden desks. There were fifty of them. Maybe sixty. It was the first day of my Introduction to Literature class at the Ho Chi Minh City Open University.

I wrote “Matt Gross” on the blackboard, but the humidity and my light touch—I have a visceral hatred of chalk—rendered it nearly illegible. I began speaking, then almost shouting to be heard over the noise from outside, trying to keep my syntax simple. We had a textbook, a tragically photocopied thing bound in transparent plastic, and its first short story—the first work of English-language literature I would be teaching these kids—was about a girl and her dog on a presumably Australian sheep farm. To my eyes, it appeared to have been written for middle-schoolers; although I can't remember the plot specifics, it was earnest and uncomplicated, with minimal subtext. The students, Ms. Thanh had told me, were supposed to have read it already, but like freshmen everywhere, they hadn't.

To get them accustomed to speaking in class, I had each read aloud a paragraph. This was, as I'd expected, a slow and painful process. No one spoke English particularly well, and fewer still were comfortable performing for their peers. But little by little, we got through the text.

When I started asking the class questions about the story, it immediately became clear we were all in trouble. Silence—utter silence. Even the barking dogs and honking mopeds seemed muted. As I asked more questions about the story's theme and meaning and characterization, I could tell these concepts were too sophisticated for students struggling not only with a foreign language but with a teacher who, probably unlike every instructor they'd ever had, wanted them to participate in the discussion of the work. I had to change tack.

In my EFL training course the previous summer, I'd been taught that students—or “learners,” as we were supposed to call them—often felt shy speaking imperfectly before a native speaker, and that the way to get them more comfortable was to have them speak to one another. So, I had an idea. I broke them into ten small groups and assigned each group an investigation based on one of the five W questions: Who was in the story? Where was it taking place?
When was it taking place? What was happening? And why did the author choose to tell the story?

Incredibly, they understood, and got to work breaking this flimsy tale into its constituent elements. For ten minutes, they brainstormed, and I even heard English phrases and sentences floating among the Vietnamese. When I asked each group to present their work, they actually got things right, dissecting the characters not only of the girl but of her dog, too, even if they were slightly confused about where (France?) and when (present day?) the story took place.

But the question of
Why?
was more complicated. Both of the groups assigned to contemplate the deeper meaning of the story saw it solely as moral instruction—this was a tale designed, as all tales were, to show us how, or how not, to behave. The girl's actions were representative, symbolic, with no weight or impact outside of their commentary on society and an individual's proper place within it.

This was, of course, pure Marxist-Leninist literary thought, as taught to generations of students throughout the communist world. Literature exists to improve us and our country; it is unambiguous; it is written with purpose.

There were only a few minutes left in class, so I spoke, again raising my voice to be heard over the outside noise. Maybe, I suggested, the author of this story had written it for other reasons—to try to understand the thinking of the young girl, to make sense of something perhaps she herself had gone through as a child, to capture a particular historical moment in Australia, or even, possibly, for the pleasure of conveying a minor drama in elegant language. These were not deep interpretations, but I needed to get the students to consider other possibilities—anything but the “moral lessons” of literature.

Class ended. I'd survived it, and invented a reading framework that I could apply throughout the semester. The students had spoken aloud, and one, a cute girl named Marie who spoke English surprisingly well, thanked me personally afterward. My anti-Marxist-Leninist approach to literature might one day bite me in the ass when
I applied for Communist Party membership, but for now I was relieved. In the past sixty minutes, I'd earned a whopping thirty thousand Vietnamese dong—just under $3.

This, I knew as I rode my Chinese-made bicycle back to the Lucy Hotel, was going to be a problem. Ms. Thanh had come through with this teaching gig, but a weekly hour-long lecture wouldn't come close to paying my bills, even if I covered other teacher's classes now and again. The $15-an-hour courses I taught for ELT Lotus helped, but those were still only two or three days a week. And Suzanne, an Indonesian woman who lived at the Lucy Hotel, had hooked me up with a friend of hers who needed a tutor for Ferdinand, her chubby eight-year-old son.

Altogether, I was bringing in a few hundred dollars a month, barely enough to pay my fairly meager expenses. Foremost among these was my rent at the Lucy: $300, which was reduced to $210 when I asked not to receive three liters of bottled water per day. Still, I investigated even cheaper options in the backpacker zone. Following a tip, I walked down one of the alleys that thread through Vietnam's urban blocks, climbed several interior staircases, ascended a ladder, and popped my head through a hatch into a dark attic where a young Japanese guy sat in his underwear. Sharing the room, explained the landlord who'd led me there, would be $4 a day.

“I'll think about it,” I lied.

Beyond that, the Vietnamese food I was trying to learn to enjoy cost very little; if I spent more than $5 or $7 on a meal, I was splurging. Beers and gin-and-tonics ran a dollar or two, depending on whether I bought them at a dive like the Saigon Café or at Q Bar, a cavernous, multichambered lounge installed under the city's Beaux-Arts opera house.

And that was really it. I had a small cushion—$2,000 my parents had given me—but that was slowly disappearing as I dealt with issues both serious (flying to Bangkok to arrange a proper long-term visa) and trivial (buying a nice Aiwa CD player). I even had an American
Express card, although opportunities to use it in undeveloped, unconnected Vietnam were few indeed.

Soon, I knew, something would have to give: I was making almost nothing, and I was unwilling to ask my parents for a cash infusion (although I would let them pay the occasional small Amex bill). All my life, they'd given me everything, and apart from the money I'd earned in college—as a delivery guy for Domino's and a video clerk in Baltimore—I'd had to rely on them. For years, I'd looked forward to finishing college and striking out on my own, and now, in my first stab at independence, halfway around the globe, I was flailing.

More frustrating still, I was surrounded by glamorous expatriates with flashy jobs. At Q Bar, I met bright young architects and graphic designers and video game producers and filmmakers and entrepreneurs and admen (and women) staffing the newly opened offices of Saatchi & Saatchi. They bought vintage Vespa scooters and lived in castle-like villas in the suburbs and ordered Scotch and sushi and foie gras like those were everyday snacks for twenty-five-year-olds. They bought tailored suits in Hong Kong and went scuba diving in the Philippines. I didn't resent them—I wanted to
be
them, for they all seemed to have come to Vietnam knowing what they were there to do: make money and live awesomely. Meanwhile, I couldn't even tuck my shirt in and had to turn down bottled water to make the rent.

There was, of course, another option: I could become a backpacker. When I moved to Vietnam, I hadn't even known such a lifestyle existed, but I became aware of it quite quickly. They were everywhere throughout the Pham Ngu Lao area, bearded guys in tank tops and tie-dyed pants, willowy girls in long skirts, all tanned, all musty, all with enormous high-tech, high-capacity backpacks towering over their skinny bodies. They drank the cheapest beers, slept in un-air-conditioned misery, and subsisted not on street food but on banana pancakes and french fries in the restaurants that catered to them. They would hang around seemingly forever, then
vanish to the next low-budget destination, or maybe back to finance jobs in London or New York, leaving behind thumb-smudged bootleg copies of last year's Lonely Planet.

The Vietnamese called them
tây ba lô
—literally, “Westerner with a bag”—and looked down on them for their shabby attire. As did I and the other semipermanent expatriates. Though we inhabited the same quarter of town, and often the same bars and restaurants, I rarely spoke to any backpackers, and so most of my impressions of their lifestyle were just assumptions. Were they really as cheap—and as trust-fundedly rich—as everyone said? I didn't know. All I knew was that I wanted to keep away from them, for fear of being perceived as a filthy transient myself. And I knew, too, that unless I could improve my circumstances, the distance between us would shrink to nothing.

One morning in mid-November, I biked to the offices of ELT Lotus, housed in a middle school whose female students all wore white ao dai, the long, nearly transparent traditional gown of Vietnam. At the long table in Lotus's common room were strewn local English-language publications—
Vietnam Economic Times, Vietnam Investment Review
, the
Saigon Times
, and
Viet Nam News
, the staterun daily newspaper. After murmuring hellos to Dave and Adrian, I took a seat and flipped through the
Viet Nam News
, my eyes settling on an intriguing story. Next month, it seemed, the Hanoi International Film Festival would be taking place. Over an eighteen-day period, it would feature movies from Germany and India, China and Italy—even the United States was involved: Warner Bros. was premiering
The Bridges of Madison County
, the first major American postwar production to be subtitled in Vietnamese for official distribution.