Why would a Turk want to go to a Vietnamese restaurant?

Sunday, February 13, 2005

Opinion by Elif Şafak

  “Oh, so you re Turkish!” the young cab driver jovially exclaimed as he switched from broken English to broken Turkish on the way from Schiphol Airport to central Amsterdam. “What are you doing in Holland?”

  “I m here for a literary conference,” I replied. “I m a novelist, and I live in the United States. I flew from New York yesterday.”

  Completely dismissing the last pieces of information he nodded in glee: “Welcome, welcome! How is the weather in Istanbul?”

  So we talked about Istanbul, not the real Istanbul but, if anything, an imaginary Istanbul. The capital of the mighty Ottoman Empire, the locus of a glorious past whose reflection could provide some consolation to the miserable problems of the present; an alternative land to which we did not travel but certainly could any time, sometime; the Shangri-La or El Dorado of Turkish immigrants and exiles living abroad. The cab driver had never lived in Istanbul, not even for a year, not even for a month, and he originally was from a small village in Central Anatolia, directly migrating from his childhood village to the city of Amsterdam at the age of eight. But when he talked, he sounded as if he were an Istanbulite and knew the city so well.

  “Nothing is good here. The weather, the water, the traffic, the people…” he started to pour out complaints, peppering his Turkish with Dutch words, as we waited for the light to turn green at the next crossroads. “You will be disappointed in Amsterdam because nothing bears a resemblance to Istanbul. I have been living here for 24 years now, and I still haven t gotten used to their ways… Every morning I tell my wife, let s go back to Istanbul!”

  “So why don t you?” I wondered out loud.

  He frowned at me from the rear mirror and shrugged, “Oh it s too crowded!”

  Istanbul is too crowded, Amsterdam is too alien and the little Anatolian village where he came from is too boring. He doesn t like it “here,” but then there is no “there” to go to; there is no “other” land -- a kingdom of complete bliss and delight where everything is bright and beautiful, and you don t have to work so hard to make a living. Thus until the day he can be zoomed into that fantasy space of a homeland in heaven, he keeps doing what he is best at: complaining.

  “So could you please take us to a neighborhood where we can find some good restaurants?”

  He heaved a sigh while flipping his hands and rolling his eyes: “Alas,” he said tonelessly. “There are none.”

  “Are there no restaurants in Amsterdam?” I heard myself exclaim.

  “No,” he answered solemnly. “It s not like it is in Istanbul. They don t even have a cuisine. But I can take you to a Turkish restaurant. There s a good one nearby.”

  “You better not. Take us to a Chinese or Indonesian or Indian or Japanese restaurant, but not to a Turkish restaurant just because we happen to be Turks…”

  He was confused. Why would a Turk want to go to a Vietnamese restaurant, unless that is the only alternative left and he is about to starve? There is a gap between us, and he can t fathom where it comes from since we both speak the same language. But do we?

  I believe it s possible to be multicultural, multilingual and perhaps even multifaith. You can be “both Turkish and Dutch” rather than “either this or that.” If, however, you cut yourself off from all “others” who come from a different walk of life and build walls of cultural biases all around, you might end up thinking the whole world is against you and that there are no restaurants in Amsterdam.