Eating Viet Nam: Dispatches from a Blue Plastic Table

by Graham Holliday

I had done the fresh cobra blood thing, eaten a still-beating heart, drunk snake bile, ingested snake bones and snake penis whiskey, the whole seven, eight, nine courses. It was more of a challenge than a pleasure—a rite of passage for the dumb twentysomething in Việt Nam. However, my only residing memories of those evenings (five or six in total, I am ashamed to say) are as follows: First and foremost, the look of utter horror on Nghĩa’s face as our group of eight foreigners proceeded to get stupidly wasted, blood pouring down our faces, like amateur thespians doing Dracula, badly. Nghĩa, one of my first-ever students, the one who had first thrust a uterus in front of me, had recommended the place in Gia Lâm (“It’s better than the famous one. There are more animals to choose from”), but he didn’t touch a drop of the crazy juice all night. He drank a single bottle of room-temperature Heineken beer. Second, the shakes. The morning after one of these foul, debauched nights, I woke up shaking. Not the DTs. This was different, something new and unexpected. It was as if someone had lit a fuse inside my arteries. They were on fire. I drove down to Mạc Đĩnh Chi Street to meet Frank, my motorbike-riding instructor. “Oh, you’ve been poisoned,” he said nonchalantly, like a bush doctor brushing off a patient with an inconsequential crocodile bite. “What snake did you eat?” “A cobra. A big one,” I replied, the shock of what he’d said only just beginning to sink in. “Have you spoken to...