Vietnam’s Nourishing Streets
Thoughts on Graham Holliday’s:
Eating Vietnam: Dispatches from a Blue Plastic Table
Ecco Books, an imprint of HarperCollins — 2015 — 352 Pages
I was not prepared for this book.
And that is very odd.
I had wanted it from the moment that I learned of its publication. There were earlier years in my time in Hanoi when checking in on Mr. Holliday’s Noodlepie blog typically outstripped my desire to email distant family and friends when hunting down a reliable internet connection. “Everybody” read Noodlepie in those days. It was only natural to be excited for what seemed to be its printed culmination.
Being a long-term foreign resident of Vietnam, there was also that inevitable sense of needing to check the work. So much utter nonsense is published about contemporary Vietnam that just about everyone I know who lives here and cares about the place feels compelled to make sure it’s getting a fair portrayal. An absurd worry in this case, given the immense credibility he had already established with most of us who feel this urge, but the urge cares not for reasons.
And then there is the topic itself. The cuisine of Vietnam is one of the easiest ways to get hooked on this broadly fascinating country. For those of us who have spent large portions of our adult lives wandering Vietnam’s alleyways, it is often the food that has marked our progress. Learning about new dishes and developing an appreciation for old ones while phasing in and out of “regular” status at hole-in-the-wall eateries anchors my sense of time and place in Vietnam the way music once provided a soundtrack to my youth’s stream of big moments.
Still, this book caught me out.
Something about the title and publishing’s present obsession with insider guidance led me to assume Mr. Holliday would be compiling a systematic way to contextualize the chaos of Vietnam’s streets as they relate to food. Sure, it would still be filled with all the character sketches of his favorite vendors and his deft manner of blending a newcomer’s enthusiasm with a veteran’s savvy, but it would basically be, “You can eat just like a Vietnamese street food insider too!” I mean, doesn’t everyone have a shortcut to sell these days?
To my present delight, I was completely wrong.
(Should you ever find yourself reading this review, Graham, I apologize for selling you so short. It won’t happen again.)
Eating Vietnam is not a guide to anything that I can discern. It certainly isn’t a travel book. When it comes right down to it, it’s not even a food book in any anticipated sense of the genre. More properly, it is a memoir. Its pages memorialize times and places I miss terribly.
Hanoi around the turn of the millennium was unlike anything I’m ever likely to encounter again. Anachronism and disrepair. Raw optimism. Making it all up on the fly. And that uniquely Vietnamese indifference to the plain weirdness of it all. The times come flooding back as the author describes settling in the city and having his first encounters with the cuisine.
While detailing his growing familiarity with bún chả, phở, bún thang, and all the other dishes Hanoi is renowned for, we also learn about landlord trouble, the neighborhood tea stand, and burned out expats. We meet the girl who tips the scales toward staying a bit longer. For those of us who lived in the city at around the same time, who drank the same bia hơi in the same dens, braved the same toilets, and knew some of the same misfits, malcontents, and pillars of the community, the effect is devastating.
His move to Saigon, where the Noodlepie era began, is equally rich in identifiable, lived experiences for any of us who visited or moved to the city for any length of time. Saigon’s big flavors, overflowing herb baskets, and relatively tidy operating environments all get faithfully recreated, as do the north-south food rivalries and the strange, defend-to-the-death attachments expats have for the city they first called home.
Of course, there is a lot about Vietnamese street food too. If you’re there just for the food, you won’t be disappointed. As the book progresses, so does the stature of The Food within it. By the end, it hardly seems about Graham Holliday any longer at all.
And this is entirely appropriate. In fact, it is my favorite part of the entire work. It mirrors what we all experience in moving to a new place. We tend to move with the flimsiest of pretenses for why we should be there. We think we know something about the place that makes it a good fit, but in reality, the move is entirely about ourselves. What else could it be? We know next to nothing about the land we are about to stumble through.
Upon arrival, we’re still looking at this new place from the perspective of somewhere else. We squint and imagine we’re coming to terms with it all, but the transformation required still means the most memorable experiences are personal ones. But then, if we can manage to remain open to what is around us, something begins to change. Our sense of the default shifts, and we can really start to allow the place to exist on its own terms without judgement or confrontation. We can ask honest questions. We might even learn something.
There’s no shortage of back-in-the-day moments in Eating Việt Nam for a sentimental long term foreign resident like myself, but the way that it subtly demonstrates how somewhere can go from being a premise for personal experience to fully fledged place that comes and goes without us even as we make our way within it, will always be what I appreciate most.
A lot of friends and family think they understand why I moved to Vietnam in the first place, but even they all end up asking me why I never left. I’ll know what to send them now.
