The Turk Who Loved Apples (36 page)

That day and the next, I hung out with Abdelaziz, meeting the owners of five-star boutique hotels and former national soccer heroes, drinking wine with his friends in modernist condos, and going on lunch dates with his glamorous female friends, one of whom
flirtatiously asked what I, the New Yorker, thought of
les tunisiennes
. Uh, how do you say “flummoxed” in French? (And where was my brother when I needed him?)

O
kay, now this seems promising: a quirky “Carthaginian” who seems to embody modern Tunisia. Where did he lead me? What strange adventures did we get up to together? Well, problem there: After a few days, the relationship with Abdelaziz fizzled. Suddenly, he was hard to get a hold of—I'd text and get no response. I wasn't sure if he was avoiding me—was my French
that
bad? should I have said something clever about
les tunisiennes
?—or if he simply had other things to do, but without a local contact I felt untethered. I e-mailed other members of A Small World, heard nothing back. I considered CouchSurfing, but felt overwhelmed by the dozens of Tunisian members. Which of them should I contact?

At a loss, I turned to Twitter, hoping to plead for suggestions or meet new friends, but Twitter was blocked. Oh, right: Tunisia, for all its beauty and ease, was also a police state, run for twenty-seven years by President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, whose face gazed down from billboards all over Tunis.

“I bet his hair hasn't grown a bit grayer over the years,” I'd said to Abdelaziz as we drove past one.

“On the contrary,” he said, “it's gotten blacker!”

So, politics? If only I'd known that within six months, a vegetable seller in a small Tunisian town would set himself on fire, kicking off the region-wide revolutions (and quasi-revolutions) that became the Arab Spring, I'd have delved deeper, sought out persecuted bloggers, uncovered the nasty, honest underbelly of this vacation paradise. I'd have had something serious to discuss with Abdelaziz, who in post-revolutionary Tunisia became the head of the country's Republican Party, which was less about American-style antifederalism than about secularism and the free market. On one of our lunch dates, he and
his blond friend had counted women in headscarves on the street—only three, but that was too many for him, and a marked change, he said, from a few years earlier.

But with only four days here, how deep could I get into Tunisia's complicated politics?
Afar
magazine had assigned me just one thousand words for this story—hardly enough space to describe the setting and craft a couple of meaningful scenes, let alone discuss the plight of Tunisia's working classes in a sagging economy, the suppression and potential rise of Islamist factions, and the dicey position of any nominally secular state in the greater Middle East, especially if I couldn't always get Abdelaziz, my most politically involved contact, to meet up with me.

Depth of any kind felt out of my reach. With no proper assignment, I felt unfocused and unsettled—in part because I was quite literally unsettled. After spending my first night at the weird exmuseum in Tunis proper, I'd moved to a cute little hotel in Sidi Bou Saïd, the Bou Fares, which meant that if I wanted to go anywhere outside the village I needed to hail a taxi or wait for the commuter train. And I did this a lot—there always seemed to be somewhere else I needed to be, the Carthage National Museum, or a restaurant serving lamb's head in the Tunis medina, or an interior design boutique in another suburb.

There were pleasures in this, of course. The conversations with taxi drivers were amusing. One was terribly disappointed when I told him I did most of the cooking back home—a woman's job, he said, insisting I marry a Muslim woman, or maybe four of them, one to cook, another to keep house, another to be pregnant, and the last to sleep with until she gets pregnant, after which they'd all rotate duties.

“How many wives do you have?” I asked.

None, he said, then added: “All the women of Tunisia are my wives! Except my mother and my sister. But all the rest are my whores!”

I loved it, this weird interlude on the road from Tunis to Sidi Bou Saïd. But it was, I told myself, only an interlude—it didn't matter, it didn't count, certainly not compared with what would happen once I stepped out of the cab. Perhaps, I often wondered, I should instead have made a beeline for the desert—to have sought out Luke Skywalker's old home near Tataouine. That at least would have given me some narrative structure on which to hang my observations of Tunisian life. But here in transit—and I always seemed to be in transit—I was merely skimming the surface of things. How could I shape these random moments into a story that made sense to my editors, my readers, and myself? And if I couldn't, well, then I was nothing more than a goddamn tourist.

A
s far back as I can remember, I've always hated tourists. As a teenager in Williamsburg, Virginia, I saw them everywhere—driving slowly on the Colonial Parkway, wandering in poorly dressed packs up Duke of Gloucester Street (Dog Street, to us locals). They were omnipresent, always in my way, stupid as hell. We called them “tourons,” a portmanteau of “tourist” and “moron.” We hated them most of all because we depended on them. The town ran on tourism—Colonial Williamsburg, Busch Gardens, and Water Country USA. Tourists slept in Williamsburg's hotels and ate at Williamsburg's restaurants, from Taco Bell to Mama Steve's Pancake House to fancy-pants joints like the Trellis.

And because the town ran on tourism, the town (it seemed to us) ignored its own residents. To be a Williamsburg teenager—a teenager with time on his hands—in the 1980s and early 1990s was to be bored, and to be bored of being bored. Where could we go? What could we do? There were no coffee shops, no central parks, no teen centers, no video arcades—nothing that might suggest to the youth of the town that they were wanted in any kind of public space. Sure, we had the library and, eventually, a twenty-four-hour Denny's.
But often we'd set up camp in the little alley off Dog Street, near the Williamsburg Theater (okay, we had an art-house cinema, too), and sneer at the tourons who obliviously passed us by. What else could we do? The money they spent trickled down, in obvious and not-so-obvious ways, into the hands of our parents. Without them, there'd be no us. And so we hated them even more.

Within a few years, however, I had landed in Vietnam—on a tourist visa. Yeesh. This could not stand. I was not a tourist. I was here to go deep and long, to work my way inside Vietnamese culture, to understand and adapt and prove that I was more than just an overflowing wallet from abroad. How I would accomplish this I didn't know, but as I surveyed the neighborhood I'd wound up calling home—the messy zone centered on Pham Ngu Lao Street—I knew what I would not become: a backpacker. Sloppily dressed, itinerant, subsisting on banana pancakes and sticking to Lonely Planet–approved routes, they were almost as bad, I could sense, as the tourons of Williamsburg. And though we might very well all hang out at Apocalypse Now, Bodhi Tree, and the Saigon Café, it was obvious, to me at least, that we were hardly the same class of Vietnam visitor.

One afternoon at Saigon Café, however, Dave Danielson—the American who'd given me my first real teaching job in Vietnam—brought my attention to a third kind of visitor, one I hadn't been aware of at all. Sitting up straight in his plastic chair, he adopted a mock German accent: “I have a passport and a Visa card,” he said, sounding more Hans und Franz than Schwarzenegger. “I'm not a tourist—I'm a
traveler
.”

It was a distinction I'd hear dozens of times over the years. A traveler, that is, was no mere tourist. A traveler was smarter and sharper, more flexible and less tied to itineraries, more willing to go off the beaten path, less concerned with having the right experience and seeing the important sights, more excited about connections with locals than about acquiring souvenirs. For travelers, life was about travel. For tourists, travel was what you did on vacation.

If the traveler-tourist dichotomy had first been presented to me differently, I might have signed right on to the traveler side. It was pretty close to how I viewed myself—mostly uninterested in bagging the famous sights, eager for weird experiences, excited to meet new people, willing to put up with more than a bit of discomfort. Unlike the tourons (and even the backpackers), the other travelers and I would come to know the world in a fuller, better, more meaningful way.

But Dave's presentation eliminated the possibility that I'd ever unquestioningly self-identify as a traveler. As he made perfectly clear, travelers were a snooty bunch who considered themselves far superior to everyone else. As much as they touted their deeper, more honest travel experiences, they also engaged in constant one-upsmanship, judging each other on arbitrary scales of authenticity. They were almost worse than the tourists, because at least tourists knew their place, and probably wouldn't speak to you anyway. But a traveler—a traveler would want to know where you'd been, and if you'd found the secret noodle shop or met the mad, multilingual Buddhist monk in the mountains or done ayahuasca (“real ayahuasca, man”) in Peru, because if you hadn't, well, then you hadn't really been there at all.

Of course, my own refusal to pick sides meant I was superior to both travelers and tourists. With no model to follow, I alone could decide what kind of, uh, traveler I was, and which, you know, tourist visas I'd get stamped into my passport.

But then what kind of traveler was I to be? What exactly did I want to do, here in Vietnam and anywhere else I might go?

I didn't know, and I doubt I ever formulated the questions in such explicit terms. Instead, I was too busy trying to find work and earn money, and those efforts, more than anything else, molded my approach to travel. As a poorly paid English teacher or a hustling writer/editor, I had relatively little time to explore Vietnam. While backpackers, tourists, and travelers alike were visiting battle sites from the French and American wars, I was riding my 70cc moped
to class. While they went cruising or kayaking among the dramatic limestone islands of Ha Long Bay, I was correcting hilarious typos at the
Viet Nam News
.

My life was never all work and no play. But instead of spending Sundays at the beach resorts of Vung Tau or Phan Thiet, my friends and I would head out the highway for an afternoon of ice-skating at the city's first rink, where despite the fact that it had just opened a crew of local teens was whirling and gliding like New England prep schoolers. I may have gone to the Museum of American War Crimes and to the Cu Chi Tunnels, but I made those excursions early in my stay, and as I carved out a life for myself in Ho Chi Minh City, such “touristy” attractions held less and less attraction for me. Not because they were touristy but because I had other, more important things to do.

In the fifteen years since I left Vietnam, I've often regretted this unintentional prioritizing of my own comfortable life over the serious exploration of a new country. Yes, I can tell people I lived in Vietnam for a year, but if they ask me about the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta or the coffee-producing Central Highlands, I can only shrug. If they want to know if Sapa, a northern town famous for its colorfully dressed ethnic minorities, is worth visiting, I can explain that, from what I've read and heard from knowledgeable friends, mass tourism has changed its tribal traditions into a money-making exercise in public theater—but of course, that's only what I've read and heard. I may know my way around Hanoi's ancient 36 Streets, but I've never seen Uncle Ho's embalmed corpse, on display at his mausoleum.

More tragic was my failure to learn Vietnamese. After dropping out of the class I'd enrolled in, I ceased improving almost entirely. I picked up a few things here and there, particularly curses and profanity, but four months in I was not yet able to cope with even the simplest situations in the local tongue. Not until February, when I visited Phnom Penh to cover the Southeast Asian Film Festival, did I renew my efforts to learn Vietnamese, for it was there that I saw
my good friend Douglas chat easily with hotel clerks, prostitutes, and moto-taxi drivers, who'd learned the language during Vietnam's decade-long occupation of Cambodia. When we returned to Saigon, I vowed to learn as much as I could, primarily by talking to the staff at the Lucy Hotel and asking everyone I knew for guidance and instruction. I was, by July, able to understand and answer the basic questions Vietnamese ask new acquaintances: What's your name? Where are you from? How old are you? Are you married? (And do you have children?) What's your job? What's your salary?

But that was it. I could order noodles, and direct a taxi, and cheer on my pool-playing pals (“
Hai qua
!”), but I couldn't have a proper conversation with anyone, about anything. Frustratingly, my accent was often good enough that people would assume I was more capable than I was. Then they'd pause, and wait for my reaction, and I'd stare at them blankly and, shamefully, admit I didn't understand a word.

There was so much I didn't know about this country that I loved, and yet in some ways I knew it very, very well. I knew how to cross the street safely through a flood of cars and motorbikes, and I knew how to open a bank account. I knew how to make a toast (“
Trăm ph
n trăm!
” means 100 percent, or Bottoms up!) and I knew how to handle things when the toasting got too intense (“
Năm mu'ò'i ph
n trăm
!” or 50 percent!). I knew where to find good French pâté and when to eat
ph
, and when I wanted to buy a copy of the
International Herald Tribune
, I knew to ask around Pham Ngu Lao for the deaf newspaper vendor who always carried an extra copy.