The Last Toaster in Da Nang

My nieces, Xuân and Ha, took me last evening to The Big C Supermarket in downtown Da Nang.  The Big C is in the middle of a trendy shopping center featuring products from Coach, Gucci, and Cartier.  The supermarket is three floors connected by escalator, filled with a wide assortment of groceries, health care products, and appliances – and on a busy Wednesday evening, Vietnamese shoppers.  The place was jammed.  My nieces are excited to shop for their upcoming trip to Thailand.  They are shopping for rice noodles, snacks, and chili sauce, just in case Thailand has suddenly run out of food.

I’ve been here a week, so my apartment is well-stocked by now, but I have a shopping list of my own, you know, just fine-tuning for my two-month stay in Vietnam.  One of the items on my list is a toaster.  The food here in Da Nang is marvelous, but a sudden toast craving has come over me.  I don’t know exactly why, because I’m not a big eater of toast.  When ordering in my favorite Coastside breakfast restaurant, the 3-Zero Cafe at the Half Moon Bay Airport, I invariably ask Mark to hold the toast, give me a bowl of fruit instead.  But now, with the best Vietnamese food available in thousands of restaurants and around the corner at my Aunt Thu’s house,  I am driven by a vicious desire for toast.  Perhaps a touch of home-sickness, maybe just my incipient desire to have things my own way in a land 10,000 miles from home.

Xuân, Ha and I shopped together, they with a red plastic shopping basket, me with my own.  Xuân, helpful as always, kept asking me what I was looking for as my basket filled with hand towels, trash can liners, a small wastebasket for my office, fruit yogurt (buy 8, get 1 free!).  I wasn’t even sure exactly how to describe what I wanted, “you know Xuân, an electric device that cooks bread.” Toasters in Vietnam just aren’t a Thing.  The Big C has an appliance section, I’ve seen it before.  I led the girls into the midst of it without explanation.

On a back shelf, I found a very nice, simple model, the only one in the vast appliance section filled with rice cookers, hotplates, and oddly, pink blenders.  A fine looking chrome and black Philips machine, although the toast slots were small.  I don’t think there is a Texas Toast version. The toaster carton was dust-covered. It’s possible I have cornered the market on toasters in Da Nang.

The teenaged Vietnamese girl who worked in that department insisted on demonstrating the toaster to me, even though I am sure she had never operated one or even thought about a toaster before.  She repeated several times that there was no service agreement available with the toaster.  I told her I thought that would be OK.  To demonstrate, she plugged the toaster in to the 220 volt outlet, stuck her hand down in the toast slot, and reached with her other hand to operate the toasting lever.  I quickly stopped her, unplugged the toaster and told her it was just fine, It’s exactly what I wanted.  She repackaged the toaster with some difficulty, re-taped the box, and handed it to me uncertainly.  I’m not sure she knew what I was going to do with such a thing.

With a new appliance in the household, I was inspired to walk to the market this morning in search of trúng gá, or chicken eggs.  The gá part is really crucial since it means “chicken”.  There are a variety of eggs for sale of all sizes in the market, but I have a Western squeamishness for any egg other than from a chicken.  I got there too late (9:15), all sold out.  Maybe buôi chiêu, this afternoon.   Those eggs, when found, will go nicely with toast.  Now all I have to do is find sliced bread.