The House on Dream Street

by Dana Sachs

  The obvious solution was a bicycle, but I was nervous. A few days after I first moved into my house, I had spent a morning on my balcony. Observed from above, rush hour alone was enough to give me a terror of riding a bike. Set against a symphony of noise, with motorcycle horns supplying melody and mufflerless engines carrying an insistent beat, my street was a stage for an anarchic dance of buses, trucks, cars, bicycles, cyclos, and motorbikes, each vying for its precious meter on that narrow space of road. I had watched a boy on a bike glide in a casual diagonal across the street, moving out of the path of a honking bus a split second before it flattened him. A tiny orange Honda Chaly motorbike, carrying a sandwich of three teenage boys, swerved around a slow-moving cyclo, drifted into the opposite lane of traffic, then, after nearly colliding with an oncoming truck, carelessly slid back to its own side of the road. It looked like the death-defying circus act of a trapeze family that, with each progressive trick, moved closer to disaster. I knew that, eventually, someone would miss, and a fractional miscalculation of speed or distance would leave some sad soul sprawled and bloody in the middle of the street. General Westmoreland’s much-criticized comment about Vietnam that “the Oriental doesn’t value life the way we do in the West” had begun to sound less like a racist slur and more like a clear-eyed assessment of fact.

  I had tried to explain my fears to Tra, but she wouldn’t listen. In one of my earliest encounters with bossiness, a quality I would find endemic in Vietnam, Tra insisted that I had to ride a bike. One morning, standing in the courtyard of her house, she pushed one in my direction. “If you want to live in Hanoi, you have to ride it,” she’d said. When I refused to take it from her, she walked it out to the street herself. Then, pointing at the passing traffic—a grandfather wheeling a small child to school, two teenage girls riding side by side, holding hands—she asked, “Does that look dangerous to you?” It did look dangerous, but I had to admit that she was right. I sighed, defeated, then put my hands on the handlebars, my legs on the pedals, and shoved off.

  My first collision occurred only a few blocks from the house. Few Hanoi intersections have traffic lights, or even stop signs, so vehicles cross without stopping, just slowing down or speeding up to propel themselves through without hitting one another. Not knowing that the fundamental rule is “Keep going,” I wavered at the sight of a cyclo crossing in front of me. Had I simply slowed down, I could have put my bike into holding position, treaded water while the cyclo passed, and continued on my way. As it was, I swerved to avoid the cyclo and was rammed by a motorbike coming up from behind me.

  The crash threw me off the pedals, but I caught my balance. I turned to look at the motorbike driver, a young man in a business suit. Before I could say a word to apologize, he sneered at me, jerked his front wheel out of the spokes of my bike, and sped off. Now I was stuck alone in the intersection, and when I looked up I saw a large army truck barreling toward me. At that moment, another bicycle was moving slowly past in the same direction I was going. I jumped back on my bike and, maintaining the exact speed of the other cyclist, managed both to let that rider run interference between myself and the truck and to rely on her experience in making the split-second decisions required to cross the street.

  My second collision came about a half mile farther down the road, also at an intersection. When a motorbike seemed about to cut across the path in front of me, I tried the treading-water maneuver to let it pass. Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet perfected the technique of slowing the bike and pedaling in place, and so I lost my balance. This time, I swerved into the rear end of a large Caucasian pedestrian, who extricated his legs from the front wheel while yelling what sounded like obscenities in German. My pleas of “I’m sorry!” did not move him and, as his anger showed no sign of abating, I opted for the less intimate dangers of the street and plunged back into traffic.

  By the time I got back to Tra’s house, my entire body was shaking and I was desperate to tell her about my brushes with death. But, apparently unconcerned about my fate, she’d already gone out for the day. I took the bike and slowly began to walk it toward my house.

  Maneuvering a bicycle between Tra’s house and my own wasn’t a simple task, given the peculiar geography of Hanoi. Over the centuries, Hanoi’s commercial streets had developed a tradition of specialization. In the city’s Old Quarter, for example, the merchants on Silk Street sold silk and the ones on Silver Street ran jewelry stores. Not every establishment on Cha Ca Street sold the famous fried fish specialty chả cá, but if you wanted to eat that dish, you only had to name the street and any Hanoian would know your destination. Though the Old Quarter streets were the ones famous for carrying the names of what was sold there, the entire city followed a similar organizing principal. Shopping in Hanoi was like navigating oneself through a citywide department store. You’d go to one street to buy paint, another for toys, and another one if you were in the market for a Western-style toilet.

  Although my street, Tran Phu, was named in honor of one of Vietnam’s famous revolutionary martyrs (who was, incidentally, a relative of Tra’s), I called it Dream Street because of all the Honda Dream motorbikes cluttering its sidewalks. Of course, there were other kinds of bikes parked there as well: lots of Honda 50 and 70ccs, Chalys, and Russian Minsks. But Dreams were the coveted vehicle of the day, the bike to buy if you had money. Unlike the clunky-looking older-model Hondas, the Dream was sleek and elegant. One long smooth line glided back from the handlebars to the rear edge of the black leather seat. It was the Hanoi equivalent of a BMW or a Lexus. On Tran Phu, you could usually spot a lot of Dreams, because Tran Phu specialized in washing and repairing motorbikes. On my side of the block alone, there were nine places to wash motorbikes and three to repair them.

  Wheeling a bicycle the ninety-three steps from Tra’s house to my front door was, given the layout of Dream Street, no easy prospect. French-colonial-era city planners probably conceived of the wide, shady sidewalk that ran along my street as a pedestrian thoroughfare, but, even on the quietest of days, walking along it required dodging whipping water hoses and stepping around wandering vendors hawking boiled sweet potatoes. At first glance, the scene appeared chaotic. Like every other open space in the city, however, this expanse of sidewalk was actually a highly organized commercial district. At the edge closest to the road, lottery-ticket sellers displayed their brightly colored tickets to passing traffic. Just behind them, motorbike mechanics squatted in front of flat tires and broken-down engines, their tools spread in wide arcs on the sidewalk surrounding them. Rarely did mechanics work alone. Instead, they squatted in groups of two or three, cigarettes dangling from their lips, pointing and poking, discussing transmissions and carburetors like a surgical team intent on probing the cause of a particularly mysterious ailment. The remainder of the street’s commercial life was dominated by the motorbike washing establishments, teams of four or five people who competed with one another for business by employing someone, usually a big, bellowing woman, to stand out in the street trying to wave down passing motorists.

  On Dream Street, it didn’t matter if I was going into my house, stepping outside, or bending over to tie my sneakers; I was the only foreigner on the block, and people always watched me with the scrutiny of scientific observation. Usually, I pretended to ignore them, which wasn’t that hard, considering that I had to devote most of my concentration simply to keeping from tripping over a pile of tires or a mechanic squatting in front of a broken Dream. Today, maneuvering my way along the sidewalk with a bicycle was even trickier than normal, but I was so relieved to be back on my feet and still alive that when people stared at me, I stared right back. Their expressions were as unfriendly as ever.

  After a moment, I saw Tung up ahead, squatting on the front steps of the house. The sight of a familiar face filled me with relief. I imagined describing to him my debacle on the bike, even if I had to use more pantomime than Vietnamese. I didn’t even care if he found my ineptitude laughable. As I walked toward him, the stares
of all these strangers seemed less oppressive. I wasn’t entirely on my own here, I thought. Up ahead was a person who would, at the very least, smile at me. As I got closer, Tung spotted me and waved, but when he lifted his arm, I saw that someone else was sitting beside him on the steps. It was the young guy who’d been drinking whiskey with Tung the night I’d eaten downstairs—not Nga’s husband, but the other one, the one who had glanced at me between drags on his cigarette, then disappeared before dinner. Now he was looking at me with the same blank stare that I got from everyone else on the block. I lost all my will. When I reached the house, I gave Tung a quick hello, locked the bike, and hurried upstairs.

  3. Navigation

  THOSE FIRST FEW WEEKS IN HANOI were blank days. I couldn’t get used to the weather. Absent of snow or frost, the only thing that told me it was winter was the chill that would enter my body with the force of a blizzard. This place was hardly the sweaty tropics I’d seen in Platoon. I was freezing. Every morning, I’d force myself out of bed, look out the window at the concrete wall of sky, and contemplate another faceless day. San Francisco mornings often had that same chalky grayness to them, but by noon the fog would lift, revealing a brilliant sun. In Hanoi, I had to remind myself that the sun existed. Whenever I had a chance, I’d take a long ride through the city. I’d wrap myself in a T-shirt, sweatshirt, sweater, and huge scarf and then pull my bike out the front door and into the street. Then I’d summon my courage and launch myself one more time into the flood of traffic. After a while, I could ride without staring straight in front of me, teeth clenched, knuckles turning white with their grip on the handlebars. If I sneezed while I pedaled, I no longer expected to disappear beneath the wheels of oncoming traffic.

  I spent a lot of time thinking over a conversation I’d had with an American teacher who’d been living in Hanoi for the past two years. Jack had come to Hanoi as one of the first three teachers—two men and a woman—sent to Vietnam by the New York–based organization Volunteers Around the World. After two years here, he spoke excellent Vietnamese and could use the latest slang to flirt with the women and banter with the men. He walked down the crowded Hanoi streets like an American politician—shaking hands, cooing over babies, and pulling crabby grandmothers off their little wooden stools to make them dance with him. If I had any lingering doubts that an American could be accepted here, Jack dispelled them. And he wasn’t the only American to have done well for himself in Hanoi. The other man from Volunteers Around the World had slid into Hanoi life as easily as Jack had. The woman, however, had problems. “Here was this young, pretty American woman walking down the street,” Jack had told me. “People couldn’t take their eyes off her. They’d tease her, try to touch her, follow her. I don’t think they were physically threatening, but they wouldn’t leave her alone, either.”

  Jack was carrying me home from dinner on his little Honda 250cc. With the wind slamming against my face, I clutched the leather seat with both hands, trying to hang on and listen to his story at the same time. “Laura had a hard time from the beginning,” Jack yelled back through the sputtering of the engine. “She couldn’t stand all the attention every time she walked outside. She didn’t feel safe. She didn’t make friends. She wouldn’t do anything but go to school to teach her classes. Then she even stopped doing that. After a while, she refused to leave her room. She just sat there, all alone, and we had to bring her food or she wouldn’t eat. Then one day, she just packed her bags and left.” Jack laughed a little, not because the story was funny, but because he found it so perplexing. I laughed, too, as if I couldn’t believe anyone could be scared away like that. The truth, though, was that I understood completely. All those eyes could make you crazy.

  And so I pushed myself to leave the house, to ride that bike, to become a part of the world here. I discovered lakes I’d never seen before, and instead of pedaling nervously past them, I made myself pull up to park benches, get off, and allow the curious passersby to crowd around me and look. I rode past schoolyards full of uniformed children yelling chants and doing jumping jacks, and when they waved at me through the gaps in the fence, I waved right back. I hated the men who slowed their motorbikes down beside me to stare. I hated the women who tried to grab me in the market, as if by doing so they could force me to buy. But most of all, I hated the specter of the American teacher, so traumatized by all this unwanted attention that she had had to escape.

  Sometimes, I was so worn down by the city that I hid in my room for entire days. But, despite those low points, I became convinced that I would stay here. All I had to do was leave the house in order to remind myself of how deeply I wanted to be here, no matter how much the city could overwhelm me. Hanoi was still so new to me that every day brought fresh discoveries. I had arrived not long after the Lunar New Year celebrations of Tet, which also marked the beginning of Hanoi’s busiest wedding season. Despite the fact that I often felt distant from everything taking place around me, I was able to sense the feeling of joy that seemed to permeate the city during those cold winter days. Hanoians, conscious of astrology and the predictions of the fortune tellers, considered certain dates most fortuitous for weddings. Riding my bike through the city, I’d pass dozens of wedding buses. They were covered with flowers and large red paper cutouts of the ancient Chinese character for “double happiness.” (Though Vietnamese now write their language in a romanized script, ancient Chinese characters continue to play a role in the religious and spiritual life of the nation.) The wedding buses were always full of people, and when they looked out the window and saw me, the foreign woman, pedaling along on her bike, they would sometimes smile and wave. I was still on the outside of Vietnam, but on days like those I could begin to believe that the walls weren’t so high, that I would someday scramble over them.

  One morning, the clouds receded for a few hours and revealed a sky so blue it seemed artificial. I took a bike ride down Duong Giai Phong, Liberation Street, named in commemoration of Liberation Day—April 30, 1975—the date of the “Liberation of Saigon,” as most Vietnamese called it, or the “Fall of Saigon,” as most Americans called it. Liberation Street led toward the southern edge of Hanoi and, eventually, became Route 1, which continued south all the way to Ho Chi Minh City. From Liberation Street, I turned west, crossed the tracks of the southbound railway, and entered a neighborhood of enormous Soviet-style housing blocks, three- and four-story monoliths mildewing and crumbling before their time. Judging by the architecture, I guessed that this neighborhood represented some Socialist attempt to “modernize” the ancient city. It seemed ugly and depressing in comparison to the cramped but lively neighborhoods in the unreconstructed sections of the town.

  If I had known my history, I might have looked at the map and figured out that I was riding through the Kham Thien neighborhood, which suffered some of the worst effects of the 1972 “Christmas bombing” of Hanoi. In an effort to force concessions out of the Vietnamese, Richard Nixon sent American B-52s on bombing runs over a sixty-mile stretch of a highly populated area in North Vietnam. The campaign, known officially as Operation Linebacker II, destroyed not only much of Kham Thien, but also a large part of the nearby Bach Mai Hospital. More than thirteen hundred people died in Hanoi and another three hundred in the nearby city of Haiphong.

  If I had been ten years older, these facts might have been familiar to me. I would have remembered the bombing of Hanoi and the name Bach Mai Hospital, which became a rallying point among anti-war activists, might have still sent shivers down my spine. But I was only ten years old during the Christmas bombing, and I didn’t remember it at all. I had understood almost nothing about what was happening in Vietnam, except that people were dying there. I was terrified by death, and so I began to pay attention to Vietnam. I reacted to the war by drawing rainbows of peace signs on my denim-covered notebook, hoping that these flimsy Magic Marker symbols could somehow lessen the violence I saw on TV. For me, that jungly ever-exploding backdrop to dinner was the televised version of death itself.
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br />   I was lucky. No one I cared about went to the war. The closest I ever came to knowing someone lost in Vietnam was the POW/MIA bracelet I wore around my wrist that bore the name of a missing soldier and the date he disappeared. Among the elementary school set, the bracelets began as fashion statements, but, for many of us, they became our most powerful connection to what was taking place in Southeast Asia. Like me, my MIA, Captain Raymond Stacks, had grown up in Memphis. This hometown connection, combined with what I considered an astonishing similarity in our last names, gave me a strange sense of knowing the man already. I came to think of him as my unlucky missing uncle and became convinced that I might somehow bring him home myself through the sheer power of focusing with utter concentration on the metal band hanging on my wrist. The only effect of these efforts was that I squeezed my bracelet too hard and eventually broke it. My captain never made it home. Years after the war ended, I happened to see a newspaper article about his parents and how they had lived with their loss. I felt guilty, not simply because I had failed in my mission to rescue their son, but because I had forgotten him altogether.