Wintle’s attitude didn’t improve. Despite his stated intent to get at the real Vietnam, on the page at least, he was chauvinistic and, for a journalist, oddly incurious. As one reader noted in an Amazon review, “What we get … reads at times like the memoirs of a fraternity boy: drinking, beautiful women, more drinking, more beautiful women.” It felt like imitation Redmond O’Hanlon, without the fine prose and sense of humor. At one point, when offered female “companionship,” Wintle triumphantly crowed, “Eat your heart out, Betty Friedan. A right gobsmack for Madame Greer.”
This was my traveling companion. His snide voice infiltrated my own, sullying the landscape with his cynicism, making me feel like yet another ugly American and, worse, one in the company of an elitist Englishman. I’d landed in Ho Chi Minh City during Tet, the Vietnamese New Year celebration, a month after the United States lifted its embargo, which in travelers’ terms was already too late. Those who were there a month earlier earned bragging rights for being there before. By the time I arrived, outdated “Lift the Embargo Now” T-shirts were being sold at a steep discount. “Sucker!” Wintle chortled from inside my backpack.
It still felt like an exciting moment in history. The International Herald Tribune had been aglow for weeks with reports of banks opening branches in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Coca-Cola posters were everywhere. Noting a photo of one of the new Vietnam Citibanks, I brought along less cash than usual. I would travel on the cheap and if worse came to worst, I reasoned, “I’ll just use an ATM.”
Besides, it always feels good to spend less. Some people travel on a budget out of necessity, but others do it for sport. The two inevitably seem to merge, as need becomes a virtue in and of itself; you feel good being cheap even while sleeping on concrete beds and riding third-class makes you feel like crap. Travelers compare their exploits according to how long they’ve made it and on how little. As anyone who has backpacked knows, he who spends less money is the better person.
This is easier to do if you’re a man and can safely conk out anywhere. Wintle could sleep wherever and with whomever he wanted. Not I. One evening, I arrived at the beach resort Nha Trang with a group of art historians after barreling with them across hundreds of miles of cratered roads to check out some Cham ruins they were into and save myself the bus fare. As soon as the driver stopped the car in town, they trooped off to their comfy hotel, a place that even took reservations. “Bye!” they called out, happily anticipating the resort’s beachfront amenities.
I, on the other hand, had budgeted ten dollars for my lodgings and had no reservation. It was honeymoon season in Vietnam and every place was full. Somehow, I wound up on the back of a local teenager’s motorcycle; he was determined to resolve my situation and I didn’t have the luxury of questioning his motive. We crisscrossed the city searching for a place that would let in a single foreign woman; many hotels refused on principle. Finally, he found me lodgings in a roadside cabin I wasn’t sure was a hotel at all. The doors to the room closed barn style, and to “lock” them, you had to lift an enormous plank off the floor and drive it through two handles on either side.
Fifteen minutes after I’d changed into pajamas, the plank trembled at a knock on the door. The “helpful” teenager was back to collect his reward. It took a lot of pleading about my husband and small children at home and my honor, and finally, just begging to make him go away. What was I going to do, call the police? Needless to say, there was no phone in the room.
Throughout the entire episode, I felt perversely guilty. Had I led him on? As far as I was concerned, Americans had pretty much fucked Vietnam over for decades, and I was just one more insult to the nation’s dignity. Perhaps accepting hotel assistance from a stray teen was a clear sexual advance. In any case, he’d done me a favor and gotten nothing in return, not even a tip.
And, of course, there was Justin Wintle, siding with the teenager. As often happens with a travel book, the narrator—his opinions, his prejudices, his particular way of viewing things—seeps into your experience. “Serves you right,” Wintle said. Maybe I was just another clueless American.
By the time I reached Hanoi, then still a car-and-motorcycle-free city where legions of rickety bicycles elegantly wove past one another across massive roundabouts, never colliding, I was out of cash. I’d had to take an impromptu flight from Danang to the north to avoid the bandits then rampant on the overnight train up the coast.
It was time to hit one of those shiny new American bank branches.
There was only one problem. When I finally tracked down the Hanoi Citibank, it was a cubicle in a near-empty office. “Oh no,” a solitary clerk said, generously mortified on my behalf. “We’re not offering banking services yet. It’s just for show right now.” He smiled. “Someday!”
I had no money left. I was alone in northern Vietnam. At the kind of establishments I could afford, credit cards were not accepted, and there was no way to pay one off anyway. There was no American Express office. There was no American embassy. In a scene I never would have fathomed my senior year in college, I found myself begging from table to table in a café dominated by European and Israeli tourists, trying not to look like a hippie-dippie backpacking American fool even though I bore all the signs: I was wearing sandals and a pair of faded Thai cotton fisherman’s pants. My backpack was grubby, and my hair unwashed. Justin Wintle mocked me as a stupid Yank from inside Romancing Vietnam. But Spalding, thank goodness, understood. One day, he assured me, this would be funny.
CHAPTER 11
Wild Swans
Inspirational Reading
Books provoke many reactions (laughter, tears, annoyance, disgust, envy, awe) and stir all kinds of responses (efforts to better oneself, motivation to visit a new city or cook something difficult or vow never to pick up a book by the same author again). But only once did a book get me to starve myself.
It wasn’t even a diet book, and I wasn’t actually trying to lose weight. But I did go almost entirely without food for four weeks and lost twenty pounds in the process. I felt like I was starving during every moment of every one of those days.
I did it because I was inspired.
This happened in 1994 in China, where I was backpacking solo for six weeks under the aegis of my father, who never would have gone himself. Having watched Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor at least six times too many, he sent me there in his stead with a thousand-dollar birthday gift earmarked for the trip and instructions to bring him back a spittoon.