The Turk Who Loved Apples Read Free Page B

Baltimore, it vanished off the street one night. A theft, I figured, particularly since Grandma Rosalie had outfitted the car with a newfangled cellular phone. A few days later the police found the car wrapped around a lamppost— sans cell, of course—and promptly notified my late grandmother by mail. Only when I called to check in did they direct me to an impound lot.
    In addition to being strangely technologically prescient, Grandma Rosalie had also arranged zero-deductible insurance for the car, so it cost nothing to put the car in the shop, where after another couple of weeks it emerged almost as good as new. (Which, for a lilac Acclaim, was not really so good.) The car chugged along in relative health for another two months, until one day in Washington—where I was spending five weeks learning how to teach English as a foreign language—I discovered it wouldn’t go more than about thirty-five miles per hour. The transmission was shot. Worse, by then insurance wouldn’t cover it.
    One week and roughly $600 later, I picked up the Plymouth from yet another garage, threw my bags and books in the trunk, and headed for Baltimore to fetch Tammy and enjoy a nice vacation with my folks.
    Bang.
    T his series of calamities would signify nothing—the all-too-short life and death of a generic American sedan—were it not for my post-Chincoteague plans. That is, less than a week after the crash, I was supposed to be moving to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
    The year was 1996. I’d just graduated from college with a degree in creative writing, an expensive certification of my unsuitability for work. Unsure of what to do next, I’d fixated on Vietnam, which had recently reestablished diplomatic ties with its old enemy the United States. It would be my future, my destiny, my salvation. I would go there and . . . do something. I wasn’t sure what. I had some vague ideas about mastering the Vietnamese language and joining the Communist Party (less an ideological goal than a route to power and influence). Also, I was going to write big, important, best-selling novels in English at the same time.
    But mostly, I really liked Vietnamese food, and figured that if I was going to live abroad, it should be somewhere I really liked the food.
    In other words, in the months leading up to a life-changing move, the Fates seemed to be delivering me a series of dire, travel-related warnings, the kinds of omens that, in a bad movie, would foreshadow the protagonist’s travel-related demise. Had I been able to take a step back from my life and observe the events with a more analytical (and possibly more paranoid) attitude, I might have delayed, canceled, or at least worried more about what awaited me in the former Saigon.
    Instead, I was oblivious, as I had been for much of my life, to the reality that things could go awry, and in ways that could do me physical or psychological damage. Like Chauncey Gardiner in Being There , I moved through the world unaware of looming danger and potential disaster.
    In preparing for the move to Vietnam, for example, I had done the minimum of research. There was that teacher-training course in Washington, which I’d taken more because I didn’t have the first clue about teaching English than because I thought having a certificate might help me find a job. Even so, that was general preparation—it had nothing to do with Ho Chi Minh City as a specific and unique destination.
    In those days, the Internet was of little use to travelers. This was before TripAdvisor, before Travelocity and Expedia, before blogs, before—if you can conceive of such a thing—Google. I hadn’t posted about my plans in any online forums. I had never seen a map of Ho Chi Minh City. I didn’t know where I was going to live, or whether Le Thi Thanh, an acquaintance of a friend of my father, would show up to greet me at the airport, or whether the teaching job that Ms. Thanh had