Nine Days

by Fred Hiatt

  Her living room seemed also to be her dining room, office and, with a playpen smack in front of the television, nursery. Within half an hour she had sold us what she promised were tickets to Hanoi, departing from Hong Kong at five a.m. the next morning on an airline I had never heard of, and two letters which she swore we could exchange for thirty-day entrance visas when we landed in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. All of which cost a lot less than I’d been worrying it would. She swiped my Visa card on a handheld machine she produced from behind an alarmingly cloudy fish tank.

  We managed all this even though her English was almost impossible to understand, and her Chinese (Ti-Anna told me later) even less penetrable. The baby cried in its playpen the whole time, softly, never stopping but never getting more upset, either, as if it was used to waiting its turn.

  The woman didn’t ask why we were going, or why we were in Hong Kong in the first place, or how we had found her, for that matter. When we were finished, she simply waved us to the door and went into her kitchen. We could hear the baby, still crying patiently, as we walked away.

  Heading back to the subway, we debated what to do next. We could have used a shower and a change of clothes. At least, I could have. But having nearly killed ourselves (or at least, myself) to lose our shadow, it would have been stupid to go back to base and let him catch up with us again. For the same reason, we decided it would be safer not to get in touch with Horace.

  So we moved from one coffee shop to another. I studied the Vietnam guidebook. Ti-Anna worked at reading a novel she’d bought in Chinese, which she said was good practice and would make her father happy. In the evening we rode the bus out to the airport, found a clean patch of floor in a quiet corner and took turns dozing, or trying to doze, until it was time to fly to Hanoi.

  At immigration, no one even asked to see the letters from our parents: another masterpiece that would never see the light of day.

  Day Four: Wednesday

  Hanoi

  Chapter 25

  Once we managed to cross a street in old Hanoi, I felt more hopeful than I had in a long time.

  The streets were narrow, and lined with shops with no doors or walls, spilling their goods onto what would have been the sidewalks—except there were no sidewalks, either.

  And there were no traffic lights, or traffic policemen or stop signs or, as far as I could see, rules of any kind.

  What there were: More mopeds, motorcycles and bicycles than you knew existed. Lots of them with two or even three people hanging on, sometimes hefting baskets of mangoes or giant containers of auto parts, all coming at us in an unending river of honks and bells and exhaust.

  Ti-Anna and I stood at the corner, after the bus from the airport had deposited us, and thought: We will never get across. This is where our lives will end.

  But here’s the thing: You can get across. And the way you do it is by just … walking … across. Not too fast, not too slow: the key is, no unpredictable movements. The traffic never stops. It doesn’t even seem to notice. But somehow, it flows around you. The motorcycle drivers have to have faith that you’re going to keep walking across that road, pretty much at the same speed you’ve been walking across the road, and you have to have faith that they won’t hit you. They might flow behind you, they might flow before you, but they won’t hit you. You try not to catch their eye, either, or even really look at what’s coming. That only confuses things. Instead, you just … keep … walking.

  And when you get to the other side, you can’t believe you’ve made it. Your blood pressure comes down a bit, and you think, Maybe there is hope. If a human being can cross that road while traffic never stops, anything is possible.

  By afternoon, crossing the street wasn’t the only reason I was feeling (foolishly, as it would turn out) a little better.

  First of all, the tickets to Hanoi had turned out to be real. The airline seemed to be under the same management as the Rising Phoenix, in terms of comfort and service—I’ll do you a favor and not describe the box “breakfast” they handed out along the way—but it got us there, no questions asked.

  And when we arrived, Ti-Anna let me persuade her not to go straight to Radio Man’s go-between—whose name, by the way, was Thieu. I’d been arguing that we were exhausted, having pretty much missed a night’s sleep, and it would be more sensible to find a hotel, get cleaned up, maybe even buy a new T-shirt and find him the next morning. What difference could one day make?

  She wasn’t having any of it, at first. She was determined to gain ground on her father, as she imagined it.

  But she gave in when we exited the Hanoi airport. The crowd there was like nothing you’ve ever seen—thousands of people yelling and shoving and looking for relatives and offering cab rides, in one frenzied, cacophonous (to us) mass. Anyway, it was like nothing we’d ever seen; it was Ti-Anna’s first foreign country, really, since Hong Kong hadn’t felt totally foreign to her. Plus, if Hong Kong had felt warm, this was hot—ninety-something with a drenching, deafening rain pouring onto the airport portico. (Did I mention that Vietnam’s rainy season had begun?)

  It took the wind out of us—even out of Ti-Anna. So we made our way to the old part of Hanoi, and we made our way across one street, and then another, and another, until we felt like pros, and we found a cheap hotel that wasn’t too dirty, and we dried off and took a shower (and dried off again), and generally began to feel better.

  And then, in slightly better shape, we found Anna Sydney.

  The map showed her office to be not far from our hotel, so we took a chance on finding her in, as we had with Horace. We walked around Hoan Kiem Lake, where couples were strolling and rowboating in what was now a drizzle, and found her office on the fourth floor of a soot-stained old building a few blocks from the lake.

  I wouldn’t have been able to guess her age. Her skin was cracked and wrinkled, but more from being outside than from being old, and her short hair was between blond and gray.

  She had the air of someone who generally knew what she was doing. Also of someone who was always busy. When we told her who had sent us, her eyes widened. When Ti-Anna explained, as briefly as she could, who she was, and why we were there, her eyes got even wider.

  “But you’re just children!” she said. Which, coming from her, felt more comforting than insulting.

  And then: “You must be starving!” After which, needless to say, she could do no wrong in my book.

  As we descended in her creaking elevator, she told us to call her Sydney. “Everyone does,” she said. There had been three Annas in her kindergarten class, she explained, and somehow they became Anna 1, Anna 2 and Sydney.

  “It broke my mother’s heart, because she loved the name Anna, and she called me that until the day she died,” Sydney said. “She was the only one who did.”

  She shepherded us across the street for a big bowl of pho bo, which are noodles that Vietnamese people seemed to eat at any time of day. Pho are the noodles in soup, and bo is beef, because you can get it with slices of meat on top. Like most restaurants we saw, the noodle place was open to the busy street, so it was hard to say whether we were sitting inside or outside, though a metal awning protected us from the clattering rain.

  Instead of asking a lot of questions right away, like most grownups would have done, she let us ask her about what she was doing.

  It might be hard to believe long after slavery had supposedly been abolished, she said, but in all these poor countries, there were people—especially young girls and women—being bought and sold. Burmese girls were sold as wives for Chinese men, Laotian girls were sold into prostitution in Vietnam, Vietnamese girls were sold into prostitution in Thailand.

  Girls were made prisoners in their own countries too, she said. But if they were shipped across borders, to places where they didn’t know anyone and couldn’t speak the language, they had even less power to resist. If they didn’t have passports, they might be afraid to run to the police. If they did run to the police, the police
might sell them back.

  Technically, slavery and prostitution were against the law in all these countries. Sydney’s group tried to get police and prosecutors to make the laws more than theoretical. There was a lot of bribery and the criminal gangs were tough and well organized. But, she said, there were also people who wanted to do the right thing, including honest police officers. She’d been at it a lot of years, she told us.

  That was how she had met Radio Man. One day years before he’d somehow heard about a group of young women who’d been taken from their villages in western China and shipped to a big city in eastern China—not to work as prostitutes, but in a factory where they were locked in their dormitories at night and charged more for dinner every night than they made in wages every day, so the longer they worked the more they owed. She was working in Hong Kong then, and he’d called her for help, and they’d been friends ever since, she said.

  “But I’ve been worried about him lately,” she said, without elaborating. “How did he seem?”

  Not having anything to compare to, we weren’t sure how to answer that question. Ti-Anna recounted how at first he’d sent us away, and how the next morning he had changed his mind, and how he’d come running after us on the rocks to give us Sydney’s name.

  She took that in for a minute.

  “I suppose you know that he had to leave his family behind in China,” she said. “I think that must make life awfully hard for him.”

  I thought about his nearly empty house, with a single barbell in the corner, and about his family back in China. It didn’t make me feel more warmly toward the guy, but it did put things in a different light.

  By this time we’d finished our noodles.

  “Did you both have enough to eat?” Sydney asked.

  “If Ethan ever tells you he’s full,” Ti-Anna said, “you’ll know he’s speaking in some kind of secret code.”

  Sydney laughed. “I’ll try to keep that in mind,” she said.

  Since every little restaurant in Hanoi seemed to feature one thing and one thing only, we got up and moved a few shops down to a place that served coffee and pastries.

  We found stools around a low round table on what would have been the sidewalk, if Hanoi had had sidewalks, and Sydney brought the conversation back to Ti-Anna and her dad.

  She reacted to our story with something between amazement and horror.

  “What I should do is put both of you on a plane this instant and send you right back home,” she said.

  Good luck with that, I thought, and, after taking one look at Ti-Anna’s face, Sydney just sighed.

  “Well, at a minimum I will go with you to meet this Mr. Thieu,” she said, adding that she would bring a couple of Vietnamese friends along too.

  That sounded good to me, but Ti-Anna (as I should have known she would) shook her head.

  “I don’t want to spook him,” she said. If he had arranged a meeting for her father that the authorities didn’t know about, he’d be more willing to tell her and a friend than a group including Vietnamese men he didn’t know, she reasoned.

  They argued back and forth, but in the end Sydney gave in. Vietnam was a Communist country, like China, and even though it didn’t always get along with China, police in Hanoi might not have felt much more warmly about a democracy activist like Ti-Anna’s father than police in his own country. Sydney said she couldn’t disagree with that.

  Though she didn’t look happy about it, she helped us find his address on our map—it was north of the old city, not too far from Hanoi’s other lake—and made us promise to let her know what happened.

  “Do you have a phone that works here?” she asked.

  I hadn’t tried mine, but I was pretty sure it wouldn’t. She took us back up to her office and lent us one.

  “I’m number two on the speed dial,” she said. “Call me!”

  We promised we would. Then we went back to our hotel and collapsed.

  As I lay in the dark, I calculated that it had been four days since we’d left home. I wondered if my parents were still in Geneva. I wondered if my brother had come by to water the plants.

  And then, as tired from crossing Hanoi’s streets as from spending the previous night on an airport floor, I dropped off to sleep before I could wonder about anything more.

  Day Five: Thursday

  Hanoi–Haiphong

  Chapter 26

  When I say Mr. Thieu looked like a rat, I don’t mean to be insulting. Mr. Thieu just really looked like a rat.

  We found his place without much trouble. It was odd—not a building right on the street, but a gate to a big plot of land. Big for Hanoi, anyway, where everyone seemed to live on top of each other. From the street you could see a jumble of greenery and, set back a ways, part of a red and black roof, almost as if an old temple had been converted into something else.

  I pushed a buzzer in the wall.

  Nothing happened.

  “We could climb over,” Ti-Anna mused.

  The gate looked scalable, barely. But her suggestion was enough to make the scrapes on my palms start stinging again.

  “Please,” I said. “Enough jumping around.”

  I pushed the buzzer again, and almost instantly we heard the gate unlatch, as if Mr. Thieu had a rule not to answer unless someone buzzed twice.

  He looked, as I said, like a rat: beady eyes in a puffed-up face, sharp nose, tufty hair that looked like he’d cut it himself, pink curly tail. No, just kidding; no tail. But you almost expected one.

  Before Ti-Anna could get more than a sentence into explaining who had sent us, Mr. Thieu cut her off.

  “I know who you are,” he said, in heavily accented English. “Come back tonight. Alone.”

  “We are alone,” Ti-Anna protested.

  “No,” he said, pointing to me. “You are not alone. If you want to hear about your father, come back tonight. Alone.”

  And with that he ducked away. The rusty metal gate swung slowly shut, with a creak and a click.

  We stood there, too surprised to speak. In fact, you know the five stages of grief? I don’t either, exactly, but I remember reading them somewhere, and in Ti-Anna’s face you could see her cycling through the ones I remember. Shock. Depression. Anger. Finally—what would you call it?—resignation: “I guess I’ll just have to come back tonight,” she said. (Yes, I know that was only four. It’s not like someone had actually died.)

  “You will not come back alone,” I said.

  Thus began an argument that continued, in fits and starts, for the rest of that day.

  Not that we stood in front of the gate all day. After a while, we turned around and sat in front of it, leaning back against the wall. Arguing. Then we started walking south, back toward downtown. Arguing. We stopped for some pho. Arguing.

  As the tiresome day wore on, we walked and argued and walked some more. I would say, “I don’t think you should go back alone.” And Ti-Anna would say, “If that’s the only way he’s going to tell us where my father went, then I’m going.” “You shouldn’t.” “Why not?” “Because.”

  “Maybe Radio Man didn’t mention you, only ‘the daughter,’ and so he doesn’t know whether he can trust you,” Ti-Anna guessed. “Maybe he’s scared he’ll get in trouble, and it’s safer to tell one person than two. Maybe he doesn’t like white people.”

  At some level, I’m sure Ti-Anna knew that none of those made much sense. But she had come this far, she felt like she was about to find out what had happened to her father, and she wasn’t going to let anything stop her now. And I had come this far so she wouldn’t have to do this alone, and I wasn’t going to let anything stop me.

  The rain was streaming down our faces, even as sweat was trickling down our backs.

  To kill time, and get under some kind of roof, we visited Ho Chi Minh, though he happens to be dead.

  Ho was the Communist leader who led Vietnam in wars against the French, in the 1950s and ’60s, and against the Americans, in the 1960s and ’70s, ev
entually beating both. According to their official history, which of course is written by the Communists who still run the place, he is the beloved father of his nation—their George Washington. Yes, just like the Chinese and Mao.

  They have him pickled and on display, in this monumental mausoleum in the middle of a parade ground in the middle of Hanoi. (Yes, just like Mao in Beijing.) To see him you have to go through a metal detector and get in a long line, and there are guards telling you to take your hands out of your pockets and keep quiet. When you get inside it’s like being inside a temple, or a funeral home.

  While we were waiting to get in, I started in on the sickness of creating state religions around Communist dictators. Ti-Anna shushed me, and I thought back to the last time I was shooting my mouth off about a pickled Communist dictator. That seemed like a couple of eons ago.

  I shut up. But as we filed past the mummified corpse, nicely turned out in a shirt and tie, I couldn’t help nudging Ti-Anna and whispering, “How do we know he’s not made of wax?” Because, honestly, he looked suspiciously orange.

  “Shhh!” she said again. “Not here!”

  “Shhh!” a guard said, in a less friendly way.

  When we got outside, we resumed our arguing. All I could think about was Rat-face, and why he didn’t want me along.

  “Look,” Ti-Anna said, in what she obviously thought of as a compromise. “You can wait right outside the gate. He’ll know you’re there. What could go wrong?”

  Which is the question that was echoing in my mind, over and over, as we headed back to Mr. Thieu’s. Because, of course, Ti-Anna had won the argument and was planning to go in alone. I had agreed to wait right outside the gate.

  Chapter 27

  I might have kept my promise, too, if the gate hadn’t closed so slowly.

  We returned to the house as darkness fell. I hung back as Ti-Anna punched the buzzer. The gate opened, Ti-Anna disappeared, the gate swung back—and paused, for just an instant.