I came to learn that traveling with Ngueyn Manh Dung (pronounced When Mine Zoom) is always an adventure, particularly of the gastronomic type.  The first dinner I shared with him on Cat Ba Island foreshadowed the experiences I was to have over the next six weeks with this delightfully sweet 35 year old Vietnamese man.   

Zoom, as he’s come to be known on Cat Ba, takes great delight in introducing people to Vietnamese language, culture and especially to the food.  The Vietnamese who live in the South, while certainly no Westerners, are considerably more conservative eaters than their countrymen in the North.  Zoom told me early on about a Vietnamese saying that I’ve come to believe holds true more in the North than in the South:  “Chu cut voi la xoan” which translates “We eat everything except poisonous leaves and shit.”  Having traveled with him extensively, I can attest to this fact.

We first ate dinner together when I treated him as a thank you for coming to my aid in rescuing my motorbike from the hands of an inept mechanic.  During that dinner, Zoom delighted in not only selecting our still swimming seafood, but introducing me to them before they met their ends.  In addition to Joe the Fish, we also ate lobster-size shrimp, snails and clams that squirted water at us protesting their fate.  During dinner, I noticed six large jars of liquid with various objects inside sitting on a counter.  I asked what they were and Zoom became like a kid at Christmas.  

“These are rice wine with different things inside,” he explained.  The “different things inside” were starfish, seahorse & snake (all 3 in one jar), moldy clams, scorpions and tree roots (again, an interesting combo), shark fins, seal penises and last, but certainly not least, goat penises with a bonus goat embryo.  There were 20 goat penises in the jar and one lonely embryo.  They’d all obviously been there for a while because, although they weren’t moldy like the clams, the flesh was only a few shades away from being out-and-out gray and particles from the tissue had separated from the organs and were floating around like a million not-so-brilliant stars in the galaxy of wine.   “We believe drinking this makes the man strong if you know what I mean,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.  “You have to try some of this!”  

"baby goat wine" and "snake wine"

“Well, I’m not a man and don’t really have any need to be strong, if you know what I mean,” I replied.  “C’mon!” he continued. “This is the only chance you’ll ever have!”  If Zoom didn’t know my achilles heal, then he certainly made a lucky and incredibly accurate guess.  I love to try new things.  It takes me a little more time to work up the courage to try some things than others, but if I’m faced with the prospect that I’ll never be able to do it again, that will almost always push me over the edge.  And that’s how I came to drink goat penis wine, timidly I admit, but I did it.  

Oddly, my timidity was caused less by the fact that there were reproductive organs in the wine than by the fact that any almost gray, particle-losing tissue was present, regardless of where on the body it came from.  I made myself ignore the millions of little particles and chugged my half-shot glass size shot glass of the stuff.  Miraculously, it didn’t taste any different from the non-penised rice wine I’d had at the Hai Phong wedding a week before - which isn’t to say I liked it.  I wasn’t crazy about that wine from the wedding either.  It’s pretty strong alcohol (40%) and burns on the way down.  It doesn’t taste exactly like vodka, but that’s probably the closest I can come in describing the taste.  After overdoing it with vodka shots on my twenty-first birthday oh so many years ago, I’ve never particularly liked shooting vodka either.  But there it was … down the hatch.  I could now one more more oddity to the list of weird things I’ve eaten or drunk in Southeast Asia. 

Zoom wasn’t going to let me off that easily.  He didn’t quite feel victorious enough with just the one shot it seems.  “Let’s do one more!” he said excitedly, already pouring me another before I could say anything.  Let’s just say that for many years through college and afterwards, I was no stranger to alcohol.  Although I’m not much of a drinker these days, I somehow managed to retain my tolerance for the stuff and for a little gal, I can hold my drinks with the best of them.  So it was less the effect than the taste that I objected to.  But what the heck? I’d already had one and it hadn’t killed me.  I do like to be a good sport.  

another "Zoom special" ... congealed goat's blood

The next night we ate dishes with buffalo, frog and eel.  Zoom seemed to make it his personal mission to make sure that I not only ate a variety of Vietnamese food, but that the variety included animals that were foreign to me or at least unfamiliar parts of beasts already in my diet.  In hindsight, I can now say that buffalo, frog and eel were pretty tame.

Of course I tried to do what I could to introduce Zoom to America too, or at least to correct his many misimpressions of it.  One of those misimpressions was that it was the normal everyday occurrence for American wives to murder their husbands.  “I see it on Desperate Housewives all the time,” he explained.  Wow!  How to undo that propaganda?  My favorite misimpression, however, was that brilliant American scientists had somehow designed and managed to build an invisible shield over the country that would protect it from missiles and various other attacks.  “Do many Vietnamese people believe this Zoom?” I asked after I picked myself up off the floor.  “Everyone thinks this,” he said, completely serious.  

With beliefs like that, I felt like I was starting in the red trying to answer his questions about what America was like.  I spent much time trying to discover his beliefs about my country and to correct the ones that were as outlandish as those first two.  I’m not sure he ever completely believed me.  There are many ways in which our two countries are alike, but just as many in which we are different.  I realized that, in the same way that I love to photograph everyday life in Southeast Asia, I needed to do the same in America and bring the pictures with me next time to show my Asian friends who were curious to learn about the non-TV version of the stars and stripes.  Without such props, I might as well be discussing a different planet … one with an invisible protection shield.