The House on Dream Street

by Dana Sachs

  In the middle of the crowd, an angry cyclo driver was arguing with a tall, muscular teenager who, judging by his rubber boots, was one of our street’s motorbike washers. The teenager pointed at a woman standing next to them. She had on a smart pea green business suit and high heels. She was leaning over her Dream, investigating a broken headlight. The teenager’s voice rose, and he began to stomp his foot for emphasis.

  I felt as though I were watching a foreign film without the subtitles. “What’s going on?” I finally asked Huong.

  “The cyclo driver hit that woman’s motorbike, and the teenager’s mad because the cyclo driver won’t say he’s sorry.” Though I couldn’t get all her Vietnamese, Huong’s hand motions and facial expression told the story perfectly well.

  The shouting escalated. The cyclo driver jumped off his seat, then the teenager moved toward him. Drawing his fist back in the air, the teenager looked like a cartoon character going through the stylized motions of a fight. He was fast and his fist went flying.

  Before the blow hit its mark, two other men grabbed the teenager and pulled him back. One of the men let go of him, then walked over to the cyclo driver. He was smaller and less intimidating than either the burly teenager or the tough-looking driver, but, with a few words, he managed to appease them both. I realized that this peacemaker was someone I recognized.

  I nudged Huong. “That’s Tung’s friend.”

  She nodded. “Phai. He’s a motorbike mechanic.”

  The crowd was silent, everybody straining to hear Phai, whose voice was as quiet and steady as the swish of the street sweepers’ brooms I heard when I lay in bed at night. The cyclo driver’s eyes were focused on his fingernail, but he, too, was listening. Finally, he looked up and said something to the owner of the Dream. She shrugged, then got on her motorbike and kicked it into gear.

  “Doesn’t he have to buy her a new one of those things?” I asked. I didn’t know the word for headlight.

  Huong shook her head as if the logic of the situation should have been clear to me already. “He’s a cyclo driver. He doesn’t have any money.” She pointed to the woman in the pea green suit, who was already puttering away. “She’s got money. She can pay for it. They just wanted him to apologize. He wasn’t polite.”

  I may have been witnessing the birth of a capitalist society, but that didn’t mean that Vietnam was developing into the same kind of capitalist society as the United States. Communism had had its effect on this country, as had the ancient traditions that dated back over a thousand years. For most Vietnamese, poverty wasn’t a predicament so much as a state of being. It was permanent and unalterable, like the geography of the land. Although Vietnamese had hope for their improving economy, few people harbored illusions that the poor would ever be anything but poor.

  The cyclo driver pulled himself back up on his seat and slowly pedaled off. He hadn’t gotten far when the teenager started after him again, but Tung’s friend Phai grabbed the teenager’s arm and pulled him back toward one of the mechanic shops.

  “Let’s go back inside,” Huong said. She let go of Viet and he sprang away from us like a rubber band, disappearing into the alley behind our house. Huong walked back inside, turning away from the crowd as if the attention she’d paid the event were one more task completed. I took one last look at Phai and the teenager conferring in front of the mechanic’s shop and followed her inside.

  Huong had forgotten the commotion instantly, but I was still trying to figure it out. In America, people slow down to glimpse the carnage of accidents, hence our term “rubbernecker.” Still, I couldn’t imagine a fender bender in America causing the commotion I’d witnessed in the last ten minutes. Despite all the fury, nothing had been broken except the social code and the headlight on one Honda Dream. Why had the traffic stopped? Why did everyone congregate to watch? It began to occur to me that Vietnam was a culture not of rubberneckers, but of kibitzers. They watched the occasional fistfight and commuter drama not simply because they were curious, but because they lived in a society that expected everybody to keep an eye on everybody else.

  If for no other reason than this sense of community, Vietnam differed radically from the world I knew in America. The effects were obvious. Outsiders might assume that Vietnam is an aggressive society, but violent crime was rare, and I never witnessed anything worse than the occasional fistfight. I had the freedom—which I did not have in the States—to walk down the street at night without the fear of being assaulted. A society free of violent crime is, of course, one of the reasons repressive governments give for denying their citizens basic human rights. My Vietnamese friends didn’t have the freedom of speech or freedom of assembly that I took for granted. But I found myself cherishing the safety I felt on the streets, a safety that Huong, never having to worry about getting assaulted by strangers, would not have even considered. Viet could run all over the neighborhood and any woman who saw him would take care of him with as much care as his own mother, whereas Tra had often complained about how isolated she felt in the States. She could fall down and die on the street and no one would notice. In Vietnam, you couldn’t read a book or eat your dinner without someone noticing and discussing it. If you went to visit friends and they weren’t home, you simply went next door and the neighbors could probably tell you where your friends had gone.

  Over the next few months I would come to realize, all too clearly, the negative effects of being watched all the time. But it was still early enough in my stay that I could appreciate the freedoms I didn’t have at home, without noticing the ones that were missing.

  The motorbike washing and repair business on my street inspired a busy support network of tea stalls. Motorbike workers and their customers gathered for refreshment around low tables covered with various snacks, drinks, and cigarettes. The proprietor sat at the head of the table, within arm’s reach of anything or anybody, investing the atmosphere at her tea stall with the particular attributes of her own personality. My house had a tea stall on either side of it, one run by Grandmother Nhi and the other by Grandmother Ly. Grandmother Ly seemed indifferent to the competition. She was either too distracted by the presence of her newborn grandchild or too busy combing out her knee-length white hair to invest much effort in the business.

  Grandmother Nhi worked harder, and she had the more loyal following. The motorbike guys spent the quiet time between jobs lounging next to her tea table, playing cards, smoking cigarettes, cracking sunflower seeds between their teeth and tossing the empty shells onto the sidewalk. Maybe they frequented her tea stall because Grandmother Nhi was lovely, with skin the color of uncooked rice, smooth as the soybean milk she kept in a bottle on her tea table. Or maybe they just liked to hear her gossip.

  One afternoon I came home and saw Tung and Phai sitting on the benches surrounding Grandmother Nhi’s tea table. Tung motioned for me to join them. I had never spoken to Grandmother Nhi before, and now her smile was huge with anticipation: The foreigner was finally close enough to touch. “Duyen! Ngồi cho vui!” she said. Sit down for fun! I sat down. Phai was across the table, and Tung sat next to him. The two looked so different from each other that it was hard to imagine they were friends. Phai was small, dark-skinned, and wiry—in a culture that prized men who were, like Tung, tall, light-skinned, and buff. The other men I knew wore busy fabrics and fancy leather shoes as signs of their sophistication and wealth. Phai wore solid blacks and blues and whites, as if he’d never noticed there was such a thing as fashion. Unlike Tung, he was quiet. He listened closely, but seldom spoke. After he’d convinced his mechanic friend not to clobber the cyclo driver, I’d seen him several times in our living room. I’d never talked to him, but I could tell that I amused him. Sometimes, while struggling through some tricky grammatical turn of phrase, I would glance in his direction and see that he was watching me. I’d smile, embarrassed. He’d smile back as if we shared a secret.

  Grandmother Nhi handed me a steaming cup of tea. I knew that she was about to speak, and my
brain shifted into a mode of nervous preparation. Then, it came: “Duyen, how old are you?” Easy enough. I relaxed, but before I could get the words out of my mouth, Tung answered. He proceeded to launch into a lengthy and astonishingly assured discourse on the details of my life. Within a few seconds, I had lost the thread of the conversation, but I could tell by the way he continually gestured in my direction that the subject matter had not changed.

  Tung made some sort of joke that made both Phai and Grandmother Nhi start laughing. Grandmother Nhi’s laugh was persistent and breathy, like the hiss of a water heater. Phai’s was louder, but only lasted a moment. I stared into my cup of tea, trying to figure out what had suddenly made Tung such an expert on my life. Since the night he’d brought his brother and cousin to my room, he hadn’t come upstairs as often. He was like a child, always focused on the newest toy, and my novelty had worn off. Now he was busy networking to fill the other room in his guesthouse and was often so distracted he’d barely notice when I walked by. At last, I thought, my relationship with him was becoming more normal. We still spent blocks of time hunched over the dictionary downstairs, but the time was no longer simply an exercise in language acquisition. We were really trying to say something. Tung had told me about his years in Germany, about his best friend Hans, a taxi driver from Dresden who had given him the Metallica cassette he always cranked up on the stereo. In exchange, Tung had taught Hans how to cook rice Vietnamese style (never gooey, with each grain so distinct you could pick it up with your chopsticks and see an oval as perfect as an egg). Neither one had had to teach the other about beer. That was one thing they had in common.

  Grandmother Nhi began to laugh again and from a few key words I guessed that Tung was describing the limits of my vocabulary. Tung’s most recent contributions to my knowledge included “air conditioner,” “go downstairs,” “go upstairs,” and “lock the door.” I had, most recently, taught him “it’s okay with me,” and “fuck you.” Was Tung telling that to Grandmother Nhi? He was grinning, seeming to get an inordinate amount of pleasure from making me squirm.

  Phai wasn’t laughing anymore. His eyes rested on me. As Grandmother Nhi’s amusement continued, my discomfort must have been obvious because, for the first time, Phai spoke to me. “Duyen, do you understand?” he asked, his eyes suddenly wide with worry. I nodded and shrugged at the same time, an answer that could have meant anything. Then I hurriedly finished my tea and went inside.

  4. The Four Stages of Love

  IN EARLY APRIL, THE COLD LET UP and the rains began. Hanoians called it mu’a xuân, “spring rain,” to distinguish it from the violent storms of summer. I couldn’t call it rain at all. “Rain” seemed too strong a word for this formless, weightless mist that didn’t fall from the gray sky, but condensed out of the air itself. The chinaberry trees in front of my house bloomed tiny white flowers, which fell like snow into the puddles on the sidewalk below. You couldn’t tell if all this water was going up or coming down, and the living room floors glistened as if they’d just been mopped. My backpack, shoved into the bottom of the wooden wardrobe, took on the smell of rotten tomatoes. The adhesive on envelopes developed colonies of blue fungus, moistened spontaneously, and sealed. Laundry wouldn’t dry at all, and the clothes hanging neatly in my wardrobe became organic and began to sprout. I tried to protect myself from so much moisture by pulling over my head a blue and gray hooded rain jacket I’d bought in Hanoi, which had the phrase SHOWER ATTACK SPORTS printed in big letters across its back. Vietnam’s markets didn’t provide much choice in rainwear, and the weather brought out mobs of commuters decked in the exact same jacket. But it made no difference whether I was riding down the street or lying in my bed. My body was slick with the moisture of a rain I couldn’t feel.

  Winter may have been cloudy, but spring seemed worse. We didn’t see the sun for weeks. Every morning, we woke to a sky that matched the gray on our raincoats and spent our days picking paths across muddy sidewalks or riding our bikes down muddy streets. I gave up trying to keep the cuffs of my pants clean and got used to walking in shoes that squeaked with moisture. The relentlessly dull quality of the light became so familiar, so apparently permanent, that a blue sky seemed as unlikely as everyone on the streets suddenly speaking to one another in English.

  I’d been in Hanoi for more than a month and my life had settled into something resembling routine. Three mornings a week, I left the house at seven o’clock, went to a food stand down the street, and ate the typical Hanoi breakfast, a noodle soup called phở. After breakfast, I rode my bike to the Institute of Social Sciences, where my teacher, Professor Mai, and I sat from eight to ten o’clock at a table in a dim and dusty classroom going over my lessons in Intermediate Spoken Vietnamese. In a month, I’d worked my way up to “Lesson Five: Planning an Evening Out.” Now I was memorizing such dialogues as “Brother Tai: Steve, are you free tonight? Brother Steve: I’m busy tonight, but I’m free tomorrow night; do you have something in mind?”

  Intermediate Spoken Vietnamese, published in the States in 1980, was outdated and based on southern dialect. Consequently, it seldom sounded like what I heard around me in Hanoi. I was grateful enough simply to have it, but I knew that these lessons were hard on my teacher. Professor Mai was not a Vietnamese language instructor by calling. He was a linguist who had spent much of his career compiling a French-Vietnamese dictionary. His Russian was effortless; his French nearly perfect. Although he spoke almost no English, he had such a keen understanding of language that he never had trouble comprehending anything I wanted to say. As a teacher, he was patient and devoted, determined to help me learn. Still, the idea of Professor Mai teaching me Vietnamese made about as much sense as a professor from Harvard giving one-on-one ESL training to an exchange student. My lessons were not the most efficient use of this man’s time. But he did it anyway. At four dollars a lesson, Professor Mai could make more money in three mornings with me than in an entire week of doing research of his own.

  The only real pleasure Professor Mai seemed to get out of teaching me came when we were able to delve, however simply, into sociolinguistics. One morning, our conversation drifted onto the subject of how military terms, which came into common usage during the war, had over the years taken on peculiarly nonmilitary meanings. The word bắn, which meant “to shoot,” had become, in increasingly corrupt Vietnam, a slang word meaning “bribe.” If a wealthy businessperson “shot” an official in order to avoid some troublesome regulation, you’d know the official came out a little richer because of it. Similarly, the word tấn công, which literally means “attack,” was now often used to describe episodes on the romantic battlefront as well. When a boy flirted with a girl, for example, hip Vietnamese would say, “He attacked her.”

  Hearing about the evolution of words like bắn and tấn công reminded me of how, on one of the first days I’d been in Hanoi, Tra had taken me to eat at a little food stall near my house. When I said I wanted vegetarian noodle soup, she’d told me to order phở không ngưồ’i lái. I blurted out the phrase, and the food stall proprietor looked at me with surprise, but I got the food I wanted. After that, whenever they saw me walking toward their food stall, the people who worked there yelled, “Phở không ngưồ’i lái!” and burst out laughing. It had taken me weeks to get Tra to explain to me that phở không ngưồ’i lái didn’t actually mean “vegetarian noodle soup.” During the war against the United States, she’d finally explained, Vietnamese had marveled at the unmanned airplanes Americans used for reconnaissance missions over North Vietnam. Máy bay không ngưồ’i lái, they called the aircraft: airplanes without the pilot. Soon, the notion of a thing without its essential ingredient creeped into the Vietnamese vernacular. Poor people who couldn’t afford meat in their noodle soup joked about eating “noodles without the pilot.” An American ordering phở không ngưồ’i lái seemed doubly funny. First, I was a citizen of the country that had developed that unmanned aircraft. Second, what was a rich American doing orderin
g poor people’s food anyway?

  “Is that what you mean about the language changing?” I asked Professor Mai.

  He was still chuckling over the story, but he looked at me sympathetically. “Yes,” he said. “That’s it, exactly.”

  After class, I would ride home, hang out with Huong in the living room, then go eat lunch. Most afternoons, I taught English at the National Center for Scientific Research, a job I had found through Tra’s sister.

  One afternoon, as I was on my way downstairs to go teach, I ran into Huong. Her face was flushed with excitement. “Good news!” she said. “We’ve rented the empty rooms.” Tung had spent much of the past month on the telephone, calling anyone he knew with contacts at foreign companies or international aid organizations, trying to spread the word that he had rooms for rent to foreigners. The sight of Tung talking on the telephone had become as familiar an image as Huong sitting on the couch or Viet leaping down the stairs. Now, Tung had managed to rent both of his empty rooms in the same day. Huong and I stood on the landing and went through one of our typical exchanges of information.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Chinese from Thailand,” she said.

  “They’re from Thailand?”

  “But they’re Chinese. It’s two wife husband.”

  It was the “two wife husband”—hai vợ chồng—that confused me. I’d never heard a word for “couple” before, but I could deduce that vợ chồng—the words for “wife” and “husband” in Vietnamese—could easily mean “couple.” What I didn’t understand was if “two” (hai) signified two couples or one couple, particularly since this party was renting two rooms.