by Dana Sachs
The House on Dream Street
Memoir of an American Woman
in Vietnam
by
Dana Sachs
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
To my friends in Vietnam,
for inviting me into their
lives and encouraging me to
write about it; and to Todd
and Jesse, for everything
In memory of Leah Melnick
A frog that sits at the bottom of a well
thinks that the whole sky
is only as big as the lid of a pot.
—VIETNAMESE PROVERB
Contents
PROLOGUE
1. Through the Green Gate
2. The House on Dream Street
3. Navigation
4. The Four Stages of Love
5. Pilgrims
6. War Stories
7. Liberation Days
8. A Typhoon and a Full Moon
9. Private Rooms
10. Dreams, and Waking Up
11. Shifting Positions
12. New Arrivals
13. Firecrackers on Dream Street
EPILOGUE
PROLOGUE
This is a story about Vietnam, but it’s not about the war there. It is a story about Vietnam much later, and about one American woman’s life in that country. It’s the story of a love affair with a place, a love affair that I never would have predicted.
I was born in 1962, and when I was a kid, the words “Vietnam” and “war” were interchangeable. People asked questions like, “When will Vietnam be over?” and, for me at least, such a question didn’t sound strange at all. I’d never heard of “Vietnam” except as war, and the place itself conjured nothing in my mind but dust and blood and wailing faces.
Of course the war did end, finally, after more than twenty years, and the deaths of fifty-eight thousand Americans and nearly two million Vietnamese. After North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the gates of Saigon’s Presidential Palace on April 30, 1975, Vietnam became one nation, then it shut itself off from the Western world.
Nothing that had happened during the war in Vietnam had caused my family to suffer. My father had been too old for the draft. The people we knew who had served in the war hadn’t died, thank goodness, or even been injured. And now that it was over, Vietnam receded into history for me, which amounted to the few bits of information I absorbed when my harried American history teacher compressed all of Vietnam and Watergate into the last week of eleventh grade.
Nothing in my background hinted at the possibility of my falling in love with Vietnam. Then in 1989, when I was twentysix and working as a journalist in San Francisco, a friend and I decided to quit our jobs and go backpacking through Asia. In Thailand a few months later, we found out that Vietnam, for the first time since the war ended, was offering tourist visas to Americans. We were hungry to go to a place that hadn’t been transformed by tourism (and travelers like us), and so we went.
Realistically, I knew no bombs would drop during that visit, but my imagination couldn’t get past television images of my childhood: screaming women in black pajamas, military jeeps roving city streets, and bomb-shocked children begging for food. Instead, I was confronted by a world in the midst of regenerating itself. I saw lush vegetation growing out of the broken carcasses of airplanes, and I met passionate, stubborn, intensely engaging people who, far from being beaten down by their past, focused limitless energy on constructing for themselves a less troubled future. We traversed the country during that month, from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, and in a way that no other place I’d ever visited had done, the country seemed to open its soul to me. I stood on busy sidewalks as teary-eyed young mothers held my hands and told me stories of their lives. I spent happy evenings laughing and guzzling beer with cranky old men, and lazy afternoons riding bicycles along quiet country roads with foreign language students who collected hip English phrases as obsessively as American teenagers collect CDs. I fell in love with Vietnam during that visit.
I spent most of the 1990s either living in Vietnam or figuring out how I could go back. I held a number of different jobs: I taught English, wrote a newspaper column, edited English-language radio broadcasts, led tours. More often, I worked for Hanoians, and my wages came in the ten- or twenty-dollar bundles for which my employers had scrimped and saved. Once, I contributed the voice-over narration for a documentary on the production of silk. For that, I earned a few dollars and a pale peach blouse.
I never made more than what I needed to pay the rent. But I kept returning. It was memories, and moments, that drew me back: the feel of my rickety one-speed bike careering through the streets of Hanoi; the rich, woody smell of freshly steamed rice; my friend Huong and the way a smile appeared, like sun after rain, across her face. I missed the green, crashing summer storms and the way they managed to break the heat. I missed carrying home lunch wrapped in a banana leaf and a few recycled pages of some child’s homework. I missed sitting in cafés and drinking sweet sugarcane juice with Phai, the Hanoi man I would come to love. Over the course of all these years, some part of my soul reserved itself for Vietnam. When I went there, it became alive again. And when I left, it retreated.
Not surprisingly, my personal life changed enormously over the next eight years. In 1995, I got married, and in 1997, I had a baby. I no longer had the luxury to take off by myself for Vietnam. I’d like to say that it didn’t matter, that, over the course of those years, my passion for the place had finally waned. But it hadn’t. I still wrote about Vietnam. Read about Vietnam. I still dreamed about it. Regularly.
In May of 1998, I went back, this time with my husband and son. The journey was long and complicated, demanding nearly thirty hours, crossing twelve time zones, and changing planes three times. Still, I forgot my fatigue when the jet finally touched down on the tarmac of Hanoi’s Noi Bai Airport. As the other passengers on the plane hurried to pull their belongings down from the overhead racks, I held my son in my arms and turned toward the window, straining for a glimpse of what I knew lay outside: deep green fields stretching off toward the hazy silhouette of Ba Vi Mountain. And there it was, just as I’d remembered, a view spread out before me beneath a rice-colored sky.
I had not always felt so sure of this place. Six years earlier, on a blustery day in early March of 1992, the view outside the window of the plane looked barren and uninviting. Staring out across the rice fields toward that unknown mountain, I’d felt alone and quite terrified. My plan to come here, which had once sounded like great adventure, now seemed foolish, like a game of pretend that I’d taken too far. I had nothing except a backpack and a wavering determination to build a life for myself in this place. Just those two things. And one address.
1. Through the Green Gate
THE CYCLO PULLED TO A STOP in front of an enormous green gate. I turned around and looked at the driver, but he only gave me a smug smile from his seat on the pedicab. “This is number four,” he said, gesturing toward the address beside the gate. I glanced at the number, then at the address in my hand, then glared at him. When he had first approached me as I stepped off the bus in central Hanoi, he had insisted that my destination was ten kilometers away and that he, in turn, deserved a hefty fee for pedaling me there. But we had traveled less than a kilometer and arrived in five minutes.
“Stay here,” I said as sternly as I could in my miserable Vietnamese. I clambered over my backpack and out of the basketlike passenger seat, unwilling to pay him before I knew if this place was, indeed, the home of the only person I knew in Hanoi. The cyclo driver shrugged, then twisted around on his bicycle seat and immediately leapt into a discussion with the people gathered around a sidewalk tea stall acro
ss the narrow street. “She’s an American. Came here to study Vietnamese. Twenty-nine years old. Not married yet,” he told them, making quick work of all the information I had given him on the ride over.
I stood for a moment, looking around. I remembered Hanoi from my previous visit, in the late winter two years before, and much that I saw around me now felt familiar. Today’s sky was the same impermeable gray, the color of the rice porridge I’d watched people swallow quickly on their way to work. The air had the same chilly moistness, carrying hints of motorbike exhaust, overripe fruit, and chicken broth simmering all day over tiny charcoal stoves. Across the road, a group of pale-faced old women sat at the tea stall. They wore scarves around their heads and held tiny cups of Hanoi tea between their fingers. I remembered that tea as well. In Saigon, people had drunk endless glasses of iced tea. At restaurants and sidewalk food stalls, every order, even coffee, came with tea. But Saigon tea was weak as water, barely yellow. The copper-colored Hanoi tea was a different drink entirely, whiskey strong and drunk in shots. On my first trip to Hanoi, I had sipped it and gagged.
I could remember a lot about Hanoi, but I felt shaky anyway. My earlier visit to Vietnam had lasted only a month. Now, I was moving here. The difference between visiting and living in Vietnam felt immense, and very scary. I’d had big dreams to come back to this country to live. But now, I only felt small and fragile and very foreign. I couldn’t satisfy myself with a quick jaunt through the famous sites and then a taxi ride back to the airport. I had to find a job. A home. Some friends.
From across the road, the tea drinkers stared at me with speculative interest. Pulling my scarf tighter against the wind, I wished I could take a little break, maybe just sleep in my own bed tonight in San Francisco, then try Hanoi again tomorrow. But the tea drinkers didn’t disappear. One of them, perched on a stool with her knees tightly folded against her chest, lifted a hand and briskly waved me toward the gate. Her face, as infinitely lined as cracked porcelain, broke into a great, wide grin, revealing two rows of deeply red, betel-nut stained teeth. I looked at her for a moment, forcing my mouth into a smile of its own. Then, mustering all my courage, I turned around, walked over to the doorbell, and rang. I’d come all this way. It was too late to change my mind.
After a minute, I heard a shuffling behind the gate. A latch turned and a husky, pale-skinned teenage girl appeared in the doorway. She looked out at me in shock. I stammered in Vietnamese, “Uh. Is Tra here? I want to meet Nguyen Thi Tra.”
The expression on her face did not change. “Nguyen Thi Tra!” yelled the cyclo driver from behind me. The girl’s mouth twitched in some form of recognition, and she disappeared again behind the gate.
I had met Nguyen Thi Tra less than a year before, when she taught Vietnamese at a summer-long intensive language course I’d attended in upstate New York. All the students adored her, not because she was such a fine language teacher—she was actually an economist drafted for a job outside her field—but because she had that rare and very lucky quality of being completely attractive. She was less than five feet tall, but maintained an energy that, even compressed inside that tiny body, could expand to fill a room.
Although Tra was Vietnamese, she was not an easy person to imagine living in Vietnam. I had only known her as a resident of the States, where she had been studying business at the University of Michigan for the past three years. America suited her well. There, she had guzzled diet Cokes, developed a preference for poppy-seed bagels, and become a jogger who worried about her weight. The only thing that tied her to Vietnam, it had seemed to me, was that she had a husband and young son who still lived there. I was anxious to see how this fiery spirit, so thrilled by America, would appear in Hanoi, an ancient city of crumbling colonial mansions and wizened old ladies who could make an afternoon out of staring at a foreigner.
I heard a squeal on the other side of the wall. The teenager pulled back the gate to reveal a young woman bounding toward me. She was wearing a burly white sweater, Day-Glo aquamarine biker shorts, and brand new Nike sneakers. With her hair pulled back into a high ponytail, she looked more like a college gymnastics star than a Hanoi wife and mother. I smiled. It was Tra.
We passed the next minutes in a frenzy of loud, American-style greetings. The neighbors, the cyclo driver, and the teenage girl watched us as if we were enacting the reunion of long-lost sisters in a traditional folk play. “Don’t just stand there,” Tra said, finally, ready to drag me by the hand into her house. I paid the cyclo driver and grabbed my backpack. As the gate slammed shut behind us, I felt, for a moment at least, that I was safe.
The yellow, two-story house curled around the sides of a courtyard. The older section at the left looked over the high wall into the street outside and had the elegant symmetry of French colonial architecture. Behind it sat a more modern U-shaped addition, a utilitarian two-story structure with a balcony running the length of the second floor. Together in its two parts, Tra’s house looked like a stately Paris mansion run up against a Motel 6.
The two of us stood in the blue fluorescent glow of the kitchen. We’d spent an hour or two catching up over tea and candy and now I’d offered to help cook dinner. Tra was planning to serve rice pancakes wrapped around grilled pork, a sort of Vietnamese version of the burrito. To accompany the dish, she was preparing a platter of rice noodles, lettuce, bean sprouts, sliced lemons, hot chilis, and a variety of herbs. Tra pushed a bowl of herbs in my direction.
“This is what you do,” she said, the tone in her voice reminding me of the way she used to beat the blackboard with a nub of chalk while trying to explain some complicated rule of Vietnamese grammar. Today’s lesson centered on a sprig of basil, from which she plucked off the smooth green leaves. “What do you call this vegetable in English?” she suddenly paused mid-demonstration to ask. Tra believed that her chances for success in the world outside of Vietnam were directly related to her aptitude in English. “Basil” was a word she needed to know.
“You should learn to say these things in Vietnamese, too,” Tra said, after I had carefully pronounced “basil,” “cilantro,” and “mint” for her. Slowly, she said each word for me in Vietnamese, adding the names for several mysterious-looking herbs that sat before us on the table. The one called tia tô was maple-shaped, green on one side and royal purple on the other. Chewing the leaves, Tra said, would cure a sore throat. The rau răm had long, thin leaves and a spicy smell. Tra held it up and looked at me with one of her wicked grins, the kind of expression that she would describe as meaning, “I have something in my sleeves.” Rau răm, she whispered now, “is for the monks to eat, so they won’t want to have the sex.” Then she dissolved into laughter.
I tried to pronounce the new words correctly, but I couldn’t absorb a thing. At this point, I could hardly recall the Vietnamese for “eat” or “buy.” Meanwhile, Tra stood next to me, slicing cucumbers and repeating “basil,” “cilantro,” and “mint” to herself as if she were trying to remember the recipe for some complicated salad.
I moved slowly through the bowl of basil. Back in the States, I might have rushed to finish such a task, but here I took my time. I didn’t have anywhere else to go. Tra had described some possible rooms for rent, but nothing sounded promising. My great secret hope had been dashed when she told me that she didn’t have government permission to house a foreigner. At this moment, Tra and her house felt like my only refuge. I picked through the basil carefully, hoping that if I were a good enough guest at least she’d invite me back.
A hinge creaked and I looked up to see the husky teenage girl peek in through the door of the kitchen, then disappear again.
“Tra, who is that girl?” I asked.
“That’s Lua,” Tra said. “She’s from the countryside. Her family’s very poor, so she came here to work for us.”
“The Vietnamese government lets people have servants?” I tried to place this in the context of Marxism.
“Of course,” said Tra. “We could always have servant
s.” She explained that, in the past, if a family had servants the government would consider it an exploitation of labor, but as the economy started to pick up, no one cared as much.
The girl was back, eyeing me again through the doorway. Lua was taller than average, with a physique that in another decade might have hiked the length of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, one more able body in the intricate network that supplied the Communist forces down south. Now, her family probably spent its days bent double in the rice fields, backs burning in the sun. Lua had managed to get away from all that, taking up the less strenuous life of a servant in the city. She didn’t look like either a fighter or a farmer. No famous black pajamas. No conical hat. She had on pink pastel pants and a frilly yellow top. Perhaps she was wondering why I wasn’t wearing a pith helmet and a flak jacket.
I pulled together a few words in Vietnamese. “My name is Dana,” I said to Lua. She giggled and ran away. I looked at Tra quizzically.
Tra dumped the last handful of cucumber slices into a bowl. Wiping her forehead with the back of her hand, she said, “She’s never been so close to a foreigner before. She’s scared.”
“What can I do?” I asked.
“You can’t do anything. People from the countryside, they don’t know anything about foreigners.” Tra gave a wave of her hand that showed her impatience with Lua’s lack of sophistication, then she looked at me for a moment. “I was thinking about something the other day. What is the word in English for a person with a nice face, so nice that it means good luck for their children?”
I thought about it. “I guess we would say a nice face.”
“No. It’s more than that. In Vietnamese we say phúc hậu, a face that means good destiny.”
“I don’t think we have a word for that in English,” I said.
Dissatisfied, Tra pulled a handful of greens from my bowl and began to tear them apart impatiently. Despite her years in the States, she hadn’t realized that the concept of destiny is not as important to Americans as it is to Vietnamese. Tra took destiny, and the role it played in people’s lives, for granted. I, on the other hand, never thought of destiny at all. It wouldn’t be long before I began to realize how fundamental it was in Vietnam.