The House on Dream Street

by Dana Sachs

  A moment later, the two of them stood in my doorway. I turned and smiled at Linh. Carolyn had told me about Linh’s tiny one-room house, situated down a muddy lane in a workers’ neighborhood. I knew about her husband, a low-level bureaucrat who spoke hyperformal English. I knew about her ten-year-old son and her new baby. I even had a vivid knowledge of Linh’s experience as a child during the war. Her parents had maintained their jobs in Hanoi, and every Sunday they rode their bicycles twenty kilometers into the countryside to visit their daughters, who had been evacuated from the city. After each brief visit, Linh had to comfort her hysterical younger sister, who could never understand why their parents kept abandoning them.

  Linh held out her hand to me. “I am very happy to make your acquaintance, Dana,” she said. She was rather tall and curvaceous, with honey-colored skin and eyes that were both sympathetic and curious. We shook hands and I ushered them both into my room.

  Linh was gazing at me, smiling. I thought back to the adjectives Carolyn had used to describe her friend—“kooky” had been prominent—and tried to connect them with this politely professional young woman. Hanoi was full of politely professional young women. Why was Carolyn so crazy about this one?

  “I tried to find you,” I told Linh. Not long after I’d arrived in Hanoi, I’d gone searching for her at the Bodega Restaurant and Guesthouse, where Carolyn had first met her. (Although the name “Bodega” sounded like the word for an Hispanic grocery, Bò Dê Gà meant “Beef Goat Chicken,” which the establishment supposedly served.) Though I’d easily managed to find the place, I hadn’t found Linh working there. She’d quit her job at the government-owned Bodega in order to work as an assistant housekeeper at the newly restored, French-financed Metropole Hotel. It would have been hard to find a much greater contrast than that between the Metropole and the Bodega. The Bodega represented everything good and bad about the Socialist hospitality industry. It had a large but apathetic staff, good rooms with bad plumbing, and a restaurant that didn’t carry most of the items on its extensive menu. The Metropole, on the other hand, was the first swanky digs to open in Hanoi since the government introduced đổi mới, its economic renovation policy, in 1986. It had a modern swimming pool, a concierge, and a restaurant that served fine French wines. Well-heeled travelers could expect the same quality of service at the Metropole as they would get at international-standard hotels from Amsterdam to Hong Kong.

  After only a month, however, Linh was already unhappy. Compared to the laid-back style of the Bodega, the job at the Metropole was as grueling as indentured servitude, except that the wages, at two hundred dollars a month, were excellent. The Metropole expected a lot for what it paid. Staff could be punished for arriving even a minute late. Linh’s uniform had to be absolutely spotless. She had to greet every guest with a big smile, even on days when she had a headache. Plus, she told us, “I have problem with Mr. Dodson.”

  “What’s the problem with Mr. Dodson?” asked Carolyn. “Who’s Mr. Dodson?”

  “Mr. Dodson. My housekeeper. I have problem with slippers,” Linh said matter-of-factly. Though Linh’s English rushed out of her mouth with a fluency that impressed me, she made so many assumptions about our knowledge that I had no idea what she was trying to say. After much questioning, Carolyn and I began to understand that Linh’s problem resulted from a Metro-pole policy forbidding staff from taking anything out of the hotel. A few days earlier, Linh had found a pair of bedroom slippers in a wastebasket and brought them to her boss, the chief housekeeper Mr. Dodson, to ask if she could take them home. Mr. Dodson was so enraged by this request that he threatened to fire her.

  Linh was shocked. In Vietnam people routinely, and quite practically, sifted through other people’s discards. Vendors across the city earned their livelihoods selling empty packaging—plastic Nescafé jars, Coca-Cola liter jugs, wine bottles—to customers who would take these items home and fill them with drinking water, dishwashing soap, or homemade rice wine. On days when the garbage trucks were due to come by my house, scavengers would pick through all the neighbors’ trash, collecting twine, pieces of plastic, newspapers, and cardboard, all of which they could later sell. Vietnamese were so thrifty that I once met an American doctoral student who was devoting his dissertation to the topic of waste and recycling in Vietnam, in hopes that we could learn from them. Linh was baffled by Mr. Dodson insistence that a discarded pair of slippers, even in good condition, must be discarded. Even Carolyn’s attempts at an explanation of Western concerns about thievery failed to convince Linh that Mr. Dodson was anything but evil. “I hate Mr. Dodson,” Linh said. Then, suddenly, she sprang up from her chair, walked over to the mirror, and pursed her lips in front of it. “Caro-leen gave me this lipstick. Is it pretty for me?”

  It was a deep red that contrasted nicely with her skin. “It’s pretty,” I told her.

  “How do you say in English—It’s pretty for me?” Linh asked.

  Carolyn and I looked at each other. “It suits you,” I finally said. “You would say that that color suits you.”

  Linh considered the verb for a moment, repeating it as she gazed at her reflection in the mirror. “Suits me. It suits me.” Then she added, “Can I say that this dress suits me?”

  We nodded.

  “And Mr. Dodson? Can I say Mr. Dodson he does not suits me?”

  We nodded again.

  Linh began to walk around the room, performing a little dance for us. “This color suits me. This dress suits me. Carolyn and Dana suits me. Mr. Dodson does not suits me,” she announced.

  Linh ended her parade back at the mirror and did a little fashion-model flick of her head. “I hate Mr. Dodson,” she pouted, staring at herself. “He does not suits me.”

  After Linh went home, Carolyn and I went out to get something to eat. The sky had turned purple, and at the electric appliance stalls by the railroad tracks, the lights of the globe-shaped karaoke lamps were twinkling like colored stars. Inside the open door of one house, a woman was urging a little boy to read a lesson from his school primer. A few doors down, a tiny old woman chewed on a toothpick and gazed at us from the deep recesses of an armchair. In front of us, a bread-seller walked along the street balancing a basket full of baguettes on her head. “Bánh mì nông, ời! Bánh mì nông, ời!”—Hey! Hot bread! Hot bread! It was one of the last things I heard before I fell asleep at night and one of the first things I heard as I woke every morning. The fragrance of the warm loaves drifted over us.

  Despite the long day that Carolyn had had—flying in from Bangkok and getting into the city from the airport—I could not even offer to cook her dinner. I had the materials to do so, but not the capability. Huong had given me an electric hot plate and a refrigerator. Most Vietnamese would have considered these appliances luxuries, but for an American who learned to cook on a four-burner Magic Chef, the hot-plate experience felt like camping. I had to figure out a whole new method of preparing food. Most Vietnamese cooked on the kitchen floor. Squatting down over wooden cutting boards, they would chop their vegetables and clean their fish, then prepare everything on little charcoal cookers about the size of a single burner. Even Huong, who had a full-size stove, did most of her preparations squatting in her kitchen, as I had found, to the detriment of my leg muscles, when we made our hamburger dinner. She could sit like that for hours, while I couldn’t last more than a few minutes in that position. Within a few weeks of receiving my new cooker, I was limiting my hot plate use to boiling drinking water and heating up packets of instant noodles. Considering that I could get a very satisfying meal for less than fifty cents, I mostly ate out.

  We ended up on the tiny, claustrophobic alley called Cam Chi Street. Lined with bare-bones rice and noodle shops, Cam Chi had the chaotic feel of a Cubist painting. Handmade signs hung off balance, occasionally banging the heads of people moving down the narrow, block-long road. Awnings jutted out from the buildings, their swooping fabric cutting patches out of the rice-colored sky. Inside gaping doorways, woo
den tables sat at odd angles on green-and-yellow checkerboard linoleum floors, and stacks of wooden stools leaned like rickety pillars against mottled hospital-green walls. Over everything floated steam and smoke, the steam lifting off the enormous vats of boiling broth and the smoke rising from the glowing coals of charcoal cookers.

  Cam Chi’s stalls were much like food stalls anywhere in Vietnam. One central table covered with food served as each establishment’s low-tech advertisement for what it served—whether it was phở, rice porridge, rice pancakes, sticky rice, fried noodles, stewed chicken, or fried eel. At the biggest stalls, this table sat in the open space between the street and the dining room, usually the living room of the proprietor’s own house, which was turned into a restaurant during the twelve to eighteen hours that the shop was open for business every day. The bigger food stalls could have as many as three or four people working in them at the busiest time: one or two to take orders and cook the food, another to prep the ingredients and bring the customers their meals, one to clear and wash the dishes, and another to park and watch the customers’ motorbikes and bicycles. The smaller stalls on Cam Chi set up tables on the sidewalk itself. Some didn’t even have private tables. Customers merely sat down on simple wooden benches lining three sides of the proprietor’s table. The proprietor, sitting on the fourth side of the table, was a one-person restaurant staff, able to take customers’ orders, dish up their food, handle money, and still have time left over to do the dishes.

  This was the street where Tra had taught me to order “noodle soup without the pilot,” and Carolyn and I had barely made it around the corner when a young man from my favorite noodle shop saw me and yelled, “Phở không ngưồ’i lái!” He had such a grin of expectation on his face that I couldn’t disappoint him. I ordered the usual.

  We chose a table in the corner and sat down. Three well-dressed young men sitting nearby shifted their bodies around and spent the rest of their meal watching us.

  Carolyn finally had a chance to tell me why she’d arrived so late in Vietnam. Before coming to Vietnam, she’d stopped to visit her “Tibetan parents,” an elderly couple she’d met years before in Nepal. After she had spent ten days with them in their remote mountain village, they’d convinced her to stay another week. “Sorry I didn’t call you,” she said. “The nearest international phone was a day’s hike, then a twelve-hour bus ride away.”

  Our soup arrived. “Phở không ngưồ’i lái,” said the grinning waiter, with a wink in my direction. Carolyn looked at me, waiting for me to translate, but I didn’t have the energy to explain. Instead, I concentrated on making sure we followed the appropriate rituals for eating noodle soup. I dug my hand into the canister of chopsticks on the table searching for equal-sized chopsticks for each of us. “It’s better to have a mismatched husband and wife than a mismatched pair of chopsticks,” I explained to Carolyn, repeating an axiom I’d picked up from Tra. I wiped off all four chopsticks with paper napkins. On a plate in the middle of our table was a mound of fresh herbs, crisp white bean sprouts, sliced chilis, and quartered lemons. I squeezed the juice of a couple of pieces of lemon into my broth, plucked the leaves off a stalk of basil, and dropped them in. I took my chopsticks and my wide, flat-bottomed spoon, and stirred the hot soup. The steam settled like a warm dew on my face.

  I told Carolyn about Tung and Huong, about Tra, and about the slow progress of my Vietnamese. After nearly two months in Hanoi, I was finally beginning to feel settled, I told her. When it came to negotiating my way through the basic chores of daily life, I had become quite competent. I could even carry on rudimentary conversations with people who didn’t speak any English. But in some ways, the chasm between myself and these Vietnamese was still as deep as ever. I was only communicating in outline form, really. I could mention a topic—say, “age,” “homeland,” “plans for the future”—but I could never actually discuss it.

  Finally, someone was here to whom I could actually express myself. “I’m so happy you’re here,” I told her.

  Carolyn smiled, but she seemed dazed, not simply by the experience of moving in the course of two days from the high Himalayas to the noodle stalls of Vietnam, but by the simple fact of being in Hanoi at all. She’d spent two years focused on finding a way back to Vietnam. Now, she seemed overwhelmed by the realization that she’d finally made it.

  Carolyn leaned back against the chipped and faded green wall. “I love the way it smells here,” she said, closing her eyes and inhaling deeply. She seemed to be trying to drag all of Vietnam into her lungs, and I felt as though I were watching someone tripping. I breathed a sample of the air myself. It wasn’t exotic, more like the muddled ingredients of a stew: burning coal, simmering broth, and the smoke of our neighbors’ cigarettes. I had become so accustomed to these smells, to the cries of the street vendors, to the rich taste of cheap soup, that I no longer really noticed such things. Vietnam had already swallowed me whole, and I sat inside it now like a bug in the belly of a dragon.

  Carolyn still lived somewhere beyond the thick skin of this place. I wanted reminders of America, reminders that beyond Vietnam a place existed were I could feel at home. I broke in awkwardly. “Carolyn, what’s going on in San Francisco?” I asked. “What’s happening in the election campaigns? How’s Deborah? Who was nominated for the Academy Awards? Has anybody famous died lately?” I didn’t want to miss something important.

  We ordered tea, and Carolyn tried for ten or fifteen minutes to satisfy my curiosity. She told me about the presidential election primary season, about her plans for next summer’s garden, about the new Vietnamese restaurant near my house. I took in the words as if they were drops of water falling onto my parched tongue. And then, in midsentence, she stopped. She said nothing for a long time, rubbing her eyes with her fingertips. “I’m sorry,” she finally said, looking up at me, obviously exhausted. “I can’t do this. I’m only in Asia for five weeks. My time here is so precious. I can’t think about America now.”

  Both of us were silent, embarrassed. I stretched my fingers around my cup of tea and blew into it until my face grew hot from the steam and frustration. For a long time, I focused my attention on the little disk of liquid in my cup, and on the image of myself reflected there. That other world was an ocean away. One friend had crossed that ocean, but this didn’t mean I’d gone home.

  When I came back to the house one afternoon a few days after Carolyn arrived, a brown paper bag was sitting on the living room coffee table. It was a large bag, rumpled and bulky, the kind one would use to carry home a load of groceries in the States. The top of it curled softly to one side, as if it had been rolled tightly closed, then opened, then closed again.

  On the couch sat Tung with his brother-in-law, Nga’s husband Tan. Mr. Huey’s translator, Tuan, sat in the armchair. Phai, smoking a cigarette, perched on a stool near the door. All four of them glanced up at me, then their eyes shifted back to the bag, then back to me.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Phai answered. “The money for Mr. Huey’s phone bill,” he said, explaining that Mr. Huey and Tung, under whose name the phone was registered, would be taking the money to the central telephone office this afternoon. “Take a look,” he urged.

  I walked over and unrolled the top of the bag. It was stuffed with rubber-band wrapped bundles of 5,000-dong bills, each of which probably contained one hundred individual notes. Five-thousand dong notes, which were worth about 50 cents, were at that time the largest denomination available in Vietnam. They were dark blue and usually crisp, compared to the faded brown 1,000s and the pale red 500s and 200s, which became so worn in circulation that they were as soft and rumpled as Kleenex. In this country, you were lucky to have a little blue in your pocket. Five thousand dong could buy ten loaves of bread, a major bike repair, a pair of shorts and a shirt for a child, several days’ worth of rice.

  “How much is it altogether?” I asked.

  The men looked at the bag, then looked away. It was as if a nude w
oman were lying on the table and they were trying not to stare at her. “It’s worth about five thousand U.S. dollars,” Tung told me. Though it had stabilized in recent years, Vietnam’s currency had had such a history of fluctuation that, when it came to big sums, businesspeople like Tung often thought in terms of dollars.

  “That’s about ten thousand five-thousand dong notes,” said Phai, who thought in terms of dong.

  Even though Vietnam was one of the most expensive places to make international calls in the world, it was hard to believe that one person could rack up $5,000 worth of calls in a month. The figure was astonishing, particularly in a country where the average person only earned about $130 a year. We couldn’t talk about $5,000 in terms of Vietnam, and so we ended up discussing what $5,000 could buy in the States. A third of a car, I told them. No, not a house. Almost a year of rent, depending on where you lived. College tuition at a state school. A fourth of a year at Harvard. Three round-trip tickets between San Francisco and Hanoi. Five thousand dollars was a lot of money, even to Americans, but if that was all you earned in a year, you’d be eligible for food stamps.

  Tung, Tan, and the translator nodded as I spoke, as if what I was saying confirmed their understanding of economics in the States. But Phai looked amazed. He was barely managing to earn a living. Competition among motorbike mechanics had become fierce. He spent most days sitting in our living room, thumbing through the Vietnamese-English dictionary or smoking cigarettes with Tung. And now I had just transformed myself into a Rockefeller before his eyes.