Street peddlers

Lena and I are working on a story about street peddlers for AsiaLIFE, the glossy English rag in Saigon. (I'm freelancing for the magazine! Very exciting.) We're chatting up every roving peddler who comes by our door as they make their winding, daily rounds through the many miles of Saigon's back alleys.

The peddlers push their heavy carts or ride their bicycles laden with baskets from 5:30 a.m. to late at night, covering up to 50 kilometers a day, calling out what they have to offer in these nasal, sing-song cries. Even the Vietnamese have a hard time deciphering what exactly they're offering, since their words are often distorted to slip more easily from the throat.

Today we talked to an ice cream man, a soup maker and a young man selling bananas. We mean to interview one of the women who pick up garbage for recycling, as well as to the roving masseuse, who claps cymbals together to announce his arrival. We'd like to talk to the CD guy, who blares copyright-infringed music from speakers attached to his bicycle, and to the man who sells a special kind of rice dumpling and uses a loud, scratchy recording to advertise and save his voice.

The most these peddlers make each day is $7 or $8. The least they earn is $1 to $2, enough they say to buy food for the day. But all told us they appreciate the freedom of their job; they like to roam the city on their bicycles, making whatever left or right-hand turn they please. They just wish that every day, they made $8.

This ice cream seller, whose name Lena wrote down in her notebook (she's gone out!), is 42 and been selling ice cream on the streets for 18 years. He started out working for an ice cream factory in Saigon until he decided to launch out on his own after a few years. He still buys his ice cream from the factory. On a good day he makes 70,000 dong a day, about $4, he says. He has a family in the central part of the country who are surviving on his farm. He sees them every three or so months, more often during the rainy season when no one wants to eat ice cream. For us, he dribbled condensed milk over our cones, each 3,000 dong. (And he sells durian ice cream!! Lena told me too late or I would have ordered it.)

Here's a few photos of the cute banana seller.


This man is 27, unmarried and works in three districts. He sells bananas -- 11,000 dong for a bunch -- and coconuts that he buys on weekly trips to the south. He's from the north but came to Saigon after following some friends. I don't know more details...Lena's in charge here and she's gone out to see a movie!

Here's the soup seller, selling sup cua, a kind of crab-meat stew with quail eggs and mushrooms. It's delicious and spicy. He and his wife, who cooks up the soup, both sell sup cua by the cup for 5,000 dong. But his wife has a permanent spot on a sidewalk somewhere, whereas he pushes his soup from a motor scooter. About four years ago he was working as a mechanic, but then the government decided to build a new road through an ancient outdoor market where his wife used to make a good living selling her soup. Her income dwindled, and so he quit his job to support her business. He admits that he makes more money selling soup, 100,000 to 150,000 dong a day, than he did as a mechanic, but that it is not really a natural job for him.

A technical Bon Appétit entry coming up!

Today I enrolled in a cooking class with three other students -- a friendly Australian couple and a strange, laconic Spanish guy -- for $40 a pop (and sizzle). That amount of money would have funded my diet here for a month, or more. But I feel as though I learned a few valuable tricks to make food taste Vietnamesey, a skill I hope to replicate back in Maine kitchens -- that is, if I can find dried ear mushrooms, black fish sauce and green mung beans.

The chef started off by explaining our ingredients, which the school had prepared prior to our morning class so we didn't have to do any manual labor other than stirring sauce with our chop sticks, pouring clams into clay pots, rolling a spring roll or two, and ultimately eating our creations.


Here at my station are, from left to right, the ingredients for spring rolls: red chili, garlic, purple shallots, green onions, salt, pepper, dried chicken powder pellets or bột thịt gà (the healthy, modern version of MSG), and coconut water. They were carefully arranged in delicate porcelain bowls (which still doesn't justify the class fee, I don't think). In the big bowls are tamarind sauce (made by soaking tamarind pulp in warm water for 10 to 15 minutes) and lime juice. And you can't see the black fish sauce and soybean oil at the back. Spring rolls have a lot going on, evidently.

To begin, we first made a light but spicy dipping sauce, which included sugar (there's sugar in everything). We also mixed in lime juice, fish sauce, garlic and chili.

Important note: This sauce is for the fried rolls only, which are like splashy ballroom dancers compared to their fresh-roll cousins, the clomping contra dancers. The fried rolls have so much more pizazz and flash! (I'll explain a bit more later.) The slighter fresh rolls require a sauce that's a bit heavier, to balance their insubstantiality, made with a base of yellow mung beans.

We had to cook up this mush for the rolls, which included mushrooms, dried shrimp, pork, taro (which can be replaced with turnip or sweet potato), and boiled crab meat.

Oh dear! I have no photo of the next important step. We laid out our flimsy round rice papers and dribbled coconut water over them, which supposedly gives the rolls their golden color when they're fried. Then we placed a dollop of the meat and mushroom mush in them and rolled them up before dropping them into hot soybean oil.

Here they are when they're done. But there's yet a few more steps before one is allowed to bite into them. They require fancy adornment, a few spangles and glitter.

The Vietnamese eat their fried spring rolls with fresh herbs -- sweet basil and mint, for example -- and roll them up with iceberg lettuce and white rice noodles. White rice noodles are cooler and more refreshing than normal pasta; they are like the sorbet of noodles.

The garnish, pictured above. There were probably orphans out back cutting up the tomatoes into these beautiful lotus-like flowers.

Here's a roll that's ready to be rolled up in lettuce leaf, mint, basil and rice noodles before being plunged into the dipping sauce. Although I'm not entirely sure about this, it seems that every tendency a food has toward a certain flavor or consistency has to be balanced with its opposite. So something fried and crunchy must be accompanied by ingredients that are simple, light and fresh. Fruit, especially sour fruit, is often joined here with salt and chili. (I've been told though, that this doesn't exactly counter the strong flavor, but rather brings out its undertones; in the case of tangy fruit, the salt-chili mix coaxes out its reluctant sweetness. The earthy, steadfast herbs might reinforce the fleeting crispness of the salty fried roll, which so instantly disappears in your mouth.)

Next, for our main dishes, we made coconut rice, caramelized pork in a clay pot, and sweet and sour clam soup with dill. Below the chef is pouring coconut water over the rice before steaming it in a clay pot. (It's also a good idea to cook rice with ginger if you're in poor health, we were told. And though I was heartily warned not to do it, I think steamed rice with coconut juice and ginger sounds deliciously reasonable.)

Below are the stages of caramelizing pork. Instead of pork, you can easily use any miserable meat substitute!

First, we cracked open our miniature red chili, a dramatic start to a dramatic dish.

Then we added other ingredients, including that salty dried chicken powder and caramel syrup (which the orphans made for us, but it is easy to make the syrup with sugar and water, or even sugar and coconut water).

Once you start cooking the pork in a clay pot, you have to add more sugar to caramelize the sauce. When the pork is done in about seven minutes, you sprinkle sliced green onions and a dash of pepper over it, and serve it with the delicate coconut-steamed rice.

But before the grand chow-down, we had to make sweet and sour clam soup with dill, a dish that comes from the north, probably influenced by the Chinese.

Here are some tomatoes, sour starfruit (which are considered a superfruit because they are so high in antioxidants), chopped green onion, dill and a red chili. In the bowl are small, white clams.

Not sure why, but the instructor made a big deal out of using a stirring spoon made from coconut. Every detail probably makes a drastic difference to the refined palette! To make the soup tarter and less sweet, you add more tamarind sauce and salt. For a sweeter flavor, you add more sugar.

Anyway, tart, sweet -- the soup was unbelievable! A supersoup! The instructor advised us to eat it when we were fighting off colds and other bugs.

Here's the final result above.


And for dessert, we ate a kind of che. This one has sweet boiled bananas (they're boiled in their skins with a dash of salt), tapioca, coconut milk and sesame seeds.

Bananas are everywhere; evidently there are 28 varieties in Vietnam. Here's a big one that's about to go into the steamer, much to the chef's delight.

And the course gives out certificates at the end, a cutesy move that still doesn't justify the price. But the food was very yumsicles. Even the tormented, neurotic Spanish guy seemed somewhat moved by the dishes. Hopefully they will reinforce his will to live!

And for all of you who made it through this lengthy post, I will reward you by making you these dishes, plus a sweet mung bean and seaweed chè when I come home!

A surprising neighborhood in Saigon

If you cross the bridge close to my neighborhood, you pass onto this island called Binh Quoi, a quiet world cut off from the teeming city.


Here are the backsides of the island homes along the river's edge, taken from the bridge. These houses might actually have pleasant fronts; often less care is taken with the home's rear when it's facing a smelly, pestilential river!

The island's western edge is crowded. But as you go farther east, it turns into a scene you might find in Vietnam's countryside miles away from the city, with dirt lanes and small farms.

The track narrowed, until it was wide enough just for a bicycle.

The cityscape was never too far in the distance.

The ubiquitous plastic bag! It shows up a lot in my photos, like Waldo.

This pond had a crust of mint-green algae.

The people living in the house above could step out onto their porch in the morning and catch their daily livelihood. Their little pond was bubbling with fish bobbing to the surface for bugs.

A small shop where I bought a rice cracker flavored with chili and fish oil, which smelled like it actually might have been river water. I ate the cracker anyway!

It's hard to see, but there are two little grungy dogs protecting their home here.

The animals are often grimy. I suppose the environment is so dusty and unclean that animals, despite their strong instinctual compulsion to groom, cannot stay on top of their feathers and fur. Even the herons have dirty wingtips, the pure white symbol so often associated with pastoral Asian scenes.

Grungy ducks.

A grungy water lily, or is it a lotus flower? I have shown restraint in taking photos of water lilies up to this point!

Decadence for the undeserving

I have gleaned that one is supposed to visit a spa while in Saigon. I'm not entirely sure why: Lena says its because the spa services -- the massages, facials, waxes, manicures and body wraps -- are cheap. But they're not that inexpensive. Regardless of my unsure justifications for this splurge, I decided that Lena and I should spend the afternoon in one and chose L'Apothiquaire, in District Three. She was up for it!


We had a 75-minute massage, then sat by the pool under a heavy layer of gray clouds for a half hour.

When the depressing sky became too much, we headed for the steam room and sauna and tried to sweat away the impurities that are currently clogging our facial pores.


Lena, by the way, said the massage was "orgasmic!" I thought it was pretty good, like a warm cup of green tea.


The spa itself was in a beautiful four-story French colonial villa. Some other decadent and likely undeserving person lived there once.

It was huge, with many rooms and winding hallways that turned corners into secluded courtyard patios surrounded by flowers. Muzak was being constantly piped into the various "treatment" rooms.

The case of the mixed-up fruit

If you read my entry below on the durian, you'll know I've been wanting to dedicate a lot of poems to this mysterious yellow fruit I've been eating every day. After googling "Vietnamese fruit" to identify it, I decided it had to be the durian. That's when I also discovered the extreme opinions people have about the controversial food, which seems to unfailingly inspire passionate outbursts of either devotion or distress.

But Lena told me this morning I had misidentified the fruit! The yellow thing I liked so much is the humble jackfruit, which elicits no emotional response whatsoever, as far as I can tell. (I believe the jackfruit and durian might be related, though.)

You pull these plump, buttery morsels of sweetness from the jackfruit rind and chew them, making sure to slip the big seed out first.

Mystified now by the durian, however, I hunted one down today, finding a batch for sale by the side of a major road in District Three. The vendor, who was smoking a cigarette and drinking a coffee, gladly sold me one for more tha $4. Expensive -- the price of four bowls of pho.

As soon as she cut the thorny rind open, I smelled the infamous odor that reportedly can cause people to gag several meters away. The durian is outlawed on public buses, I think, for this reason. I grew worried; the smell wafting my way reminded me of an old musty cushion peed on some days earlier by a bad cat.


The lady placed in front of me a lump of yellow mush that looked like an omelet made with some exotic animal's mashed-up brains. A thin layer of mucous glistened over the solid gelatinous mass. Despite my forebodings, I launched in and ate a bite. Oh the vile thing! It was too much! It was like eating something that had been ripped out of a dead cow's intestines and regurgitated by a vulture. It had the consistency of a slug, and I had to rip long shreds of it off, like decomposing tentacles, to properly finish the thing. But the woman was watching me and smiling and I ate as much as I could. (Sorry about all the references to dead or slimy creatures -- I am completely overcome!)

I thought I would vomit. The fruit in Vietnamese is called "one's sorrows" -- quite fitting.

Here's what those naysayers had to say about this hideous fruit (snatched from Wikipedia). I had disregarded them as desensitized Westerners prior to sampling the horrible durian.

British novelist Anthony Burgess writes that eating durian is "like eating sweet raspberry blancmange in the lavatory."

Chef Andrew Zimmern compares the taste to "completely rotten, mushy onions."

Anthony Bourdain, while a lover of durian, relates his encounter with the fruit as thus: "Its taste can only be described as...indescribable, something you will either love or despise. ...Your breath will smell as if you'd been French-kissing your dead grandmother."

Travel and food writer Richard Sterling says: "Its odor is best described as pig-shit, turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock."

I will stick with the jackfruit, which is really so delicious. Like a crunchy banana candy, truly the pinnacle of evolution.