Reflections on Bourdain’s Passing
I woke up early in Chicago this morning to edit a podcast episode before heading to Michigan for my best friend’s wedding. As I sat down a CNN news alert popped up on my phone — usually these just show the latest stupid thing Trump has said or done, but this one hit me hard: Anthony Bourdain was dead at 61.
It can be hip to say that celebrity deaths don’t really bother you, and that’s generally true for me. The big deaths of the last couple of years — Bowie, Prince, etc. — certainly were sad, but they didn’t personally impact me. Bourdain was different.
I can’t remember when I first discovered him — sometime during college when No Reservations was still on. I had traveled a lot growing up, but only within the US, and mostly east of the Mississippi River. The most ‘exotic’ meals my family ate were General Tso’s or sweet and sour chicken from China Rose in New Orleans. The first time I ate Vietnamese food was my junior year of college in Toronto, when I had banh xeo and consumed it in a way that I now look back on with shame (let’s just say it involved a knife and fork).
Watching Bourdain gallivant around the world eating “weird” food — street food, organs, unidentified meat in tube form — opened my eyes to dozens of other ways of living and dining. The way he connected with people over food, whether it was warthog rectum in Namibia or unimaginably expensive sushi in a Tokyo skyscraper, seemed effortless and real.
His on-screen style — adventurous, curious, empathetic and, yes, brash — helped spur my own intense curiosity about the world.
After signing up for a teacher training program in Southeast Asia, I had a choice: after my program I could move to Cambodia, Thailand, Taiwan, China or Vietnam. All I knew of Vietnam was Apocalypse Now, until I saw Bourdain’s multiple episodes shot in the country (along with the Top Gear Vietnam special, but that’s another story).
His love of Vietnam — the food, the people, the countryside, the way of life and the hyperactive cities — shone through in both No Reservations (which had three episodes on Vietnam) and his writing, which I also consumed voraciously.
When it came time to decide on where to go, I went for Vietnam. If not for Bourdain’s influence, I don’t know where I would’ve ended up.
Now, I’m an occasionally successful journalist going on seven years in the country, something I would’ve never predicted when I graduated from college and flew to Southeast Asia in 2010. Indeed, it’s not an overstatement to say that he has had the largest influence on my life of anyone I haven’t met in person.
Judging by the Instagram, Twitter and Facebook posts I’ve seen this morning, many other people feel the same way. Bourdain was the type of person we need more of in this insane day and age — empathy is in short supply, yet he exhibited boundless reserves of it. He allowed people to realize that a family living in a bombed-out home in Libya has the same hopes, dreams and interests as anyone in Middle America.
By shining a spotlight on overlooked countries like Myanmar, Palestine, Congo, Georgia, etc. in Parts Unknown, his superb CNN show, Bourdain went even further than he had on No Reservations. There’s a quote somewhere where he said he wasn’t a journalist, which is true, but his earnest, touching and often hilarious depictions of far-flung corners of the globe were more illuminating and thought-provoking than much of what you’ll see or read elsewhere.
Beyond this, Bourdain’s concept of travel is one that I’ve tried to take to heart — it’s not always glamorous (in fact it rarely is), it can be tedious, tiring, dirty and leave you shitting everywhere — but the goal isn’t luxury or Instagram hashtags; it’s experiencing other countries and meeting people in an attempt to understand just how similar people everywhere are.
I’ll admit that I haven’t watched Parts Unknown in about a year, as life gets in the way, but Bourdain has had a profound, enduring impact on my life, and the lives of many others. He will truly be missed, and the world lost a great ambassador today.
I generally don’t do a good job of noting down or remembering quotes, but this one from the final episode of No Reservations has always stuck with me, and I hope more people internalize it in the future: “If I’m an advocate for anything, it’s to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food, it’s a plus for everybody. Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.”
