A Beautiful Journey

“Don’t tell me what a man says. Don’t tell me what a man knows. Tell me where he’s traveled.” –No Reservations, Peru

In the very first episode of No Reservations, Anthony Bourdain stayed at the same hotel room in Paris where British playwright Oscar Wilde died, drinking himself slowly to death on absinthe his last three years. I love Oscar Wilde. And absinthe – something Bourdain liked to drink because of its overly high, almost hallucinogenic alcohol content. What can I say? I knew from the very beginning that we were kindred souls.

He paid homage to James Joyce, Yeats and Samuel Beckett on a show in Ireland. Throughout Morocco, he talked about Paul Bowles The Sheltering Sky (a book I love) and William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, about a junkie fleeing from country to country, narrated in a time disorder. He was Bourdain’s favorite Beat Generation writer (Kerouac is mine). He loved George Orwell and Graham Greene and traced the author’s footsteps in Liberia in Journey Without Maps and in Vietnam in The Quiet American (as I did). I, too, have always seen the world alongside literature, remembering all those Dickens novels in London, walking by Orwell’s house every day, reading every book by Vargas Llosa before traveling through Peru then García Márquez before Colombia, searching the backstreets of Istanbul Orhan Pamuk wrote about. Of course, Bourdain was infinitely cooler, more fearless, but I love most that he read as much as I do.

On A Cook’s Tour, Bourdain was really the first TV chef to showcase Asian food. Soba noodles and sushi in Tokyo, spring rolls, quail eggs, crab cakes and fish soup in Vietnam, durian and tripe in Cambodia, beef liver and oxtail in Singapore, frog skin and shrimp paste in Thailand. Similar cuisines I had in my childhood in the Philippines and Japan. He walked through all those fresh food markets, just like all those hot, humid weekend mornings I went with my grandmothers. He loved street food, hole-in-the-wall’s, ate with the locals squatting on the ground, used his hands to scoop up every morcel of rice, drank every town’s equivalent of moonshine. He revered Asian chefs, “you don’t see that level of knife skills in French kitchens.”

He explored the Mekong Delta, spent his mornings cruising the floating markets. After he visited Angkor Wat, he went up Tonle Sap to Pailin, Cambodia, a Khmer Rouge stronghold off limits to Westerners, what he termed as his own’s Conrad’s “heart of darkness.” When the network asked him to do more American BBQ to help ratings and he refused, the show was canceled.

On No Reservations, he took us to places even I didn’t know existed – Uzbekistan, Azores, observing everyday tea ceremonies, family traditions, drinking cultures and religious rituals. But as importantly, he brought to light so many important issues. In South Korea, he had dinner with a grandfather who told his story of fleeing from the North, risking his life and family. In Chile, he opened with the CIA-backed coup that led to the 17-year brutal dictatorship under Pinochet. In Sri Lanka, he talked about the Civil War and the devastation from the 2004 tsunami. In Kurdistan, he showed us a displaced people so rich in culture who have been victimized by geo-politics their entire history. His empathy was always apparent, and I thought it was so heartbreakingly brilliant the way he made us care about things we knew nothing about.

I also loved Bourdain’s defense of immigrants. In his book Kitchen Confidential, he wrote about all those fancy New York restaurants whose cooks were actually Ecuadorian, Dominican or Salvadorian. In Medium Raw, he wrote about the entire farm industry in the US and Europe being reliant on imported labor. He pointed out that it was mostly Hispanic kitchen workers and cooks who worked by him for three decades at every restaurant, especially at Les Halles. At a show in Texas, it was a Mexican who served his sushi. In Los Angeles, he said it was the immigrant population that made the city great, and he loved coming here because it was the only place he could get authentic dishes of any kind – Korean, Mexican, Thai.

But my most favorite episodes were the ones in the Middle East, not just because I love the food, but because Bourdain broke down everyone’s cultural misconceptions. He reminded us that it’s the cradle of civilization, pioneers of scientific advancements, a place that was among the birthplaces of empires, and as important to me as the birthplace of literature – The Epic of Gilgamesh from the Sumer ruins of Iraq was the first story ever written. I was as mesmerized by the ancient alleys and the pyramids of Egypt and minarets of Istanbul he showed us. Bourdain may have been an atheist, but he was as much in awe of the beauty of religious architecture, thought their prayer rituals were “lovely and impressive.” He had the highest level of respect for everything. And this is the other thing I loved about him most – that he loved this world as much as I do.

“Who could have thought that people from a place so different, so foreign from where I come from and what I believe, can also be so similar? It’s not like what they say on the news isn’t true, it’s that – that’s not the whole picture. It’s always a bigger, more nuanced, more complicated story.” –No Reservations, Saudi Arabia