The House on Dream Street

by Dana Sachs

  During those first few weeks in Hanoi, the thing that surprised me most about Vietnam was how little I saw around me that still related to the war. Sure, I had seen the old airplanes in the courtyard of the Army Museum near my house, but in other contexts the influence of the war seemed negligible. Nearly twenty years after the conflict ended, I was living in Hanoi, the one-time enemy capital, and, had anyone asked me, I would have described the defining characteristics of this city as motorbikes, commerce, lakes, and trees. I knew that the war had left scars on this city, but I didn’t recognize them yet. And I mistook the reconstruction of a devastated neighborhood for an inept attempt at urban renewal.

  After a while, I pulled my bike over to the side of the road and stopped to consult my map. I was determined to take a new route home. On the map, I found a small road that seemed like it would get me back to the center of town. I pedaled back and forth looking for it, then discovered a gap between two buildings, a concrete-paved lane hardly wider than a footpath from which a line of bicycles and motorbikes poured in and out with as much nonchalance as I would have had driving up the on ramp to a freeway.

  I sat motionless for a moment. I didn’t even like to admit to myself the kinds of things that scared me here, but this little lane was one of them. Until now, I’d stuck to the big roads, where I could maintain distance between myself and everyone else. If I rode my bike down this tiny lane, I would lose that tiny amount of privacy. At the same time, though, to ride home the way I’d come would amount to a failure of nerve. Would Jack have given a moment’s pause to a little lane like this one? For a few seconds, I strained my eyes to see where it was leading. Then I killed some time fussing with my map. Finally, as if the route itself were a dare, I took it.

  A few feet past the entrance, it was already too late to turn back. The road was paved like a sidewalk, its great slabs of cracked and broken concrete betraying a history of heavy use and official neglect. Every thirty yards or so, the path made a ninety degree turn, veering left at some points, right at others, as if each bend were a concession to a building that predated the road. There was just enough room for a lane of two-wheeled traffic to flow in each direction. Nobody looked at me. They couldn’t. Like me, all the motorbikers and bicyclists were too busy maneuvering their vehicles to pay attention to anything else. Smashing into another rider meant facing the embarrassment and aggravation of putting a halt to all the traffic in both directions.

  Despite the exertion required just to keep my bike upright, I realized that I had discovered something. One simple turn onto that narrow road had brought me into another Hanoi. Away from the crowded anonymity of the rest of the city, I had entered the intimate realm of the urban village. Instead of the sidewalk, bushes, trees, and closed front doors that sectionalized other parts of Hanoi, here nothing divided those of us passing through from the people who called this address home. A woman leaned out a window and dumped her dishwater onto the pavement, barely missing the shoulder of the bicyclist in front of me. Two teenage girls stood in the doorway of a house, painting their fingernails. Three little boys treated the road like a playground, hurling their sandals into the traffic, then making hysterical attempts to grab them from between the wheels of passing vehicles. An older man pulled his motorbike out of the gate of his house and, during the ensuing pause, I glanced through an open window and spotted an ancient woman standing before a ceremonial altar, eyes closed, waving sticks of incense in a slow circle in the air. I had come upon a different side of the crowded, crumbly, mildew-speckled city, and for that brief instant, at least, I felt part of it.

  Just as I was beginning to wonder if I were riding in a circle, I saw in the distance a main road. I pedaled a few more yards and then, spotting a small tea table just before the intersection, I jumped off my bike and quickly pulled it out of the flow of traffic. I was famished. The food stand was nothing more than a bench and an old wooden table set into a small empty space between two buildings. The proprietor, a middle-aged woman in spectacles, looked at me placidly, as if Americans regularly stopped by. “Cô muôn gì?” she asked. What would you like, miss?

  I had a craving for bánh bao, the steamed meat-and-egg filled roll that was both tasty and unchallenging. I didn’t eat red meat in the States, but following such a regimen had come to seem futile here in Hanoi. Northern Vietnamese considered meat a delicacy. Since arriving, I’d been offered pig’s feet, cow’s tongue, dog meat, and the roasted heads of tiny birds. All of these things I’d managed to avoid, but when it came to basic dishes with chicken, pork, or beef, I’d chosen to eat rather than argue with my hosts, who invariably couldn’t understand why I would skip the best part of the meal. Just in case I found myself face to face with something I absolutely could not eat, Tra had taught me the Vietnamese way to avoid anything unappealing. “Just say, ‘Không biết ăn,’” she instructed: I don’t know how to eat it.

  I didn’t see any bánh bao at this tea table, so I pointed my finger at a bowl of hard-boiled eggs. The proprietor nodded and handed me a cup of tea. I accepted it gratefully. The bike ride had chilled me, and soon, after taking the first bitter sip, I could feel the liquid spread its heat through my stomach. Holding the warm cup against my cheek, I looked around. On the other side of the lane, a young mother squatted on her front stoop, trying to get her distracted toddler to take a bite of rice. The notes of Swan Lake floated out the front door of the house, and the little boy was too busy dancing to pay attention to his mother. “Child! Child!” the woman coaxed, following her son back and forth across the stoop. Finally, the little boy stopped long enough to take a bite, then instantly spit it out. The rice sprayed the leg of a passing cyclist. The little boy cried, “Hot!” His mother nodded, slid a spoonful into her own mouth, held it there for a moment to cool it for her son, then spit it back out onto the spoon. “Child!” she said again. The boy opened his mouth like a little bird and let his mother slide the rice on in. Then he stood on his tiptoes, lifted his arms into the air, and pirouetted like a swan.

  “Miss!” said the tea stall proprietor. I turned around, took the small bowl from her hands, and looked inside it. This was not a hard-boiled egg. It was a half-formed, embryonic chicken. I might have been looking down at the results of an abortion.

  It would be more dramatic to say that my first major crisis in Vietnam occurred when I was accosted by a gang of drunken war veterans, or when I was suddenly overcome by a life-threatening disease, but it didn’t happen that way. This small and nonthreatening confrontation with a tiny, semi-developed bird felt like disaster in my mind, and my newfound sense of oneness with Hanoi suddenly shattered. I held the small pottery bowl in my hands, paralyzed.

  The proprietor saw the look of horror on my face. “It’s delicious,” she said. “Try it.” I stared into the bowl. It was now clear to me why the yolk of a hard-boiled egg is the same color as a live chick.

  The young mother picked up her son and crossed the lane. She sat down next to me to watch. “Try it. It’s delicious,” she said, as if at any moment she might put a spoonful in her mouth and cool it down for me to eat.

  I shook my head. “I’ve never eaten it before,” I said.

  “Try it,” both women coaxed.

  “I don’t know how to eat it!” I wailed.

  The mother looked at the proprietor. “She doesn’t know how to eat it,” she said. The proprietor nodded.

  I knew that if I didn’t get back on my bike, I’d start to cry. I offered the bowl to the little boy. His eyes lit up and he reached to take it. His mother laughed. “It’s so delicious,” she said.

  I walked my bike up to the main road and started pedaling toward home. Although the day was still clear, the city streets were a blur to me, as if I were gazing at them through a car window in the pouring rain. Back at my house, I lay down on the bed and stayed there for hours. If something as insignificant as an unborn chicken bothered me, how would I react to something really bad? The very thing that had drawn me to this place, its fore
ignness, seemed repulsive to me now. How bad had it gotten for the American teacher before she left?

  The sky was dark when I finally left the house again, to walk over to Tra’s for dinner. She laughed when she heard about the chicken egg. “That wasn’t a chicken,” she said. “That was a duck. It’s the best thing you can eat. So many vitamins. Vietnamese women eat that dish when they’re pregnant. You should try it. It’s so delicious.”

  “I don’t know how to eat it,” I told her. I felt a lump in my throat.

  Tra nodded. Now she understood. “That’s happened to me in the States, too,” she said, putting her hand on mine. “People try to get me to eat something disgusting. It’s awful. I tell them I don’t know how to eat it, but they still don’t understand.”

  I tried to imagine which American dish the gristle-loving Tra would find impossible to eat. And how could anything be worse than an embryonic baby duck?

  “Mashed potatoes,” Tra said. “All that butter and cream—disgusting! How can people eat that?”

  Once, after I’d been in Vietnam for almost a year, I went to see a play by a local playwright, the setting of which was in a Hanoi neighborhood not unlike my own. If I were to write a play about my own life in Hanoi, it would take place on a set like that one. Almost all the action would occur in the downstairs living room of Tung and Huong’s house and on the sidewalk right in front of it. Every morning, Tung would pull open the folding front doors, exposing the entire width of the living room. It was hard to know where the inside stopped and the outside world began. The street had a ceiling of dark green leaves and the living room had a ceiling of plastic tiles. The sidewalk had a layer of dust. The linoleum floor of our house also had a layer of dust. Outside, the ladies who ran tea stalls whacked the ground smooth with their feather-soft straw brooms. Inside, Huong swept the dust into pieces of newspaper and dumped it out in the gutter of the road for the street sweepers to gather on their nightly rounds. The food vendors and wandering beggars passed through both domains, walking hunched, palms open, eyes fastened now on the ladies selling tea, now on the customers drinking it, now on Huong sitting inside on her couch. The only difference between inside and outside was that outside was constant motion. Inside, we rarely moved. We formed the Greek chorus to the drama in front of us. Every day I spent in Hanoi my knowledge and understanding of Vietnam expanded, while every day the central focus of it constricted, until it seemed like the whole universe centered on this little living room and the sidewalk in front of it.

  The living room of the house was always crowded, and I had to develop tricks to remember who the players were. The sweet-faced older man who rode the rickety bicycle was Tung’s father. Huong’s father wore a black beret and spoke to me in French. Tung’s mother was bony and cheerful. Huong’s mother was round and sullen. Two of Huong’s brothers looked like twins, but the one with the Vietnamese flag tattooed to his forearm was the older one, who had driven a supply truck during the war, and the one who wore the flashy shirts was younger and would have barely reached puberty by the time the war ended. Huong had three sisters-in-law, and, because of the limited number of Vietnamese given names, two of them were also called Huong. Thus, I had the advantage of greeting all of them with, “Hello, Huong,” and being fairly certain I was right.

  Then there was Huong and Tung’s five-year-old boy, Viet, the wild child. Sometimes I’d sit down on the couch and he’d jump onto my lap, throw his arms around my neck, and let out blissful coos. At other times, he’d lure me with the promise of a kiss and punch me in the mouth. One night I brought home a flower-covered chocolate cake for Viet. He took one look at it, breathed deeply, then plunged his whole face into the middle. Viet could hold nearly a whole bowl of rice in his mouth and eat it while singing a song and standing balanced on the seat of his father’s Honda Dream.

  The family drifted in and out of conversation as easily as one drifts in and out of sleep. At first, I kept wondering why they didn’t get bored. We Americans are always searching for distractions, even at those moments that demand we do nothing but stare at whatever’s right there in front of us. We read while sitting on the toilet, thumb through magazines in supermarket checkout lines, and listen to the radio while driving to work. Even “relaxing” involves some action verb: eating, watching TV, going for a walk. Now I found myself in a place where people could sit for hours observing the relentless monotony of traffic. Only Tung had trouble. He could only last for a few minutes before he’d start to fidget, jump out of his chair, light a cigarette, comb his hair, walk into the kitchen, walk back out, make a phone call, then sit down again, finally ready for another stint at it. Everyone else could last forever, silently staring out the front door.

  In the beginning, when I spent a lot of time downstairs, I wondered what I was missing. I’d only walked by the Army Museum, and I wasn’t even sure where the History and Fine Arts museums were yet. Maybe something major was happening in this city while I sat on a plastic-covered sofa watching traffic. Maybe revolution was fermenting in Hanoi and I didn’t even know it. But ever so slowly I became completely absorbed by the life of this house, and my American compunction to “use my time wisely” disintegrated. Whole hours passed unaccounted for, marked only by the steady rise and fall of noise. Time started to pass in a different way, not so much in the turn of the clock as in the change in the light, the growling of my stomach, Viet’s ecstatic return from school, or the smell of Huong’s cooking.

  If someone had told me, even a month before, that I would spend so many hours hanging out on a couch with a native Hanoian, I still might have doubted it. It was hard to believe that I could feel so relaxed around a woman like Huong, who wasn’t Westernized and who had never had a chance, as Tra had, to make peace with America. About the time I was polishing my POW/MIA bracelet back home in Memphis, Huong was hiding out in the countryside, avoiding the bombs the United States was dropping on her city. But here we were, twenty years later, sitting on the couch together, not only not discussing the past, but—on my part and I believe hers as well—not even thinking about it.

  Something was finally shifting between myself and Huong. I couldn’t mark any exact moment that had caused the change, but each time we passed each other on the stairs, each time she came into my room to water my plants, our smiles became more relaxed, our exchanges easier. I don’t know that my Vietnamese tones had gotten any better, but she had gotten much better at understanding them. The more time I spent with her, the more I realized how smart she was, and the more incomprehensible became my initial reaction to her as a timid young wife cowering behind her husband’s back. That image seemed laughable now, as I watched her directing Tung through his daily chores like a factory boss. She spoke to her older brothers with a voice of authority, and they listened to her. I don’t think I was the only one intimidated by her.

  Huong had not only never shown an interest in why I came to Vietnam, she never asked me anything at all about my past. Her world was compact, as tightly woven as the finest straw basket, leaving no space to contemplate my existence in America. She acted as though the span of my life began at that moment I’d first stepped through her front door. I think this assumption accounted for how, although I was actually a year older than she was, she treated me like her innocent younger sister. As our conversation became easier, she took to giving me advice on everything from my love life to how I washed my towels. On quiet mornings, she rested her hand comfortably on my knee, just as she rested it on her sister Nga’s knee, and taught me new words, all the while keeping her eyes out for passing vendors hawking something she might like to cook for lunch.

  One day, Huong was trying to explain to me all the Vietnamese words for rice. She found it incomprehensible that I could use the same term for the plant growing in the fields, the uncooked grain sold in the market, and the food we ate for dinner. To prove to me that these were in fact three very different things, she opened the cabinet under the glass coffee table and pulled out the Vietnamese-English
dictionary. I leaned back on the sofa and prepared to wait. I had already found out, during any number of dictionary-aided conversations with Huong, that, like many Vietnamese, she didn’t know the system of alphabetical order. Every time she wanted to find a word, she did a random search for the first letter, then slowly scanned the rows until she finally found the word for which she was looking. It could take her fifteen minutes to find a single word, and by that time I’d nearly forgotten what we were talking about. But Huong hadn’t. She was patient. The two of us experienced time in completely different ways. Sometimes I tried to imagine what kind of person she’d be if she were an American. I could see Tung wrangling his little deals in New York or Dallas as easily as here in Hanoi. But Huong’s pace, the steady and absolutely certain way she moved through her days, was an exact mirror of her surroundings. She was rooted to this place in the same way that a tree is rooted to the soil. I sensed that if she were ever torn away from this house, this street, this city, she might not survive.

  I was waiting for Huong to find the third of her rice words when, suddenly, from out of the normal roar of traffic, we heard the sounds of screaming. Both of us jumped up and ran outside. A crowd of thirty or more people was forming at the edge of the street. Passing motorbikes, bicycles, and even a couple of cars had stopped to look at whatever was going on in the middle of the road. This is it, I told myself. Our neighborhood’s collective karma had been used up. Now, instead of another near miss, we’d had the real thing. “Viet! Viet!” Huong shouted. My stomach turned, but then I saw him trying to nose his little body into the middle of the crowd. Huong dragged him out by his shirt. The three of us stood at the edge of the mass of people trying to figure out if anyone had gotten hurt.