by Dana Sachs
I couldn’t sleep at Tra’s, but her neighbor across the street, Nhung, had permission to rent rooms to foreigners. Nhung’s place was clean and convenient, but I didn’t fancy the brand-new carved wood furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl, or the price, which seemed to reflect the cost of the opulent surroundings. On the bedside table, perhaps to entice me to stay longer, I found a plate of bananas and oranges with a little note that said, in simple Vietnamese, “Enjoy! All of this fruit is a gift for you, and you don’t have to pay for it.” For a long while, I lay sideways across the imperial bed, eating a banana and staring at the ceiling. I’d lived in Hanoi for more than eight hours, and so far, I reminded myself, things were going just fine. On the other hand, I’d spent seven of those hours cloistered inside Tra’s house, and my hour-long journey from the airport had felt a bit dicey. I considered the fact that, for as long as I lived in Vietnam, I would always stand out in a crowd—bigger, paler, and richer than everyone else.
Maybe I was a little out of my league as an independent traveler. I doubt that Paul Theroux or Graham Greene got shaky every time a group of old women stared at them from across the street. Eric Hansen, author of Stranger in the Forest, trekked through the jungles of Borneo—facing wild animals, debilitating ailments, and the constant danger of getting lost—and then he turned around and trekked right back. A guy like that wasn’t likely to quake when a cyclo driver demanded a better price.
But women and men, in general, experience travel in very different ways. A man carries a certain cachet in international society. He’s the explorer, and although locals might question his behavior, they’re not likely to question his very right to travel. When women venture into foreign societies, we often throw ourselves up against the hard surfaces of traditions that aren’t flexible enough to accept us there. Simply by daring to go, we break a taboo. Many local men regard breaking one taboo as license to break another, or so I had learned from a hotel bellboy in Thailand, who sat down on my bed, expecting sex as a tip, and from the tour guide who couldn’t keep his hand off my thigh, and from the sweet older man in North India who suddenly grabbed me from behind and tried to kiss me. Women travelers have to move through the world very carefully.
Sure, I’d heard about the woman who rode a camel by herself across Australia, but I didn’t know any women (or men, for that matter) like her. Most of the women I knew who traveled had to overcome huge obstacles in their own psyches before they even packed their bags. Growing up, I’d always considered myself a physical weakling. When I started to travel, I realized I had to either find my own strength or stay home. One of my most exhilarating experiences had been a very mundane one. It was my first day alone in Asia and I was terrified. My backpack felt like a small child hanging from my shoulders. At the airport bus stop, someone pointed out the bus I needed to go to Bangkok. I watched the vehicle pull alongside the curb and slow down and then realized it was never going to come to a full stop. With my pack bumping along behind me, I jogged to the open door, grabbed the metal bar at the side of it, and pulled myself up. I was still hanging over the side when the bus sped away. For one eternal moment, my arm muscles competed against the weight of the backpack and I knew that I could either pull myself into the bus or allow myself to come crashing down onto the street. With a strength I didn’t know I had—a powerful combination of desire and fear of disaster—I pulled myself into the bus.
For me, success in travel had always depended on that mix of desire and fear. Desire got me to buy the ticket, and fear of failure kept me from cashing it in. Coming to Hanoi was no different, except that the stakes were higher. My desire to live in Vietnam was so absolute that I could not imagine any other way to spend the next great chunk of my life. Fear, on the other hand, made me think that if I failed at this I’d have to take it as a general sign of failure in life. I pictured Eric Hansen, setting off into the wilds of Borneo, confronting the challenge of nature. But I wasn’t Eric Hansen.
It was nearly midnight. I rolled my banana peel into a little ball, tossed it onto the bedside table, and switched off the light. Upstairs, I could hear the landlady’s family watching TV. A dog in the house next door let out a whiny howl. I calculated the time difference between Hanoi and San Francisco—fifteen hours—and fell asleep.
2. The House on Dream Street
THAD VISIONS OF RENTING A LITTLE GARRET in an old villa built by the French. I didn’t want anything big, and I could live with creaky doors and peeling paint, as long as I had a view of a tree or two. I pictured renting a room from a big family full of wise grandmothers and cooing babies. I would help them celebrate their weddings, and if someone died I would be with them to share their grief. This house would be my entry point into the culture and customs of Vietnam, and at the end of each eventful day, I would climb the stairs to my quiet little garret, where I would look out at my tree and reflect on what I had learned.
Unfortunately, this was not to be. Garrets, Tra explained, were hard to come by in Hanoi and seldom rented out to foreigners. Though the city had many villas, most were decrepit tenements that lacked such amenities as indoor plumbing. The families lucky enough to have government permission to rent rooms to foreigners were generally the people building the shiny new houses springing up all over town. I might have to make do with something a bit less quaint, Tra told me, but I’d be happier with the plumbing.
We went to look at a townhouse around the corner. The building was four stories high, towering over every other structure in the neighborhood, and so new that I was looking at it through a haze of construction dust. Its most prominent feature, aside from its startling gawkiness, was a strange hull-shaped trellis covering its roof.
“I designed the house myself,” said the owner, a man about my age named Tung, who had come outside to meet us. “I didn’t need an architect.”
“What’s that thing up on the roof?” I whispered to Tra in English. “It looks like a boat.”
“That’s the Hanoi style,” she said.
We followed Tung into the ground floor room of the house, which was bare, except for a brand-new gray sofa and matching gray armchair, both covered in clear plastic. Tung stopped and pointed to an empty place on the wall, then said something to Tra.
“He’s going to have a telephone,” she told me, obviously impressed. Tra’s family had a private phone, but they were among the few Hanoi families that had one. Tung explained that his name was at the top of the waiting list for private phones in the city and that he expected to have it installed any day. “We’re number three three four seven one,” he said proudly, and his future telephone number was the first thing he said in Vietnamese that I could understand.
We followed Tung up a flight of stairs to a second floor back door, which opened on to an exterior stairway leading to the rooms above. Behind the house sat an old French villa, built decades earlier at a stately distance from the road. Now its front and side yards served as real estate for newer buildings—stone cottages and concrete one-room homes cluttered together in such density that, except for a narrow bicycle path, the mansion was completely cut off from the street. From the second-floor landing of Tung’s house, I gazed down at the villa with vague longing. Wouldn’t I be more likely to find my dream family in that villa than in this tall, skinny townhouse with a nautical trellis on its roof?
Tra and I struggled to climb the stairs. The landlord may have been able to design his own trellis, but he clearly didn’t understand how to build a simple staircase. The staircase was not only uneven, it was also excessively steep, and I nearly tripped over one sudden change in the elevation. Tung, meanwhile, was talking nonstop as he climbed the stairs in front of me. I understood few of his words, but it wasn’t hard to recognize the intonation and body language of a salesman. He was a modern guy, a Vietnamese Burt Reynolds, possessed of a thick mustache and that easy self-confidence that comes with good looks and financial security. Judging from his shiny loafers and well-tailored pants, I decided he wasn’t the kind of
fellow who would take an interest in teaching me the old and honored customs of traditional Vietnam.
After climbing three flights, Tra and I were breathless when we finally reached the room. As Tung continued talking about the house, and Tra nodded politely, I looked around. It was large and airy, with a Western-style bathroom adjoining it and double doors at the far end that opened to a balcony overlooking the street. The color scheme was inconsistent enough to seem random—brown-and-orange tiled floor, yellow walls, a ceiling painted in two shades of baby blue, a pink coverlet for the bed, dark green curtains, and a pair of reddish-orange Naugahyde armchairs. Tapestry scenes of deer grazing in green mountain meadows (Vietnam?) hung on two walls, and at various spots around the room dangled the shiny metal balls I’d always thought of as Christmas tree ornaments. The room contained enough furniture to fill a small house. In addition to the bed, desk, couch, coffee table, three-piece wardrobe, armchairs, and folding chairs, there was a Barbie-style mirrored vanity with matching red leather stool. I walked over to the faux-rosewood wardrobe and looked in at the contents of its tinted glass shelves: a pair of small porcelain ballet dancers, a green inflatable clown, a vase of synthetic-fabric flowers, a conch shell polished to a shade of pale peach, a small plastic reindeer, and a toy motorcycle. Tung carefully opened the cabinet, and Tra, who looked beguiled, reached inside to get a closer look at the reindeer. In the United States, such furniture would serve as a substitute—those who couldn’t afford real rosewood or mahogany could at least enjoy a laminated facsimile of the real thing. But here in Vietnam, where “rich” meant access to a few thousand dollars, the ability to buy a sumptuous fake was itself a sign of wealth. Here, most families both slept and ate their meals on the same mat-covered wooden platform.
My house in San Francisco was decorated with Indonesian woven baskets, Indian embroideries, and lacquer boxes I had carried back from Burma. Vietnam has its own highly developed traditions of lacquer painting, wood carving, and silk weaving, but just as I didn’t buy La-Z-Boy recliners, not all Vietnamese valued their local handicrafts. Tra handed me the tiny plastic reindeer, and as I turned it over in my hand I realized the decor made the place familiar and comforting. The pearl-inlaid lacquer furniture at Nhung’s seemed sterile in comparison. I glanced at the satin-fringed harlequin-doll lamp sitting on the vanity. Okay, so some of the furnishings were excessive, but the profusion of objects showed somebody’s careful attempt to turn a bare room into a pleasing home. Tung didn’t seem like a kindred spirit, or even someone I might choose as a friend. He was a businessman determined to rent out a room. But his face also betrayed an expression of deep pride in this house and in having built it. It was that private look of satisfaction that made me want to live there.
The door creaked open and a little boy squealed and leapt into the room. “This my son,” said Tung, speaking in English for the first time. “His name Viet.” The child couldn’t have been more than five years old, and he was robustly skinny in that way that only healthy children can be—with limitless energy and absolutely no need for extra bulk. He stared at me with such intensity that, if his father had not held him firmly by the shoulders, I felt sure he would have tried to leap on top of me. I gave him an uncertain smile, and the boy, like a visitor to the zoo delighted to see that monkeys can put their toes in their mouths, began to laugh. It wasn’t the sweet tinkling giggle one might expect from an innocent young boy, but a deep, gravelly chuckle, the laughter of a child who had smoked too many cigars.
“Viet!” a voice hissed across the room. We looked up to see a young woman half hiding behind the door.
“This my wife. His name Huong,” Tung said, motioning for her to come inside.
I nodded at the woman as she gazed in my direction. She was rather tall for a Vietnamese, but thin and pale, with eyes that took in everything while revealing nothing. I would never have guessed that she was married to this businessman. The two seemed as mismatched as the clothes she was wearing: a lace-embroidered, mud-red shirt topping a pair of orange-flowered pants. (As I would later learn, Huong had a fashion sense that was quite common in Hanoi, one that was reminiscent of the leaner days of socialism, when personal style was dependent on the availability of products, not on choice between them.) Only her hair, which bore the unmistakable frizz of a perm, gave any indication that she had an interest in the modern fashions that so obviously delighted her husband.
The couple stood looking at me. He seemed anxious to hear my decision. She hovered behind him, exhibiting a shyness that would have been more understandable in the little boy now straining to touch me. It seemed to take all the effort she could muster simply to look me in the face and smile limply. I glanced over at Tra in her smart slacks and oxford-cloth shirt. Had I not known, I would have taken my friend Tra for the landlord’s wife. I tried to smile at Huong.
Tra said something to Tung and Huong that made them laugh.
“Duyen,” said Tung. “Yes, good.”
Tra looked at me. “I told them to call you Duyen. You should use your Vietnamese name, you know.” Tra herself had given me the name Duyen when I began to study Vietnamese back in the States. It meant “charming,” and Tra had chosen it not because of any particular attributes of my own personality (she had nothing to go on but a class roster when she picked it) but because, like Dana, it began with the letter D.
“Duyen,” my future landlord said. He tapped his index finger against his chest. “I. Three years. Deutschland.”
“You lived in Germany?” I asked.
Tung nodded, beaming. “I speaks Germany. Germany no good.” He gave a little shrug and held his empty palms up. “I want study English.” Robbed of his smooth sales ability in Vietnamese, he didn’t seem as slick.
“I like your house,” I said slowly, in English, pausing between each word.
He nodded happily. “Yes, I want study English.” Tra looked at me and giggled.
Later, I counted. From my front door to Tra’s took ninety-three steps.
The backpack I brought to Hanoi contained a few changes of clothes, a sampler of antibiotics, an armful of thick novels, a twenty-pack of black Uni-Ball pens, and a six-month supply of tampons, which were not yet available in Hanoi. I had so few things of my own that I felt grateful for the green plastic inflatable clown, the pair of porcelain dancers, and all the other knickknacks in my new room. Even if those weren’t my things, at least they were things.
As soon as I moved in, Huong started bringing me more. A few minutes after she saw me walk upstairs carrying a bouquet of flowers, she knocked on my door with a bright purple and orange ceramic vase. The next morning, she knocked again, this time to hand me a pair of pink rubber sandals to wear in the bathroom. A day later, after our new phone was installed, she brought me a copy of the Hanoi phone book, as if I would actually have numbers I needed to look up. None of these offerings led to conversation between us. I wanted to talk to her, but my Vietnamese was not comprehensible. Each time I uttered a word, Huong’s face froze in concentration. Sometimes, she’d nod as if she understood, but mostly she was just being gracious. After a moment of silence, she would simply smile, then turn and walk back down the stairs. Shutting my door, I would think back over everything I’d said, trying to figure out where I’d gone wrong.
A few nights after I moved in, Tung and Huong invited me to have dinner with them. When I came down, I found Tung sitting in the living room with two other men. He was holding the new telephone in his lap as if it were a prized cat.
“Sit down,” he told me. “Drink Johnnie.”
Vietnamese is a language that seldom gets bogged down by excess words, but, with me particularly, Tung made sure to speak even more simply, which only made me feel worse. Despite ten weeks of intensive language study in the States, I was only able to understand Tung because he pointed to an empty stool and held up a bottle of Johnnie Walker so that I could see it.
I sat down. All three men were looking at me, but in very different ways. Tung was
leaning forward, eagerly pouring the whiskey and grinning hospitably, as if he were trying to make up in facial gestures what he lacked in ability to converse. The man sitting next to him, a ruddy-faced fellow in his forties, was smiling broadly and openly staring. The third man perched on a stool, not so much with us as halfway between where we were sitting and the door, as if he’d just stopped by and meant to leave at any moment. He was younger than the other two, about my age, with fine features, honey-colored skin, and hair that fell in thick waves across his forehead. Unlike Tung and the other man, both of whom were wearing new jeans and bright, freshly pressed shirts, this man wore black cotton work pants and a wrinkled white shirt stained with something that looked like automotive grease. He didn’t look at me directly. Rather, he rested his elbows on his knees, staring at the cigarette dangling between his fingers, and glanced up at me every few seconds before looking down again.
I managed to endure this scrutiny for about ninety seconds. Then I heard the clatter of pots in the kitchen. Pointing in that direction, I made an apologetic smile and escaped.
The kitchen was tiny. Huong and another woman were squatting on the only available floor space, hovering over large wooden cutting boards. Huong merely smiled when I appeared, but the other woman’s entire face lit up. “Duyen,” she exclaimed, as if she’d been waiting years for me to show up. She stood, rubbed bits of Chinese broccoli off her hands, then pointed her index finger to herself, said, “Nga!” and broke into laughter.
Huong watched the two of us and grinned, then turned her eyes back to the large fish she was in the midst of gutting.