The House on Dream Street

by Dana Sachs

  “Is it a wife and husband?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Two wife husband.”

  “Is that two people or four people?” I persisted.

  “It’s two people. Two wife husband.” She wasn’t impatient, but it was obvious she couldn’t see how to say it more simply.

  I was finally beginning to understand when the doorbell rang, signaling the arrival of my ride to the institute.

  My student, Harry, was waiting for me on the sidewalk. In keeping with Tra’s tradition of giving her American students Vietnamese names, I had come up with American names for all of mine. Harry was a sweet-faced man in his early forties. I was happy to see him. The center was located several miles from central Hanoi, and if I were to ride my bike there I’d spend more time getting to class than I would spend teaching it. But getting lifts to class, so far, had been a problem. At first, a member of the Department of Physics, Jerry, had driven me to class in the institute car, but it was clear to me within a few minutes of our first meeting that I wouldn’t enjoy these rides. The institute car was a clunky, mud-yellow Russian model, the first car I had ridden in since arriving in Hanoi. After weeks of getting around town on bikes and the backs of friends’ motorbikes, being chauffeured through the muddy streets of Hanoi in a car made me feel like I was riding a water buffalo through a chicken coop.

  The real problem, however, wasn’t the car as much as the driver. Jerry was tall and heavyset, a body type so unusual in Vietnam that, in comparison to everyone else, he looked like a pudgy giant. A few minutes after we had pulled away from my house on my very first day of class, he had turned toward me. “I see that you are looking so very beautiful today,” he said, looking out at me through his thick glasses. The space between the front of our car and the rear end of a truck narrowed precipitously.

  “Thanks,” I finally said as he jerked the steering wheel and whipped around the truck. “Where did you learn English?”

  “Oh, you see, I did this. I taught myself. Only two years. I did that. Study at my house is what I did. Alone. No benefit of teacher . . .” He didn’t stop speaking for several minutes, but I had already lost the thread of what he was saying. Jerry’s efforts at home study had expanded his self-assurance, but his accent was nearly incomprehensible. He spoke English as if he were speaking Vietnamese, staccato-like, forcing out each syllable like a separate word. It reminded me of a child playing with clods of dirt, throwing them ceaselessly and without aim.

  He turned to me again. “And you. I ask. Do you have a husband?”

  “No,” I said. “Your institute is very far away, isn’t it?”

  “No husband! I ask. Do you like to dance? I ask. Do you like to disco?”

  “Not really,” I answered. I didn’t know Jerry’s marital status, but since most of the men I’d met who were over thirty were married, I took a chance. “Tell me about your wife,” I said.

  “My wife? Yes. Then I will tell you about my wife. You ask.” If the shift in conversation made him pause, it was imperceptible to me. I spent the rest of the ride gazing out the window and vaguely tracking the course of a monologue that centered on his wife’s business ventures, a new car shipped from Pakistan, and their efforts to build a guesthouse in Hanoi. By the time we reached the center, I had come to know Jerry more intimately than I desired.

  After a few weeks of commuting with Jerry, I contemplated quitting the job simply because I couldn’t bear the car rides anymore. Then I found out that another student, Harry, lived near my house. Harry was friends with Tra’s sister, and his eight-year-old daughter was one of the children I taught at Tra’s house every Tuesday night. I’d had a spate of invitations from married men, asking me to do everything with them from eating at expensive restaurants to dancing at the disco to riding out into the countryside on the backs of their Hondas. I was suddenly more popular than I’d ever been in the States, but none of the attention felt flattering. Rather, it seemed that these men were interested in me because I was a single American woman and therefore available for sex, and probably discreet. Fending off these invitations had become a part-time job for me and a big joke between Tung and Huong, who kept teasing me about not liking Vietnamese men. When Harry offered the ride, I thought that this problem, at least, was solved. I could see by the delight Harry took in his daughter that he was a happy family man.

  The center was located at the western edge of the city, on a campus that, given a new paint job and a bit of landscaping, might have passed for modern. Inside, however, I was instantly reminded that this was a poor country with few resources available for aesthetic improvements. My classroom was dank, with wooden tables, dirty windows, and a ceiling fan that, once the warm weather started, would prove itself incapable of redistributing the hot and heavy air. Other institute buildings were hardly more high-tech than the one in which I taught. I never once saw a computer, and the most up-to-date offices I visited looked more like dusty wire- and cable-filled hardware stores than laboratories for scientific research.

  Despite their dismal facilities, my students were smart. Most were physicists, but the class also included medical doctors, biologists, chemical engineers, and nuclear scientists. I felt intimidated, having fulfilled my college science requirements by taking courses with titles like “Poetry and Nature.” I became even more intimidated when I learned that, on average, each of my students had spent seven years studying abroad, earning doctorates from the ivory towers of the Eastern bloc. These people were fluent in such languages as Czech, Hungarian, and Romanian, and most spoke Russian as well. Now, however, they faced two professional dilemmas. First, the local scientific facilities gave them no chance of keeping up with international research; second, the breakup of the Eastern bloc had made fluency in Czech or Romanian as worthless as the currency of a toppled regime. Even Russian would be of no help at a conference in Tokyo, Geneva, or New York. For that, they needed English. Whenever I walked into the classroom, twenty students greeted me like a visiting specialist called in to help solve a particularly puzzling question in quantum physics.

  Harry got me to class much quicker than Jerry’s lumbering car ever had and, fifteen minutes after saying good-bye to Huong, I found myself standing once again in front of the enthusiastic scientists. Today, we were working on chapter 8 of the book Meanings into Words, a Cambridge text that was so popular in English-avid Hanoi that it would have easily made the best-seller list. For the first half of class, we discussed a reading passage entitled “Dishwashers,” the first sentence of which began, “Over the last fifty years housework has been made considerably easier by the invention of an increasing number of labor saving devices and appliances.” For my students, who had voracious appetites for both new vocabulary and information on life in the West, this material was enthralling. It didn’t take long before we were holding a passionate discussion on such housecleaning topics as vacuuming options and plumbing problems. After the reading, teams of students came up to the front of the room for a role-playing session in which a customer goes into the neighborhood Sears to check out the latest models.

  My students were so satisfied with the dishwasher lesson that, after a brief break, I pulled out a humor column I’d photocopied from the San Francisco Examiner about the often odd behavior of tourists. I had never considered the possibility, however, that humor might not translate. For twenty minutes, we moved sentence by sentence through the first paragraph as I tried to explain each joke and the students politely responded with chuckles. By the time we began the second paragraph, however, they had given up listening entirely, and instead sat with their heads buried in their photocopies, hopelessly trying to decipher phrases like “cable car turnaround” and “Bermuda shorts.” Even more surprising was how bothered they were by their incomprehension. Jerry, saying he had some office business to attend to, got up and left. Tra’s sister bit her fingernails frantically. When I asked Harry a question, he shrugged with despair.

  After class, Harry and I walked silently toward his motorbike.
Today’s class was not the first time that I’d steered my students in the wrong direction.

  Harry could see that I was concerned. “It was a good class,” he said. “You taught it very well.”

  I was touched by his effort to cheer me up. “Thanks so much,” I said. “You’re really sweet.”

  We walked on for a moment without saying anything and when we reached the motorbike, Harry stopped and looked at me. “I have an idea,” he said. “We should go relax now, because you are tired. We can go to my little country house, next to the West Lake. It’s very quiet there, and empty. We can take a nap. It’s very pleasant.”

  Was there some sign on my body that said, “Married Men: I’m available”? After a long moment, I said, “No thanks, Harry. I just need to get home.”

  When, several months later, I began teaching English at the Vietnam Atomic Energy Commission, which was an easy bike ride from my house, Harry became my only student from the center to follow me to the new locale. Because his enthusiasm never waned, I assumed that he was pleased with his progress in English. It was many months before I learned he had another reason that kept him coming to my class.

  Now that I could finally communicate a bit with Tung and Huong, they were able to tell me what they thought of me, and it wasn’t always good. Tung decided that the glasses I wore were so unflattering that they made me look like an old grandmother—hardly a desirable quality for an unmarried woman approaching thirty. Huong thought I should do something more with my hair. It just hung there. Why wouldn’t I let her take me to the beauty shop down the street and supervise my getting a perm? Both of them considered my wardrobe atrocious. Faded jeans and baggy sweaters were not the fashion statement they expected an American woman to make. Didn’t I own a belt?

  On top of all that, Huong seemed to be growing increasingly convinced that I was good-natured, but incompetent. I wasn’t any good at washing my clothes by hand, and when I hung them to dry on the balcony, I didn’t pin them properly and they fell off in heaps on the dusty floor. I didn’t know how to peel an apple without slicing my hand. I forgot Vietnamese words she had already taught me two or three times. Once, in frustration, I told her she should come over to San Francisco and try operating a digital answering machine to see how I felt in Hanoi.

  To celebrate the impending arrival of the new tenants, I decided I’d cook an American dinner for Tung, Huong, and their families. Surely, hamburgers and French fries would be exotic enough to impress Huong and demonstrate that, in my country at least, I knew what I was doing. She was skeptical about the endeavor, but offered to help.

  We went to buy supplies early in the morning on the day of the meal. The Hang Da Market was a three-story concrete building, the cavernous bottom floor of which was dominated by food vendors. I’d been here before, and the sight of dozens of food-sellers squatting over their baskets of bananas, mountains of rice, and buckets of live fish didn’t put me off. I’d seen the piles of intestines sitting out on the tile-covered butcher blocks. I’d seen the live chickens and the roasted dogs. I was used to the smells of rotting produce and raw meat, and I knew to walk carefully so as not to slip and fall on the wet and often slimy floor. But I’d never bought anything more complicated than a few tomatoes. The prospect of collecting the ingredients for a dinner for a dozen people suddenly overwhelmed me.

  Huong stood behind me. “It must be different from your markets at home,” she said.

  I nodded.

  When I still didn’t move, she gently nudged. “What do you want first?” she asked.

  To my right, the vegetable vendors sat in little neighborly clusters, chatting with one another while they bent over their morning bowls of phở. “Tomatoes, lettuce, and potatoes,” I decided, and we started there.

  We spent about an hour in the market, though Huong could probably have gone through my whole list by herself in fifteen minutes. She was more puzzled than annoyed, though. It was hard for her to understand how someone about to cook a meal could be indecisive about what to buy and how much of it to buy. I was glad to have her with me, though, and not just for the extra arms (and motorbike) to haul the groceries home. Huong knew the appropriate price of every single item in the market and wouldn’t let any of the vendors get anything more out of me. The only things I knew better than she did were the prices for ketchup and mustard, which we bought from imported goods dealers at stalls outside.

  When we got home, Huong locked the bike and I started pulling bags off the handlebars and out of the front basket. “Duyen!” I heard a voice call from behind me. When I turned around, I saw Phai squatting on the sidewalk in front of his mechanic shop in his worn blue shirt and black trousers splattered with mud. He had a cigarette between his fingers and a big grin on his face. “Đi đâu vê?” he asked. Where have you been? It was a standard Vietnamese greeting.

  Even though I knew that Phai didn’t expect a literal answer, I answered by holding up the groceries for him to see. “I’m cooking dinner tonight,” I told him.

  Phai’s eyebrows went up.

  “I know how to cook,” I insisted. He didn’t look convinced. “I do,” I said. “You should come.”

  The expression on Phai’s face didn’t change, but he gave a slight nod, which I took as acceptance.

  Late that afternoon, I went down to the kitchen to cook. Huong, who had volunteered to be my sous chef, was already squatting on the floor peeling potatoes. “What should we do with these?” she asked.

  Hamburgers and French fries had seemed the perfect meal to make, before I started making it. Neither dish was complicated, and the two combined were so quintessentially American that even Huong had heard of them. The problem was, I didn’t know exactly how to make either one. Although I loved to cook, hamburgers and French fries were not on the repertoire of things I made at home. I looked at the pile of freshly peeled potatoes and said, “We’ve got to do this,” gesturing with my hands to cut the potatoes with a knife.

  Without talking much, we sliced potatoes and tomatoes, washed lettuce, and began to make the burgers. Ground beef was not an item on sale at the market, but I’d managed to explain what I needed to one butcher, who, though puzzled over my request, was willing to take a huge slab of perfectly lean filet—the kind of cut that would have cost fourteen dollars a pound in the States—and chop it by hand with a murderous-looking cleaver. Now I dug my hands into a bowl to mix the meat with eggs and chopped onion and garlic.

  We moved on to the raw potatoes. “Now we use that,” I said, pointing to a bottle of oil on the shelf.

  Huong looked at the oil, then back at the potatoes. “Are you sure?” she asked.

  I hesitated. I was only making up this recipe as I went along, but I was sure that Huong would know less than I did about making fries. “You’re supposed to use that,” I asserted, pointing again to the oil.

  “I know what dish you’re talking about,” Huong said. “Don’t you call them French potatoes? They’d be better in the oven.”

  Of course, after years of French colonialism, the Vietnamese had been influenced enough by French cuisine to have discovered pommes frites. But what self-respecting American thinks of French fries as French? I considered arguing with Huong, but then I gave in. I really didn’t know how to make French fries. In this case, she might be right.

  Vietnamese recipes seldom called for baking, and Huong used her oven for storage. We pulled out a wok, two saucepans, a baking pan, an empty water bottle, and an orange plastic frog that Viet had thought he’d lost. Then we spread the potatoes out on the pan, sprinkled them with salt and oil, and turned on the oven.

  By seven o’clock that night, everything was ready. Huong and I had pulled together several small tables to make one large dining table in the living room. Vietnamese usually eat with chopsticks out of small, deep bowls, and so Huong didn’t have enough plates and forks for all the people coming to dinner. We improvised by putting platters of French fries at strategic points along the table and deciding that peopl
e would eat their hamburgers out of bowls.

  We finished just as the guests began to arrive. Huong’s parents got there first. Her sister, Nga, and Nga’s husband Tan came in a few minutes later, followed by Tung’s parents, who rode bicycles over from their house a few blocks away. Tung’s younger brother appeared on a motorbike and took a seat next to his mother. Viet, who refused to sit down, lurked near a bowl of French fries, which, not surprisingly, had turned out crisp and perfect. Tung pulled his bottle of Johnnie Walker from a cabinet and began pouring it into glasses. The only person who hadn’t shown up yet was Phai.

  Huong, Nga, and I shuttled platters of burgers and fries in from the kitchen. Huong’s mother, a round-faced woman with a loud voice, picked up the bottle of Heinz ketchup, opened it, and smelled it. She set it down, picked up the bottle of mustard, smelled that, and set it down. As I was beginning to learn, Vietnamese rely on their sense of smell much more than Americans do. If someone describes a food, they’ll talk about its smell, either complimenting its pleasant fragrance or complaining about its stink. And when Vietnamese want to demonstrate their affection, they don’t kiss. Instead, they hold each other close and inhale deeply.

  Now Huong’s mother was wrinkling her nose at the smell of the ketchup.

  “It’s delicious,” I told her. “Do you know how to eat it?”

  Huong’s mother never attempted to communicate with me directly. She looked at her daughter Nga and bellowed, “What is it?”

  Nga set a platter of burgers down in front of the two grandfathers, then looked up at me. “What is it, Duyen?” she asked.

  Before I could answer, Huong’s father pointed to the ketchup and said, in French, as if to translate, “Qu’est-ce que c’est?”

  Everyone looked at me and waited. I leaned over the table and methodically pointed at the plates of burgers, the “buns” we’d fashioned out of long baguettes, and the bowls of fries, using gesture and a few words of Vietnamese to demonstrate the varied uses of mustard and ketchup. Huong’s mother eyed me skeptically. Then Tung’s mother picked up the ketchup and, using her chopstick to get it moving, gamely poured some into her bowl. She had a character that Vietnamese would call vui, which to describe an experience means “fun” and to describe a personality means “cheerful” or “good-natured.” Unlike Huong’s mother, who wouldn’t talk to me at all, Tung’s mother acted as if I could understand Vietnamese as well as a native Hanoian. She looked up at me and said something that sounded like, “Blah blah blah Duyen blah blah.” Everyone laughed.