by Dana Sachs
The most obvious sign of that difficulty was evident in my friends’ marriages. In Hanoi, at least, separations were a big part of the problem. Even my students, most of whom had graduated from foreign universities, were anxious to go away again. The economic benefits of going abroad were so enormous that almost no one could hope to earn as much by staying home. Vietnam was in desperate need of educated professionals, but few acknowledged the emotional price to be paid for them.
Family separation had evolved into an accepted tradition in Vietnam. The nation’s folktales are full of soldiers going off to battle, leaving their heartbroken families far behind. During Vietnam’s wars in this century it wasn’t unusual for soldiers to be away from home for the duration of the conflict, even if that meant twenty years. With Vietnam at peace, the tradition of family separation had not disappeared, just evolved. But as Tra had once explained, families have a much harder time surviving long separations when the cause is not national defense but personal ambition. And in the gap between those very different motivations lay a hint of what was happening in Vietnam today: This nation, whose very survival had always depended on an all-powerful sense of community, was evolving into one in which the individual took precedence.
Instead of my cheering up Huong, she ended up consoling me. Seeing the glum expression on my face, she started laughing. “Don’t worry,” she said. “This is normal.”
I stood up. “You should talk to Tung,” I said.
Huong shook her head, then closed her eyes. “I’m not ready yet,” she said.
When I got back downstairs, Tung was still sitting in front of the broken telephone. Both bottles of beer were now empty. “What did she say?” he asked.
I shrugged.
He pulled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lit it. “I’m so sick of this,” he said.
When I got home from teaching that afternoon, Phai was sitting by himself in the living room with the broken telephone spread out on the coffee table in front of him. The big double doors, usually opened wide to the street, were halfway shut. The overhead fluorescent bulbs were turned off, and the only light came from the slice of dim sunlight that managed to pass through the dense clouds and thick canopy of leaves hanging over the street outside.
I sat down on one of the little plastic-upholstered stools. “Tung and Huong are having a fight,” I said.
Phai laughed, as if we were sitting through a typhoon and I mentioned that it was raining.
I smiled. “Phức tạp,” I said. The word meant “complicated,” but it sounded like “fucked-up,” which would have worked just as well.
Phai nodded, looking out the door at the rush-hour traffic. His smooth, dark face was full of concern. The afternoon drizzle was starting to turn into heavier rain, and gray Shower Attack Sports raincoats flashed by like ghosts on motorbikes.
“Do you understand what the problem is?” I asked.
Phai looked at me and smiled. “I don’t know. I’ve never been married. I don’t know anything about women.” Then he turned his eyes away and picked up the telephone. “I should fix this thing,” he said.
I still felt slightly confused by Phai. There was a distance between us that neither seemed capable of bridging. It had nothing to do with mistrust. Unlike all the married men who saw me as a prospect for an affair, Phai seemed willing to regard me as more than The American Woman. He had an empathy that I recognized long before the two of us were even able to talk. During those early months in Hanoi, when I felt as though people regarded my efforts to speak Vietnamese as the ridiculous utterings of a mental incompetent, Phai always watched me like a sports fan rooting for his favorite player. Still, we were complete mysteries to each other.
Phai had what my grandmother would have called “commonsense smarts.” He had never been to college, but could install an air conditioner without even glancing at the instructions. In Vietnam, which suffered from a chronic lack of spare parts, exacerbated at that time by the U.S. trade embargo, people made do by fashioning workable replacement parts for everything from radiators and refrigerators to typewriters and photocopy machines. Most Vietnamese knew how to coax aged and delicate appliances into working one more month or year, but, even by local standards, Phai had talent. Tung was clever enough to recognize Phai’s skills and turn him into the fix-it man for everything that broke in our house. I had watched him open a busted stereo, scatter the parts across the floor, tweak a few wires, then put it back together so that Tung could blast Metallica through the house as clearly as ever. I often came home to find Phai perched on a ladder, readjusting the electrical wiring, or hidden between the toilet and the wall, unclogging a drain. To me, this was magic.
Phai was using a rubber band and Scotch tape to fix the broken phone. He pried the cover open with his fingertips and thumbs.
“Where did you learn to fix things?” I asked.
He glanced up and grinned at me. “You don’t have to go to school for this.”
The internal circuit board looked like something I’d seen on a commercial for AT&T, an intricate puzzle of tiny wires and connectors meant to convey to TV audiences the technological sophistication of the phone company. Phai dug his fingers into it, opened a gap, and fixed the rubber band around it. Then, holding a torn section of the board in place, he ripped off a piece of tape with his teeth and reconnected it. He snapped the cover back on the phone, fiddled with the wires in the wall, then picked up the receiver and listened. After a moment, he handed it to me so that I could hear the dial tone myself.
“You must have learned about machines somewhere,” I insisted.
“I learned some in the army,” he finally admitted, pulling a cigarette out of the box in his shirt pocket and lighting it. Phai was my age, which meant that his mandatory military service had taken place long after the last shots of the war against the United States were fired (but not long after the brief 1979 border war with China). His memory of the American War was probably hazy, but, like all my other Hanoi friends, he still avoided talking with me about it. Sometimes, someone would make a joke about the war, but other than that, when I asked for specifics, I generally met with the same response, a vague smile and an emphatic, question-stopping, “That was the past. I like to think about the future.” Once, during an English class, I asked my adult students to describe the scariest moment of their lives. One talked about almost drowning while swimming in a river as a kid. Another remembered a traffic accident in Moscow. All of my students would have been considered members of the “Vietnam Generation” had they lived in the States. But if they had any terrifying memories of war, I didn’t hear about them. Talking about the war with an American was bad form, like reminding a guest in your home that she owed you money. Still, the longer I spent in Hanoi, the more I felt the need to find out about it.
“What did you do in the army?” I asked, testing to see how much more he’d offer.
“I was up on the border with China,” he said. “I didn’t want to shoot a gun, so I studied how to repair cars and motorbikes. I hated the military service, but at least I learned a trade.”
I heard the rumble of a motorbike outside the door and turned to see Tung pull up on his Dream. He walked into the house, leaving muddy tracks across the slick linoleum floor, then threw himself down on the couch next to Phai. None of us said a word. In a culture that had so little regard for privacy, there was a great respect for silence.
My impulse to come to Vietnam had sprung from my conviction of the two nations’ similarities, not their differences. I was learning that I’d been right. Phai learned to fix motorbikes so that he wouldn’t have to shoot a gun. Had I been faced with military service, I would have done something like that. Tung didn’t have the patience to sit still on a couch for ten minutes, much less prowl through the jungle on an all-night patrol. But it was one thing to try to imagine Tung and Phai in army gear. It was quite another to hear directly from them how they had experienced the war. Sooner or later, I would have to ask.
I was already able to understand one thing very clearly, though. It was not career military men or the sinister VC I remembered from movies, but individuals like Tung and Phai who would have done most of the fighting. Despite all the rhetoric, all the willingness to die for a cause, war wasn’t natural to any of them.
A memory slipped through my mind then, from Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel China Men describing the experience of soldiers in Vietnam: “[When] they were ordered to patrol the jungle they made a lot of noise, clanged equipment, talked loud. The enemy did the same, everybody warning one another off. Once in a while, to keep some hawk officer happy, they fired rounds into the trees.”
I didn’t know if Kingston’s description was authentic or not, but I’d remembered it all these years because it seemed truer to human nature than anything else I’d read about the conflict in Vietnam. I looked at Tung and Phai and thought of my friends back home. I could picture any of them, lonely and petrified, banging their jackknives against their mess kits.
It seemed like we sat there, silently, for hours, but it was probably only five or ten minutes. Tung finally leaned over and ran his finger across the top of the phone. “Did you fix it yet?” he asked Phai.
Phai picked up the phone and held it over his shoulder like a football. “It works,” he smirked. “Now you can throw it all you want.” I watched Tung, wondering how he’d react to teasing.
Tung looked at Phai and managed a little grin. “I’m so sick of this,” he said miserably.
Tra, her sister Hoa, and her sister-in-law Xuan were discussing how many pairs of black pumps Tra would need in Michigan. Tra couldn’t seem to convince them that, given her student lifestyle, she might not need any pumps at all. Like me, she spent a lot of time trying to convince people that, though Americans have a lot more money than Vietnamese, we aren’t necessarily stylish.
Laid out on the floor of her bedroom were several open suitcases, piles of clothes, a fake-fur jacket bought on a visit to Saigon, three plastic bags of medicinal herbs, a new Vietnamese-English dictionary, several pairs of plastic sandals, five packages of dried noodles, and six small lacquer paintings Tra planned to give to friends in the States.
The bustle in the room obscured the more central fact that Tra was leaving, and the occasional laughter did nothing to mask the strain on every face. Minh wandered sullenly in and out of the room or lay across the bed, playing with his Game Boy. Hoa squatted on the floor, silently folding shirts.
The three-month struggle between Tra and Tuyen had finally come to an end. Tra’s plane left for Bangkok at eight the next morning, and everyone knew, without saying so, that she was buying an education at the cost of her marriage. Tra and Tuyen’s marriage was reflective of significant changes that were taking place between men and women in Vietnam’s middle class. In word, at least, women had been considered equals since as far back as the revolution, when female soldiers marched right alongside the men on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. These days, women occupied positions in most sectors of Vietnamese society, but, like American women, they were also expected to take care of the children and the home. And few Vietnamese men had begun to accept the possibility that they might, at the very least, help out at home. The women of Tra’s generation were beginning to rebel.
Tra had never mentioned the word “divorce,” and she planned to return to Vietnam as soon as she completed her degree, but it was impossible to ignore the potential implications of her decision to leave. Tra and Tuyen’s marriage, like a bone forced too far in the wrong direction, seemed destined to snap.
I hated the thought of being here without Tra. Besides the prospect of missing her, I dreaded saying good-bye. I remembered too clearly saying good-bye to her the first time, a year earlier, in New York. We had been at the end of a whirlwind rush through Manhattan, two days that had included the Statue of Liberty, the Metropolitan Museum, and the United Nations. Our last stop had been the New York Stock Exchange, where she and I had spent an hour on the observation deck above the market floor, about fifty minutes too long for me and many hours too short for Tra. Before Tra caught her bus to Philadelphia, I’d allowed a few minutes for us to sit and drink diet Cokes, trying to think of anything left to say. There was nothing to say but goodbye, and neither of us was ready to say it. Finally, we stood up, hugged three times, and pulled away.
I had walked a few feet up the street before I gave in and turned around for one last glimpse. Tra hadn’t moved at all. She laughed when I caught her, gave a little wave, then slowly began to walk in the opposite direction up the street. The two of us kept on like that for the length of the block—walking, turning, laughing, and waving—until Tra became a tiny black spot that disappeared beneath an ocean of gray business suits.
Now I sat there, watching her pack, telling myself I should get up and leave, but not being able to move. Finally, we heard a knock at the bedroom door, and Tra’s elderly aunt poked her face into the room. It was nearly ten-thirty at night. I pulled myself out of my chair and said, “Tra, I’ve got to go.”
Tra looked up from her suitcase, crinkled her nose, and nodded. “I’ll go downstairs with you,” she said.
Tra held my arm as we went down the creaky wooden stairs of the old house, then walked across the courtyard to the front gate. “Check up on my family sometimes, okay?” she said quietly. “Keep teaching the children English. Make sure that Tuyen learns English, too. He’s so lazy. Make sure he learns.”
We heard a shuffling behind us and turned to see that Minh had followed us down the stairs. He stood watching us, unwilling to let his mother out of his sight. Tra ran to him and tried to hold him. Minh pulled away. At eleven, he was torn between a child’s anguish and an adolescent’s refusal to express it. He could only stand and look at us, grinning fiercely. Tra tried again, taking one step closer, but this time Minh slipped away completely, turned his face to the vines creeping up the courtyard wall, and made as if to examine them. Tra stood motionless, both eyes on her son, then turned back toward me and picked up my hand.
“Take care of him. Teach him,” she said. In the glow of the streetlight, I stared at her face and tried to think of how to reassure her. I would invite Minh out on Sunday outings to Lenin Park. In our Tuesday evening class, I would let him play Monopoly as much as he liked. None of that could substitute for his mother, though.
I nodded anyway and squeezed Tra’s hand. “Don’t worry,” I told her. “He’ll be fine. Everyone will be fine.”
Tra smiled, but now the tears were streaming down her face. I pulled open the gate and we walked onto the desolate sidewalk. “Write,” she told me.
“I’ll write,” I said, and I felt a clinching in my throat. Above us, the streetlight buzzed. Quickly, I hugged her, then turned and walked away. Before I reached the corner, I had to stop and look. Tra was still standing there. She laughed and waved.
5. Pilgrims
A FEW WEEKS AFTER TRA LEFT, I pulled my bike up in front of my house and heard Grandmother Nhi calling my name. When I walked over to her tea table, she greeted me with an enormous grin. “You’ve had a visitor,” she told me, breathlessly, as if she couldn’t believe her own good fortune. “Another American!”
I was standing on my balcony late that afternoon, scanning the rush-hour traffic. In my hand was a piece of scratch paper, a note from my friend Carolyn from San Francisco. “Sorry I’m late,” she’d scribbled. “I got sidetracked in Nepal. I’ll meet you here at five.”
“Late” was actually an understatement. I’d expected Carolyn two weeks earlier, but when I’d gone out to meet her at the airport, she’d never shown up. Carolyn was a traveler, and though a lot of Americans love to travel, few would want to travel the way she did. She once hid under the dashboard of a truck in order to avoid rebel fire on a remote island of Indonesia. She trekked alone through the Himalayas. She turned a bottle of aspirin and a box of Band-Aids into a rudimentary clinic for desperate villagers in the hills of northern Thailand. I couldn’t help but wonder what
had “sidetracked” her in Nepal.
Carolyn and I had known each other for years. During the mid-1980s, we had worked together at Mother Jones magazine in San Francisco, but we’d only become friends quite recently, because of Vietnam. Both of us had visited Vietnam in 1990, Carolyn only a few months after me. One day, not long after she returned, we’d gotten together in Berkeley. We sat on a bench on Shattuck Avenue, eating sandwiches and discussing our trips. Carolyn was the first person I’d talked to who completely understood the effect that Vietnam had on me. Like me, she had planned to return ever since.
At exactly five, I spotted a bicycle making a shaky left turn before pulling slowly up in front of my house. A frizzy-haired Vietnamese woman was pedaling. My Western-sized friend was balanced precariously over the back wheel. I watched them disembark from the bike, then I yelled down at them. The two women looked up. Carolyn waved with both arms, then pointed at the beaming woman standing beside her. At the tea stall a few feet away, Grandmother Nhi shielded her eyes from the setting sun to watch. Phai, working on a motorbike out on the sidewalk, paused and looked up.
“This is Linh!” Carolyn yelled up to the balcony. Linh and I looked at each other and waved.
Carolyn’s reason for coming back to Vietnam had a proper name: Linh. Linh had been a clerk in the hotel where Carolyn stayed in Hanoi and, somehow, despite the gaps of language and culture, each had felt she’d found a soulmate. A few months after Carolyn left, Linh had asked Carolyn to be her second child’s godmother. Carolyn had come back to meet her godson.
Of all the photographs of friends and family I’d brought to Vietnam, Carolyn’s was the least successful at conveying the essence of its subject. Photographs could only capture her physical features, the small frame, thick brown hair, and large eyes that made her pretty in a not unusual way. But they failed to convey the spirit that became so obvious when one met her in person. She had an extraordinary ability to develop deep and lasting relationships with the people she met. Through simple facial expressions and pantomime, she could converse for hours with people without sharing a single common word. Perhaps this ability explained her success teaching English to new immigrants from places like Afghanistan, Eritrea, and Vietnam. She had a magnetism, an ability to draw people toward her. Photographs never revealed that.