Crapulence

Hi!

During his initial visit, my friend endeared himself to a married couple who lived in a low tile home overlooking a valley of rolling coffee farms.

Thuy had managed to keep Chú Vui in town long enough to raise and their daughter.

But that would prove a difficult task.

Days before our arrival, someone had murdered a pair of elderly chicken farmers in a most grizzly fashion. 

Di Thuy laid out the competing theories about the killings over a lunch of lettuce, none of which would prove true.

We lay about on the tile floor until Uncle Happy built a bonfire that drew neighbors like so many moths. 

For a time, the men sipped Diet Coke and tea.

By New Year's Eve, the husbands of Ta Nung launched a quiet revolt against the ban on fun. Warm cans of beer began falling from jacket sleeves; plastic bags of rice wine popped out of pockets.

We piled drunk onto motorbikes and went from house to house in our crispest clothes handing envelopes of money to children who immediately threw it into card games to find out just how lucky it was.

The pious women of the town, primped to impossible beauty, simply drew their mouths and retired early.

And then the chicken feasts began.

We washed down the birds, one after another, with cases of beer in shacks wallpapered with old calendar pages — as though the days meant nothing at all.

Months later, the town's residents packed the local People’s Committee building to see the killer: a 23-year old hired hand named Lu Van Quy.

Quy had asked the old couple to borrow some money ahead of the holiday. When they refused, he picked up a hatchet and knocked the old man down. Then he called the old woman out and knocked her down too.

After stealing their old phones, he robbed them both of less than $24.

The weirdness began as it so often does, with an unsolicited email.

Dear Calvin, We are the group of five people — food and travel journalists and vietnamese restaurant owner from Moscow, Russia. We’ve been travelling through the Vietnam from South to North the whole month, researching vietnamese food and culture. Now we arrived at our final destination in HCMC and we want to share with you our own pho, talks, local beer, music and pleasue. Please, bring some vietnamese food or products that you think we definitely have to try: that can be something small and made by yourself. And of course you can invite your colleagues and friends who are also interested.

I'd just quit my job and begun the process of moving to Singapore. 

I told myself that solving food mysteries was less important than, say, buying medical insurance or burning my things.

My hosts, Ivan and Nika, had hung a banner over the doorway, while the rail-thin owner of Lao Lee (a waterfront Quán Nhậu for Moscow!) floated in and out of a kitchen full of Vietnamese club DJs and their moms.

Ivan and Nika saw my byline in the Lucky Peach, the magical food rag that provided a kind of group home for weird and rambling stories about Chợ Lớn's lady hog butchers, Củ Chi's brown rice noodle cult and Big Daddy 7, the king of the Trường Sơn mountains.

Some three hours after I arrived, the head chef assembled her puzzled Vietnamese guests and began to give a heartfelt speech about the significance of her journey before presenting a cabbage and mushroom-based noodle soup she called “vegan pho” to a starving and distinctly drunk eating audience.

When we all sat together on newspaper, the bullet-headed cop clearly dispatched to investigate the bizarre goings-on shuffled in with an iPhone and his cigarettes rolled up in the leg of his pants.