Breakfast of Champions (with Fish Sauce)

Dan Kempner
Editor

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The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, Saigon Serenade – ed.

October, 2018

This morning the Red Sox won the World Series. 

Duck-boat parade in downtown Boston celebrating the World Series win.
The Boston Red Sox’ victory Duck Boat parade tools down Boylston St. Photo by J.Walsh. Public Domain

There was no fanfare here in Saigon, Vietnam, no duck-boat parade through District 1. I heard no horns braying outside, and no cheers or groans from neighboring apartments as the Sox’ chances rose and fell. Nor did any pennant-carrying fan in a Xander Bogaerts jersey belt out a drunken Sweet Caroline. In fact, there was no sign that anyone here had ever heard either of the Sox, the Series or, indeed, of baseball. 

There was only the standard cacophony of motorbikes buzzing along in their millions, rattling the corrugated roofs. The standard sun warmed the street vendors’ carts, the cracked sidewalks, the faded shop canopies. It was as if the victory was only an echo from a deep well, a Gehrig-like voice crying, “Today-ay-ayy…The Red Sox-ox-ox… Won It All-all-all-all-all-all…”

The local response to this great event was summed up by a Canadian friend I spoke with just before the final out.
“Are you interested in the Series,” I asked?
He pondered this question.
“Well,” he said at last in clipped Canadian tones, “I could care less… but I’d have to really work at it.”

Around 7am my phone alerted me that the ballgame was underway. Gone was the usual anticipation, the slow crawl of a day as it builds toward game time. The inchoate butterflies at breakfast, a tingle in the extremities by dinner becoming a full-fledged hammer-beat by first pitch. It was more like the scene in Frozen where Princess Anna is awakened by the minister calling through the door,

“Wake up, Princess, it’s time to get ready!” and she answers, eyes shut,
“Okay, sure, uh huh. (Zzz) Uh, ready for what…?”
“Ahem, it’s Coronation Day.”
“Coronation Day…? Coronation Day?! Yippee. ‘For the first time in forever….’”

I couldn’t see the game live, I don’t have the tech. The only other way was an hours’ commute to an expat bar downtown. I’d been there and done that. When the Patriots played Philadelphia in the Superbowl, a friend and I made the 6am trek. We found an American-owned bar that, like many others, opened early so people like us could watch the game. We had some coffee and the game began. He ordered noodles, I asked for opelet and bread – fried eggs served with soy sauce and a small Vietnamese baguette.

His noodles came, followed by my eggs, but there was no bread. I called for the waiter, said, ‘can I please have the baguette?’ He listened intently, did the little head-duck bow, and scurried off.

The Patriots were struggling against the Eagles’ powerful defense and Brady was not as effective as usual. I waited for the roll to arrive for ten minutes, then beckoned to another waiter: same dance, but no baguette ever came. I asked for the manager, same conversation.

My friend, who’d been in Vietnam for nearly 20 years, leaned close and said, “Dude. They don’t have any bread. They don’t want to tell you, the Vietnamese hate to say ‘no’ so they just nod and hope you figure it out. Hang on, I’ll be right back.”

He popped out the door but came back in a minute with two fresh baguettes from down the block.

So, I had my breakfast and more coffee. With ten minutes to go in the game, and the Patriots trying to get back into it, the signal was lost. I had to go home to find out what happened.

Today, having no desire to repeat this episode, I stayed home. Besides, there was Kailin to get to school and classes to prepare for and I’d been up most of the night helping a US client. I was beat.

In desperation I opened my computer but the closest I could come was watching generic cartoon players, avatars in modern parlance, standing frozen at the plate, bat on shoulder. Every few seconds a yellow line would streak through an electronic batter’s box and, if the end glowed red, it was a strike. Green was a ball, blue meant, “in play.” Reading the notes that lagged a few moments behind I’d see “Home Run,” referring perhaps to Mookie Betts, whose avatar had just silently and motionlessly hit one out. One of the most electrifying players in the game and this image just stood there on my screen like a stump. This Sucked! The radio guy in Bull Durham used to bang two sticks together to replicate the sound of a hit: I didn’t even have that!

Speaking of the play-by-play, as each pitch streaked over the plate a note popped up saying, “4-seam fastball: 98.4mph,” or “swinging strike: slider.  99.7mph.” Really? Look, I know it’s the proverbial ‘game of inches’ but has Major League Baseball – a hotbed of meaningless stats – never heard of rounding?

The poor bastard in the batter’s box already has to cope with a sick, nasty, filthy, overpowering slider that rides in belt-high middle, then whipsaws down-and-in to a right-handed hitter. Can he really tell the difference between 99.7 and 100? I can imagine the hapless Manny Machado – whose misfortune it was to whiff on exactly that pitch to end the series – thinking, ah hah! He’s dropped .3 under his usual velocity. I’ve got him now!

Then the pitch blows by before he can even put a weak-ass swing on it and Boom! The Sox are in the clubhouse wasting good Champagne while Machado wanders off somewhere and cries. If he doesn’t need to know, to the decimal, how fast the pitch that beat him was, heck, I sure don’t. Even umpires can’t split that difference.

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Umpire and author Ron Luciano. Photographer unknown.

Ron Luciano – one of history’s great umps, and certainly the most flamboyant – once wrote of a certain umpire calling balls and strikes for Nolan Ryan. At the time Ryan was the premier fastballer in the game and, when an 0-2 pitch came slamming into the catcher’s mitt this ump shouts, “Baaall One! Sounded high.”

So the Red Sox won the series and no one in this country cares but me. That’s the odd thing. I care. Why? Why does it matter that a bunch of players I’ve never seen, in a stadium halfway around the world, won it all?

My dad was a lifelong White Sox fan and, though he was estranged from his home city of Chicago for almost sixty years, he never rooted for any other team. Why? I don’t know but it meant something to me that my father was so loyal, if only to an idea. I understand him just a little better now, feel his longing to hold on to things that mattered in the past.

Now I’m forced to wonder if my kids will have any such guiding rods, such clues to my character as they grow up here. Chicago, Boston, New York – all cities in which I rooted – will be foreign to them. No matter what else I knew about my dad it was clear he was, always and forever, a White Sox fan. We went to Comiskey Park together, to Wrigley with his sister’s clan (the Cubs’ wing of the family) and watched their games avidly. Neither team ever won but that didn’t change the loyalty one iota.

My British grandparents who, via Ellis Island, settled on Chicago’s South Side – a Jewish and Polish neighborhood then, a blood-soaked ‘hood now – loved baseball.

Perhaps they were converted Cricket fans for, during every weekend visit, we saw them in their room, brown-cloth gloves on arthritic hands, drinking tea (with their pinkies up) and watching the Saturday Baseball Game of the Week.

My dad was born within a year of the Black Sox scandal, when members of the White Sox – allegedly including Shoeless Joe Jackson – intentionally blew the World Series for a pathetically small amount of cash. Shoeless Joe and 8 others were banned from baseball after that and the Sox never got to the series again during my father’s lifetime. He grew up with this shame in the Chicago of Capone and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. When Dillinger – a Cubs fan apparently – was killed by FBI agents outside the Biograph theater, my dad was watching a movie a few blocks away.

I knew something about all that, had a cultural matrix to fit my dad into. Chicago: Dillinger; Grandpa; the war; the White Sox and Comiskey. What will my kids have that feels like that about me? What will they associate me with, to understand me within a culture, on my home ground? Right now, in a place where saying, “World Series” elicits a baffled stare, it’s hard to guess.

This question rankles, especially as I am a far older dad than mine was. I had decades of grown-up conversations with which to understand and place my father but I must live a long, long time to make that true for my daughters.

Mom, of course, filled in gaps, reminded me of people and incidents he’d forgotten, made connections. But Trúc, as hard as she might try, could never do this for Kailin and Annika. She was born here, true, but events like the Mỹ Lai Massacre? Mỹ Lai village is only 500 miles from here but she first learned about it in America, from me. Yesterday, my Truckie’s fashionista little sister asked me what a Hippy was. “I know they wore this,” she said, pointing to a vintage photo of my contemporaries dressed in paisley. “But what was it about?”

Trúc can’t help my kids fill in those blanks. She knows nothing of the culture and mores that shaped me. My love of libraries, for example, comes from my parents’ six-book-a-week habit. But there are no real libraries here to help explain. Or Judaism, as much a cipher to these people as Isis worship was to me. The foods I love best? Nope. The Lovin’ Spoonful, or even the Beatles for God’s sake? Those things are all mysteries.

So the Sox won and yippee, but it’s a trifle off kilter, a little Through the Looking Glass, just a bit hollow and lonely. “I don’t care if I never get back,” goes the refrain of Take me out to the ballgame. Don’t I? Today, I don’t know. I got the prize in the Cracker Jacks, true: they won it all. But it doesn’t taste like home: it tastes faintly of fish sauce.

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In May, 2018, the author moved from Boston to Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam, where he lives and writes with his wife and two daughters. He is also the Editor of Legacy Magazine.