The House on Dream Street

by Dana Sachs

  “Chào, Nga,” I said. Hello, Nga.

  Nga had long, wavy hair, a curvaceous body, and a face that, were she just a few years younger, might have adorned the glossy photo calendars I’d seen for sale at the post office. She pointed to Huong and said, “Em,” then pointed to herself and said, “Chị,” then back to Huong—“Em”—and back to herself—“Chị.” For once, my intensive Vietnamese course did me justice because I understood that Nga was telling me she was Huong’s older sister. I felt like I’d cracked a secret code.

  The Vietnamese system of pronouns feels immensely complicated to Americans. The language has no simple word for “you,” and, despite a Communist-era effort to promote the word “tôi” as an all-purpose, egalitarian “I,” most people still rely on the ancient system of pronouns, which honors age and status. To put it simply, in Vietnamese one must modify the words for “I” and “you” depending on one’s own identity and that of the person with whom one is speaking. Thus, a thirty-year-old woman would call herself “little sister” when speaking to someone ten years older than herself and “niece” or “daughter” if she were speaking to someone even older. With a child, she’d call herself “aunt,” with a younger friend, she’d be “older sister.” With a dear friend, she’d use her given name, and with a colleague, she’d call herself “friend.” In a culture less concerned with personal individuality than with one’s relationship to others, identity itself was relative in Vietnamese. Who you were depended on whom you were with.

  Once I figured out that Huong and Nga were “younger sister” and “older sister” in a literal rather than figurative way, I must have looked shocked. It wasn’t the fact that the two looked so different, but that their personalities were so completely dissimilar. Nga was such an extrovert. Huong was so laconic that I had my doubts she and I would ever have much of a conversation, even if I did manage to learn Vietnamese.

  Nga pulled me through the door and back into the living room. The younger, dark-skinned man had disappeared. I couldn’t remember—actually, I didn’t know—if Tung had introduced him to me or not, and I had no idea who he was or where he’d gone. Now Nga seemed intent on introducing me to the other man. He was still sitting with Tung, drinking whiskey. “Chồng! Nga,” she announced, pointing to him.

  For a moment I was at a loss, trying to remember if chồng meant “brother” or not. Then Tung helped me. “His husband,” he announced in English, and then Nga, apparently satisfied, dragged me back into the kitchen.

  Over the next twenty minutes, the two sisters managed to prepare a four-course dinner in a space no bigger than the average American bathtub. I watched them for a few minutes from the doorway, then pulled a knife from the dish rack and pointed to myself. Huong and Nga both shook their heads so violently that they might have feared I was planning to kill myself. I put the knife down and said, “I. Like,” in Vietnamese, then couldn’t remember how to say “cook.” They burst out laughing.

  Nevertheless, Nga tried even harder to converse with me. While Huong cooked, Nga and I used mime and my few words of Vietnamese to commiserate over the plight of women in Vietnam and the United States. Nga didn’t speak a word of English, but she had the range of a fine actress when it came to communicating the arduous nature of cooking, scrubbing, and, most convincingly of all, delivering a baby. Huong, frying the fish, only smiled at us occasionally, like an indulgent mother. For the first time, she didn’t seem timid so much as self-contained. I began to think of her as a hard-to-please older sister.

  When dinner was ready, Huong directed Nga to take the plates out to the living room. Nga, grinning as if we shared a secret, finally indulged my need to help by handing me something to carry by myself. I looked down into the bowl; it was filled with sprigs of fresh basil and mint. If only I’d paid attention when Tra had tried to teach me my herbs. Maybe Huong would have been impressed.

  Vietnamese didn’t seem like a new language as much as a new medium of communication. It had tones, which were as important to the meaning of words as spelling or the pronunciation of consonants and vowels. I thought of the tones as little devils sabotaging my attempts to simply remember the spelling of words. Sometimes, I boycotted them altogether. It didn’t help. After one particularly disastrous effort—I had thought I was saying “my feet hurt,” but I said, “I’m sick of living” —Tra got serious. She tried reasoning, drawing me a diagram of the word ma, for example, which, depending on which of the six tones one used, could mean “ghost,” “mother,” “but,” “grave,” “horse,” or “rice seedling.” When reasoning didn’t work, she tried scare tactics, explaining that if I used the wrong tone for dai, instead of saying “tough,” I’d end up saying “penis.” That worked. I began to concentrate so hard on trying to get the tones right that they started to develop their own little personalities, like Snow White’s seven dwarves: the flat tone was Boring; the rising tone was Panicked; the falling tone was Depressed; the falling-and-then-rising tone was Curious; the rising-and-then-falling tone was Choking; and, lastly, the abrupt tone was Angry. Unlike the dwarves, however, these guys were not my friends, and they never stuck with me. I’d begin each sentence with my brain cells completely focused on pronouncing every word with the right tone, and by the time I got halfway through, my words would dissolve into flatness and my listener would stare at me in total confusion.

  For some reason, Tung had less trouble than his wife in comprehending the garble of sounds coming out of my mouth, and, because he could speak a bit of English, we were much better fit to converse. He’d often come up to my room to chat, bringing along two lists, one of words he wanted to learn in English and another of words he thought I should know in Vietnamese. He was so serious that he made me feel hopeful. To a certain degree, we succeeded. Over the first few weeks, Tung taught me the Vietnamese for “enough,” “Please repeat that,” and “I’m leaving.” At the same time, he learned “Fantastic!” “It’s up to you,” and “Pay in advance.” While Huong and I struggled with pantomime, Tung and I switched back and forth between the two languages, developing a skeletal little Vietnamenglish of our own. After a while the two of us were spending so many hours poring over our dictionaries that one might have assumed we actually had something important to say.

  Now that I was getting to know Tung better, I could see what an operator he really was. He always had a plan, and those plans regularly involved getting something out of me. With Tra translating to make sure that none of our misunderstandings were ever linguistic, he presented me with a new request almost every week. His eyes would open, wide and slightly nervous, like a child angling for more candy he knew he shouldn’t get. We’d long before agreed on the cost of my rent, which was two hundred dollars a month—a price that would have been impossible for a Vietnamese to pay, but which was pretty standard for foreigners at officially sanctioned guesthouses. Then, only two weeks after I moved in, he wanted to increase it by twenty dollars, saying the addition would cover the electricity my air conditioner used in the summer. A week later, he took the couch out of my room, replacing it with a second bed. Tung needed to find a space for the thing, and so he did his best to convince me that a second bed would really make me happy. Most of the time, I let him do what he wanted. I liked my room and didn’t want any tension with my landlords. Besides, the difference in rent was negligible, and I had so much furniture already that I didn’t really care if one piece was a couch or an extra bed. The only thing that bothered me was the fact that, because I couldn’t understand Vietnamese, Tung assumed I couldn’t recognize manipulation.

  Both of my landlords regularly came up to my room, Tung to practice conversation and Huong to clean, or water the plants, or bring me some new little item to add to the decor. I could always tell which one of them was knocking at the door. Huong tapped so lightly that the door merely rattled its hinges, like the wind bumping it at night. A loud bang on the glass, smack in the center of the door frame, could only be Tung. He had no sense of privacy, and if I didn
’t bolt the lock, I knew he would open the door and walk right in. One night when I heard his bang I glanced at the clock. It was nearly ten o’clock and I was tired. I straightened my sweater, then opened the latch. Tung walked in with two men I’d never seen before.

  “Ngồi đi! Ngồi đi!” Sit down! Sit down! Tung said, as if it were perfectly normal to invite strangers into his tenant’s room at bedtime. Now that I was couchless, the visitors pulled up chairs and sat around one side of the coffee table, which was next to my bed. I perched on the edge of my mattress. The two men were giving me that new-acquisition-in-the-zoo look, and I knew that Tung had brought them upstairs with the sole purpose of showing off his American renter. As if I weren’t having a hard enough time with people staring at me out in the street, now I had to deal with them in my room.

  I had thought that Tung understood my predicament. At least, he’d given me reason to think he did. People were pounding on the doors, quite literally, to get me to teach them English. One woman and her daughter had essentially camped out on my doorstep to convince me to help the girl get a scholarship to Harvard. Tung, sensing my despair, had finally drawn the line. The next time the Harvard wannabees appeared at my house, he had told them, flatly, to go away and not come back. But now here he was.

  I glared at him, but he smiled back placidly, as if he didn’t notice. Switching into English, he said, “This my brother,” gesturing toward one of his guests, a younger, skinnier version of himself. Then he turned toward the other man and said, “This my mother brother son.”

  Tung’s mother brother son, who was dressed in a business suit, looked over at Tung and sighed aggressively. Then he leaned back in his chair, crossed his legs, and adjusted his tie. “He means that I am his cousin,” he said in perfect English.

  “Cousin,” Tung nodded. He stared at the ceiling, consigning the new term to memory. Then he pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and passed it around to his guests. Not only was he bringing people to my room, but now he was acting like it was his room.

  On the coffee table sat a bowl of mandarin oranges I had bought that morning. I picked one up, scored the skin into quarters with my fingernail, and folded it back from the fruit like the petals of a flower. This was a hostess trick Tra had taught me. The men gasped, impressed that a foreigner could be so accomplished. I smiled. They were my guests now.

  “I can tell that you’re becoming a real Vietnamese lady,” said the cousin, inspecting the orange flower I offered to him. His baby-round cheeks made him look like a toddler in a business suit. He held the orange in his palm, admiring it. “This is very lovely,” he said.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” I responded demurely. This Vietnamese way of hedging compliments was another trick I’d picked up—not from Tra, who wasn’t that good at it, but from her older sister. The men nodded approvingly. Tung looked proud, which irritated me even more.

  The cousin was a lawyer. The extent of my knowledge of Vietnam’s legal system lay in a conversation I’d had with a former South Vietnamese army officer I’d met two years earlier in Saigon. After the war, the man had spent ten years in re-education camps and, for obvious reasons, his opinion of the present government was less than favorable. Vietnam’s leaders couldn’t understand the rule of law, he had complained, and they chose to operate under the same brutal system they’d developed during their underground years as revolutionaries. He’d called it “Jungle Law.”

  “What kind of law do you practice?” I asked the plump-cheeked attorney.

  He gave a ponderous pull to his tie. “I work for the Ministry of Justice,” he said. “I’ve been involved in a large number of significant cases concerning vital issues related to important international law.” I waited for specifics, but he looked around the room as if he’d finished.

  During the ensuing pause, the younger brother tried out his language skills. “Excuse me. I would like to introduce to you a few things about myself,” he said. He told me that he was studying English at the Foreign Language College, that he lived with his parents, that he was twenty years old. Then, he added, “Excuse me, may I now ask you some questions about yourself?”

  “Sure,” I said, handing him another orange. I’d only been in Vietnam two weeks, but I’d had a dozen such conversations already. The cousin watched us both indulgently. Tung, who couldn’t follow the conversation at all, was simultaneously puffing on a cigarette and picking at his orange.

  Tung’s brother cleared his throat and leaned forward. “I would like to know something about your chosen profession,” he said.

  I told him that I was a journalist and that I had worked as an editor for a community newspaper in San Francisco that catered to the city’s Southeast Asian immigrant population. “That’s where I made my first Vietnamese friends,” I said.

  “And why did you decide to come to Vietnam?” he asked.

  Despite so many similar conversations, no one had asked me exactly that. Tra knew so many Americans fascinated by Vietnam that she took it as a matter of course that I would come. And Tung and Huong never would have questioned why an American would move to their city. I looked at Tung’s brother. “Well, I traveled here as a tourist in 1990,” I began, and then the cousin cut me off.

  “Did you travel in the south?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I told him. “I traveled to many cities in the south.” It was in Saigon that I had first realized how much I could learn in Vietnam, and how much I actually had in common with these people. But in Hanoi people had kept me at a distance, and, though I’d thought their city beautiful, with its lakes and tree-lined streets and elegant French colonial architecture, I hadn’t found it friendly. When I’d made plans to come back to Vietnam, I’d had every intention of moving to the south. Then, when I studied Vietnamese in the States, I met a professor from the Institute of Linguistics in Hanoi who told me he could arrange a long-term visa for me to continue my studies in his city. Securing long-term visas in Vietnam was no easy thing for an American to do, so I’d decided to give the north of Vietnam another chance. I’d met Tra by then, and she’d promised to help me. Now, after almost a month here, I was making progress in Hanoi, but I often wondered if I would have had a smoother acclimation had I lived in Saigon.

  I looked at the lawyer and smiled. “I really loved Saigon,” I said.

  The expression on the lawyer’s face hardened. “Excuse me,” he said, “we haven’t called it Saigon since we reunited the country in 1975. We Vietnamese call it Ho Chi Minh City now.”

  I felt my stomach tense. On my first visit to Vietnam, I’d been determined to use the name Ho Chi Minh City, proving that I, for one, was an American who recognized the legitimacy of the Hanoi government. But the local people insisted that I refer to their city by its original, prerevolutionary name, Saigon. I might have attributed this behavior to linguistic dissent were it not for the fact that, even in Hanoi, I seldom heard anyone use the name Ho Chi Minh City. Even Tra, whose father had fought in the revolution alongside Ho Chi Minh, always called the place Saigon. After much thought, I had finally decided it was both more prudent and more convenient to use the term Saigon.

  The lawyer was staring at me like the cherubic baby doll in a monster movie, suddenly possessed with the dazzling pinwheel eyes of the devil. Clearly, the “everybody else calls it Saigon” argument would not do here. I was an American. “Ho Chi Minh City,” I mumbled. With a sense of surrender, I gazed down at my orange. “Sorry,” I added.

  Suddenly I felt overcome with exhaustion. I had come to Hanoi to discover some other Vietnam, a Vietnam that wasn’t exploding bombs and burning villages and screaming babies. I had come with a belief that by learning about the country at peace, even learning such silly things as a new way to peel an orange, I could develop an understanding of this place that was broader and deeper than what my country had learned during so many years of war. But now I saw that Americans weren’t the only ones who could reduce an entire nation to their own country’s experience w
ith it. Here was a Vietnamese who believed he could judge my political opinions by my choice of a proper noun.

  Tung seemed aware that the conversation had taken a turn for the worse. He suddenly stood up and said, “We’ll go downstairs now.”

  Tung didn’t follow the other two down the stairs immediately. Instead, he stood for a moment on the landing outside my door. Behind his head, the lines of the rooftops zigzagged across the dark horizon. I looked in his eyes and I saw something I’d never seen before, concern. “Ngủ đi.” Go to sleep, he finally said, adding with a gentle smile, “lo nhiều quá.” You worry too much.

  After Tung went downstairs, I stood on the landing for a long time, the loneliness seeping into me like dampness through the porous walls of this house. I had felt alone almost every minute since I’d gotten here, but it was always simple homesickness mixed with the uncertainty of finding my bearings in a foreign place. What bothered me now was not the pain of physical distance so much as the absolute sense of mental isolation. My relationship with Hanoi had to be more complicated than my relationship with Saigon. After all, the United States had bombed this city. Maybe no one would ever completely trust me here. Maybe I wouldn’t trust anyone myself. In the space of ten minutes, Hanoi had switched back to “Hanoi,” the totalitarian, eternally frowning center of a Communist dictatorship. The war wasn’t some show that I’d seen on TV as a kid, and I wasn’t even sure that it was over yet.

  I stood outside for a long time. One by one, the lights went out in the nearby windows. In the distance, I could see a lone pine tree towering like a great leader against the sky. I leaned on the railing of the stairway and took a deep breath of enemy air.

  I tried to remind myself that I was making progress. I’d even started to do something I never would have expected from myself: I was using a bicycle to get around Hanoi. For another American, riding a bike in Vietnam might not have been such a big deal. But I was always the kind of rider who rode on the sidewalk, then stopped and walked whenever I had to cross a street. I wasn’t very brave. I wouldn’t have been crushed to learn I’d never ride a bike again. But in Hanoi, I didn’t have a choice. My other options were worse. Cyclo drivers not only demanded exorbitant prices of foreigners, but they also had the confounding habit of insisting, once we reached our destination, that I pay them even more. An American lawyer who lived in Vietnam later explained this phenomenon to me in terms of cultural differences in contract theory. While Westerners consider contracts the final phase of business negotiations, Vietnamese view them as a starting point, a basis for further discussion. Thus, when I agreed to pay a cyclo driver five thousand dong, I expected to pay five thousand dong. The driver, however, would, after completing the trip, take into consideration the difficulty of the route, his fatigue, and the estimated size of my wallet, then give me an updated price. The extended process of negotiation may have made sense to him, but after a while I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t rely on walking, either. Central Hanoi didn’t cover a lot of territory, but on foot I would have had to spend two or three hours a day making my way across it.