Year of the Durian

It’s a dubious claim to fame, but I’m probably the only person to have his New Year’s resolution spelled out for him by a fruit.

Not just any fruit, mind you, but the legendary durian, native to Indonesia, famed for its exquisite taste and its appalling smell, a stench so rotten that in many Asian countries it’s illegal to take a durian on a bus or into a hotel.

I’d never even seen a durian until my wife Barbara bought one from the local Asian market and gave it to me for Christmas. We opened presents at around 9 a.m.; by 9:15 the durian, which looks roughly like a very spiky football, was banished to the porch. Even this specimen, which had been frozen and flown halfway across the planet, stank overpoweringly of a combination of ripe garbage and kerosene. It came with a little blue ribbon, as if we deserved a prize for even getting near it.

After 24 hours, I plucked up my courage and went out to the porch, armed with a thick pair of gloves and a cleaver. Barbara and my daughter Maddy watched me through the double-paned storm window, armed with a video camera. I hacked the fruit open, and found four seeds like avocado pits, each nestling in a yellowish pulp that was supposed to taste like vanilla custard. I scooped out some pulp and tried it.

The taste was curiously like well-blended sweet onion pudding. It was certainly no weirder than, say, an avocado.

As I stood there on the porch, making those little frowns and nods and humming noises you tend to make when you’re tasting something, it occurred to me that the fact that I was even able to try eating durian proved my sense of smell is so defective that, as we say in my family, I have a nose like an elbow.

I spooned out a little of the pulp, opened the kitchen door and passed the spoon in to Barbara. Unfortunately, her sense of smell is so keen she could hire herself out to the U.N. and find buried bioweapons just by sniffing. She tried a little, gasped, shrieked, gagged, ran to the sink and began frantically washing her tongue.

A mixed review for the durian, then; but the experience, coming at year’s end, left me curiously exhilarated.

Any year that begins with tasting a durian must be a year of adventure, I thought. And given the terrible economic news at the time and the growing hysteria over terrorism and pandemic influenza, I was in favor of anything that promoted a sense of exotic possibilities, of enterprise, of new things worth trying.

Sure enough, over the next twelve months I started a radical publishing project that has already produced nine original books, launched a college-based publishing program and laid the groundwork for a web-based global public health communication initiative. If I could try durian, I could try anything.

So I wish you all a New Year so full of courage and enterprise that it’s like trying a spiky fruit that can kill at ten paces. Let’s make 2010 not the Year of the Tiger or the Year of the Pig but the Year of the Durian. Bring it on, I say.

This is the first essay I wrote after my great friend Bob Malesky, a wonderful producer and a lovely human being, was made a departure offer he couldn’t refuse and had to leave NPR. As one of his stable of regulars, my own position there was, of course, doomed. This essay, then, was my first not to be broadcast on NPR. I include it here because it is one of my favorites, and it has a certain defiant resolve about it that seems both ironic and appropriate, under the circumstances.