At the Market

Inside me, I think that an animal goes through a
lot of pain in the whole cycle of death in the slaughterhouse; just living to
be killed. That whole situation is really messed up for animals, growing up in
those little cooped-up pens. I just don't think it’s worth eating that animal.
I think animals should be free. There's so much other food out there that
doesn't have to involve you in that cycle of pain and death.
-Zack de la Rocha, Rage Against the Machine

Food was without a doubt my biggest fear moving to Vietnam. My relationship with food
throughout my adult life has always been tenuous both physically and intellectually. For the first time I questioned whether the rationale for my vegetarianism was reason enough to maintain it in Vietnam. My beef was with the American industrial complex, not the consumption of meat itself. Also, even though I had mostly conquered the “sick feeling” I got from dining hall food in college, I has always choices based on avoiding foods that made me feel bad. I was now set to move to a third world country where just washing an apple in the sink can make you sick for
days. It made me anxious, which made me feel sick, which made me worry about being sick in the same cycle I’d had in college. It became so bad that I discussed seeing a psychiatrist about my fears with Reyna in the months preceding our departure. I arrived in Vietnam, scared and nervous, two days before Reyna. The trip over had become a confirmation of my worst fear; that I would be alone. Reyna is the intrepid one, not me. And here I was, stuck in a foreign land alone. The very first day, I called Alfredo who worked in our Vietnam office to help me through my first day. Alfredo would not have normally been my first choice of first day Vietnam companions because there were a couple other people I knew better from Las Vegas who had already relocated. As luck would have it, they were both out of town that weekend, it being a holiday in Vietnam. He and I had only met twice before, and had spoken to each other for less than five minutes before that day. Alfredo met me at my hotel and walked me around the
neighborhood. As soon as we turned off the street where my hotel sat I was lost. Every block looked the same: dirty and crowded with people and motorbikes. We walked until I thought I
would keel over. Alfredo must have thought I was insane because I kept saying that I wanted to stop and get a beer somewhere. After 24 hours of travelling and the added stress of Reyna getting stuck in LA had taken its toll. I’m not proud to admit, but I was desperate for a cold, soothing alcoholic drink. He took me to a bar called Phatty’s where I enjoyed my hesitant first taste of Tiger Beer; an Australian lager, not unlike Budweiser that is sold in nearly every bar in Vietnam. It felt fantastic to have something so familiar in my hand after days of our home not feeling like home, traveling and landing in this strange new place. The Tiger had the added benefit of soothing my fried nerves enough to order my first meal in Vietnam. I had vermicelli noodles with vegetables and it tasted fantastic. That night he took me to a Thai restaurant which was also quite good. Almost immediately I started feeling better about eating in Vietnam.
That feeling was put almost immediately into jeopardy when I went to work the next day. I had a
conversation with Mike, a two year veteran of our Vietnam office about food. He said that eating wasn’t really that big of a deal, but it was important to get my shots. He also said that I ran the risk of getting worms from the produce in country. I felt the good feelings regarding eating in Vietnam instantly drop from my stomach to my colon as I quietly excused myself from the conversation.
Reyna arrived two days later and, in the way that totally fit her character, we walked to the first outdoor restaurant we found and sat down. We were pouring sweat even though we’d only been outside for 15 minutes, but I was so happy to see her I didn’t care. The first two days alone had felt like weeks. We sat at a tiny table, on tiny chairs and ordered beers. The beers
were warm, and our server offered us ice. I was still way too wary to accept ice from a community bucket, preferring to safely drink my beer at outdoor temperature, but Reyna happily obliged and received an ice cube the size a Volkswagen to cool her beverage. She also ordered food, which totally blew me away. I have always been so careful about eating. If it comes between choosing between being hungry and eating questionable food, I will
always choose hungry, but she is so fearless. Her spirit of adventure gives me the courage to try new things almost every day. Unfortunately on this particular occasion, her eggrolls contained pork. We stayed in a hotel for the first three weeks in HCMC. The Kingston Hotel is situated two blocks west of the Ben Thanh Market, the largest and busiest market in the city. It is a strange and interesting place because it’s not only where locals go to buy all manner of goods necessary for day to day life, but also a tourist attraction where curious foreigners go to experience
how 98% of the world shops for food. As always, Reyna was the more adventurous one, and expressed excitement about going to the market. I’ve never been a good shopping buddy. I fully admit it. I can remember one particular instance when Reyna expelled me from a Ross department store because of my bad attitude and negative reaction to the narrow aisles overflowing with a mishmash of knick knacks, junk and obese patrons. I have a tendency to ruin the shopping experience for others with my urge to leave a storethat either isn’t selling things I’m interested in buying or is frequented by people I find distasteful. So I tried my best to be a good sport about experiencing the Vietnamese market. I was a miserable failure. On our second weekend (the first being spent, in its entirety, apartment hunting) we walked the two blocks to the market. Reyna had visited a couple of times and assured me that it was worth the walk. It
was hot. By the time we made the six minute walk to the market itself, we had already stopped to buy a large bottle of water and had both sweat through our shirts. When we lived in Vegas, I had gotten out of the habit of wearing underwear because I would always forget to pack a pair in my messenger bag when I rode my bike to work. That habit was now literally biting me in the ass. It
was hellish. I don’t think it was on purpose, but Reyna guided me through the meat market on our way in. If her intention was to put me off my lunch, then she exceeded expectations. Animals in various states of deconstruction were everywhere on hooks and metal
tables. I couldn’t decide what was worse, the collections of hog snouts, the entire legs of unidentifiable animals waiting to be chopped and sold or the baskets of fish that created a stink that punctuated this personal chamber of horrors. I stopped suddenly as a small Vietnamese woman rinsed off her bloody knife in a stainless steel bowl and then dumped the contents into a trough running down the middle of the walkway. She didn’t seem to mind the water splashing
on her bare feet, nor did she notice that my flip-flopped feet were also in the vicinity of the stream of detritus. It was so hot that I wanted to climb out of my skin to cool down. I prayed silently for a sudden downpour to wash away the heat and the smell. That was my introduction to the market. It’s interesting to me how little thought we give to how our food is handled in the US. There are codes and ways of doing things that are second nature to us. We pass through our lives rarely noticing the pains taken to ensure the safety and cleanliness of our food. That is, until we are standing in a place where there are no codes. Imagine walking into your local Safeway or Albertson’s on a hot summer afternoon to find that the electricity has been out for the last 48 hours, so inside the store is now as hot as the parking lot you just traversed. As you walk into the store, you notice that it’s crowded with shoppers who are all talking at once in a language you don’t understand. These shoppers aren’t just walking, though, they’re also riding motorcycles through the aisles, grazing past your sticky body and spraying plumes of hot, acrid exhaust at both you, and the items that you wish to purchase. You head for the butcher to buy the meat you promised your significant other you would bring home and fight your way through the horde of people slapping, grabbing, hefting, and pinching cuts of meat to find the
butcher squatting on his cutting table. He wields a knife the size of your forearm, mere inches from his bare feet, chopping and passing out the meat while collecting money from the
customers as he goes. There is no soap, no hand sanitizer, no latex gloves, no refrigerated tank with steaks hermetically sealed and arranged neatly on Styrofoam pallets for you to
peruse. You choose your desired cut off the hook on which it hangs by grabbing it and handing it to the butcher. It’s you, your 20 sticky and hot new Vietnamese friends all sweating and grabbing, the butcher and the flies, which are everywhere. As we moved past the meat and entered the covered part of Ben Thanh market, I realized just how good I’d had it in the narrow aisles of Ross. Where the aisles of the American retailer were populated with a few overweight women occasionally squeezing past each other, the Vietnamese aisles were about half the size and choked with dozens of people jostling and haggling for all manner of goods. A barrage of children approached us trying to sell us toothpaste, plastic bracelets, fans and all manner of cheap Chinese crap, all jabbering and clutching with hot clammy hands. We shooed them away, checking to make sure our wallets were still intact, and ventured deeper into the market. It was a strange and bizarre experience. There is no clear arrangement of products. There are blankets next to shampoo next to rice next to fruit next to incense next to dishes. After about ten minutes trying to process the mayhem around us, I was overwhelmed. I just wanted out. I was so hot, so
over-stimulated and claustrophobic that I felt I couldn’t breathe. I apologized to Reyna and said that I just couldn’t do it and needed to leave. I think she felt the same as me because she acquiesced immediately and we hastened to the air conditioned comfort of our hotel room and drank liters of bottled water. That was the first and last time I ventured into a market
for three months. The experience was overpowering and intimidating. We rode past them periodically, and I could smell the fish stink even from the window of a moving vehicle. After three weeks, we left the hotel and moved into our apartment. Our new home is located one block from another, not quite as large, but still big market. We stayed away from there, preferring to eat out at the restaurants we had become familiar with while kitchen-less in our hotel room. After five weeks, Reyna took a trip around Vietnam with a friend who planned to spend
a year traveling in Southeast Asia. During their trip, they took a day long cooking class, which included a guided tour of the market in Hoi An. She returned to HCMC armed with a mango peeler and a newfound determination to prepare meals at home. She started to go to the market
regularly to buy produce for our modest attempts at cooking. These attempts consisted almost entirely of weekend breakfasts, eggs scrambled with vegetables purchased at the market.
Weekend breakfast has always been a special time for Reyna and me. When we met, she worked nights as a server in a bar. I’ve never been a night owl, so our courtship revolved principally around breakfasts. Every Saturday and Sunday morning we would roll out of bed and have
breakfast at Egg & I on Sahara Avenue in Las Vegas. We’d spend the time discussing our separate lives or watching the bizarre parade of patrons in the restaurant: families with way too many children, clubbers still dressed up and out from the night before, ancient couples and us. Once she moved in with me, we started making our own breakfasts, although we were usually too lazy to put forth the effort and simply went back to Egg & I. Before meeting Reyna I had never been much of a breakfast eater mainly because I refused to eat eggs. Spending time eating breakfast with her, however, helped me discover the simple joy of eggs for breakfast, a cup of
decent coffee and lively conversation. I knew it was love when I found myself flipping bacon with a fork so she wouldn’t have to get out of bed to enjoy her weekend morning ritual.
Back in Vietnam, we cooked with things that Reyna had already purchased at the market. Usually she would run down to the bottom of the stairs, buy a baguette from the food cart across the street and we’d cook. I think she knew that I was uncomfortable with the thought of a hundred hands on the food I was eating, and handled the acquisition of food alone. The food
appeared, and I didn’t ask where it came from. It was a fine and ordered situation.
One Sunday morning, soon after Reyna got her first job, had worked hard all week and all of Saturday, she offered to run to the market to buy ingredients for breakfast. On this particular morning, for whatever reason, I offered to accompany her. It was still overwhelming, but I made a conscious effort tostay in my body and think through the experience. While Reyna hunted through things, I stood and stared at the pork section. The pork section consists of a row of barefoot women squatting on tables with large wooden cutting blocks. People walk, or
inexplicably ride their motorbikes (I don’t think I’ll ever get used to that),down the aisle squeezing and prodding the meat. At first I was disgusted. I don’t want to eat things that have been sitting out in the heat all day, with flies buzzing everywhere, and have been handled by multiple strangers before making its way to my refrigerator. As I stood and stared, a woman selling woks across the aisle from the meats touched me on the arm. She motioned for me to stand out of the way of the river of people passing and grabbing. I stood next to her safely out of the way of passing motorbikes. As I stood there I realized, like I have so many times in the past few months, that this is how the vast majority of people in the world buy food. They are not the disgusting ones, we are. We devote an unbelievable amount of energy making our food as sterile and impersonal as possible. In an American supermarket meat counter there is nothing to make one think “cow” or “pig” or “fish.” There are no faces in our supermarkets past the smiling face of the butcher. There is something incredibly sick about that. It’s like the supermarket doesn’t want you to actually associate the steak with the big-eyed, mooing, cud-chewing beast that stands in the fields as you drive past on your way to the store. Most of the world doesn’t buy food that’s prepackaged and sitting neatly in their grocer’s freezer, they look it in the eye. They spend time interacting with the person who grew the food, slaughtered and cut up the cow and personally carried it to where it sits waiting to be purchased. I stood with my mind spinning. I’ve never thought twice about opening the freezer door in a supermarket and pulling out a Lean Cuisine that I can pop in the microwave later and have a fully prepared meal in 10 minutes. Who made that? Where does it come from? Preparing that Lean Cuisine must be an incredibly complex process; from acquiring the raw ingredients, to preparing the meal itself, selecting the proper packaging, adding the right amount of chemical flavoring to ensure that the advertised product tastes something like the title of the dish, to shipping it frozen to my local supermarket. Somehow in my brain, that process has become less foreign than a person raising a pig, slaughtering it, cutting it up and selling it at a market. I was caught entirely off guard by the simplicity of growing, harvesting and selling. I thought about my friends in the states who are more comfortable opening a box of Corn Pops than they are eating an ear of corn on the side of the road and how sad that is. I thought about going with my brother, Kenneth, to an orchard in Florida and buying oranges to take home for my parents at Christmas. I wasn’t entirely comfortable eating something that had been so close to dirt just moments before and realized that I am no different from my Corn Pop eating friends, despite my efforts to “eat healthy” and “low on the food chain.” The fact that the corn on the side of the road is “dirty” but the box of cereal shipped from a factory in New Jersey is somehow cleaner and safer made me feel like a fraud. I was reminded of my high school physics teacher. He was considered one of the
“cool teachers” due to a Name That Movie Clip game he had devised along with a
few others we played in class every week. It was his way of making a less than palatable subject and making it fun. One of his favorite sayings was, “Physics is the science of thinking really hard about really simple things.” We were simply out to buy groceries for two meals, and I found myself reexamining choices I made almost fifteen years ago. Living in Vietnam has stripped away the glitter and convenience of my life in the US causing me to reexamine things
in an entirely new perspective. Walking through the market, I found myself wanting to experience it the way I had when I was a child, a simple assortment of food and nothing more. As Americans we have a way of taking simple things and complicating them in ways that are unnecessary and at times seem downright counterproductive, all in the name of convenience. Clearly I had forgotten that there is a vast difference between what is convenient and what is simple. By all accounts we are extremely privileged people in Vietnam. We aren’t rich, but we can do pretty much whatever we want whenever we want. Living in a third world country has turned out to be nothing like I expected. I find myself spending my days thinking about things that seemed pedestrian before my move. I am finding, however, that these new and sometimes troubling thoughts are what make us grow as humans and draw us together despite our differences. I started to feel that I could let the inconveniences of this place either frustrate me, or accept them as opportunities to understand more about myself. That choice has brought with it a peace that I would have never known without coming to this place and sharing my life with these people.