The House on Dream Street

by Dana Sachs

  I had my bundle of rice in my hands and was pausing at the curb, waiting for a truck to pass, when something, perhaps the glint of light on steel, caused me to glance up. Then I realized that it wasn’t Hanoi’s colors that had changed; it was the light. For the first time in months, the sky spread above me in a solid blanket of blue. Looking up, I saw the sun, an acquaintance I remembered only vaguely from California, rising above the railroad tracks down the street. After the relentless mud of spring, the city was clean, crisp, and dry. Hanoi had become a different city overnight, one I’d have to get to know.

  Summer had arrived.

  Linh was a single woman now. At least that’s what she called herself. She’d always dressed nicely, and her appearance didn’t change in any obvious way. But these days she had a kind of raffishness about her I hadn’t seen before. She went around spouting the slogan of Ho Chi Minh—“Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom”—which she’d learned to use, in this context at least, from me. And she wanted to do the kinds of free, independent things that single women did, like go to the movies. One Saturday afternoon, she left me a note that said, “Dana, today is my holiday, your holiday, too. Tonight we’ll take dinner outside for short time and go to cinema at Ngoc Khanh cinema hall. It will take us forty-five minutes by byke. The very interesting film will begin at 8 P.M. Hope to see you soon.”

  When Linh arrived on her bicycle, she was in no hurry to leave again. “Today our holiday,” she said. “No one waiting for us. Tonight, we go slow, not quick, quick, quick.” We spent ten or so minutes lying on my bed, resting our eyes, then Linh popped back up again, went to the mirror and put on lipstick, and announced that it was time to go.

  We rode to a small co’m bình dân, a “regular rice shop,” not far from my house, where we stood in front of a table covered with prepared food and picked out what we wanted. Linh insisted that we “eat like the pigs,” so we ordered plates of fried tofu simmered with scallions and tomatoes, four pieces of grilled fish, stewed bamboo shoots, a ham omelet, two deep-fried hardboiled eggs, sautéed water spinach, a bowl of vegetable broth, and two large bowls of steamed rice. The entire meal didn’t cost three dollars.

  At Linh’s request, we ate slow, slow, slow, then we sat for a while over tea. Linh had decided that the only way to salvage her marriage would be if Son would agree to find them a house somewhere closer to the center of the city. If they lived in a more convenient location, she wouldn’t have to ride so far to her job every day and she wouldn’t be so exhausted when she got home. She’d have more time to spend with her family. All their problems would be solved. Linh had been dreaming about this idea for years. But recently, it had seemed a true possibility, and then that hope had been dashed. After ten years of service in the Foreign Ministry, Son received a bonus, which was intended for the purchase of a home. But instead, Son came home with a small Sony color TV.

  “That must have been an expensive TV,” I said.

  Linh shook her head. “You don’t understand,” she told me. “I was wrong about the money. The ministry, they tell you they give you this money to buy a house, but when the money comes, it’s not enough. Vietnamese dong worth so little now that the same money used to buy a house now only good for a small TV—not even a big one. So my dream become like glass, broken.”

  “Is that really why you’re so fed up with Son?” I asked.

  Linh shook her head. “When I married my husband,” she said, “I loved him with all my heart. He loved me with all his heart. But then, after some years, he was not faithful anymore. That’s why I become fed up on Son.”

  Linh’s raffishness, I was coming to realize, was mostly superficial, and, with the discussion of her marriage, she fell into a funk. I looked at my watch and saw that it was nearly seven-thirty. I pulled her up, paid the bill, and we rode out to the cinema. Somehow, the memory that we were two single girls going off to the movies cheered her up enough to serenade me with songs along the way. The theater was a fairly new brick building, simply built, with a crowd of mostly teenagers waiting to get in. Linh had a friend who worked in the ticket office, which meant that we got in for free. Screaming, “We are VIP!” in English, Linh pulled me past the paying customers and led me into the cinema.

  We took seats in the back row. As the rest of the audience began to file in, each person made sure to take a long look at me, the foreigner. I was the most interesting thing in the house, apparently. And somehow there was a pervasive sense of dreariness about the whole enterprise, as if no one was there by choice, but because there was nothing else to do in Hanoi.

  But Linh was already staring up toward the screen in anticipation. “The film is an American film,” she told me. “I know that you will enjoy it very much.” She pulled from her purse two bags of sunflower seeds and handed one to me. As the lights went down, the entire theater became alive with the steady crackling of seeds. On the screen, the credits began to roll. The film was called The Tower of the Screaming Virgins, based, supposedly, on a novel by Alexandre Dumas.

  The movie was in English, simultaneously dubbed into Vietnamese by a woman speaking into a microphone from the projection booth behind us. Between the pauses in the Vietnamese translation and over the cracking seeds, I could just make out some English, spoken in American accents. Although the film was set in eighteenth-century France, the haircuts, the particular thrust of the cleavage, and the grainy color made me suspect that it had probably been made in the 1950s. How it ended up in Vietnam I couldn’t begin to guess. The characters didn’t speak to one another so much as exclaim, crying and moaning and saying things like, “The walls have ears!” It was hard to pay attention, not just because it was silly, but because soon after it started, Linh began to fidget. She stretched this way and that, moving her body, taking deep breaths. A character by the name of Blanche Dubois began to cry. Linh lifted her knees up to her chest and buried her face in them. “Are you okay?” I asked.

  Linh nodded. Her shoulders were heaving. Then, suddenly, she jumped up, squeezed past me, and ran out of the theater.

  I raced after her through the darkness. I discovered her at the side of the building, leaning with her head against the wall, gasping for breath.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “It’s no problem,” she said, between great gulps of air.

  “But what is it?” I was trying to figure out if she needed a doctor.

  She couldn’t answer immediately, but she put her hand on my arm to keep me near her. It was several minutes before she could speak. “No problem,” she finally said. “I have this once time before, when I’m sixteen.” Her hands were trembling and she was clearly shaken.

  “Do you have asthma?” I asked. Linh shook her head to let me know she didn’t know what “asthma” was. Slowly, her breathing became more regular. It didn’t seem to be asthma. It was more like a panic attack, but I didn’t know how to say that in Vietnamese. For most Vietnamese, the only ways to cope with depression or anxiety were to make a trip to the pagoda, talk to a fortune-teller, go home to mother, or ignore it.

  After a while, Linh said that she felt well enough to get on our bicycles and ride slowly back home. We unlocked our bikes and started the long ride, but we’d only made it a few hundred feet when she had to stop again. We pulled over near the shore of a small lake and sat down.

  We leaned against a tree and looked up at the night sky. The clouds hung low and I couldn’t see a single star. For a long time we said nothing. Linh’s breathing slowed until I couldn’t hear it anymore and then, a few minutes later, she began to speak. Two years earlier, when she was still working at the Bodega Hotel, she told me, she’d met a man who came from Bulgaria. Every night for a week, he came to the Bodega for dinner. “He was so nice to me,” she said. He told her stories about his homeland. He lived near the ocean, in a house with a slanted roof, not a flat roof like hers in Hanoi. He could lie in bed and hear the ocean waves running up against the shore. He told her that she should come v
isit.

  Linh was quiet for a moment. “I knew him for only one week,” she said, “but that man asked me about my hobbies. Do you know, Son has never asked me about my hobbies in ten years. This man, one week!”

  A mangy dog came and nosed around in a pile of trash, then tried to get into Linh’s purse. She shooed the dog away, then we got back on our bikes. Linh held the handlebar of my bike so that we could ride next to each other through the streets. She never saw the Bulgarian after he left Hanoi, and she’d never spoken of him to anyone. But now she had to ask, “Is it possible to love someone you only know for just one week?” I thought about the question for a long time, but I didn’t know the answer.

  Vietnam celebrated two major holidays at the end of April, the April thirtieth anniversary of the Liberation of Saigon, followed by the May first celebration of International Workers’ Day. To have a two-day holiday was a very big deal for Vietnamese, who only had Sundays off every week.

  On the evening of April 30, I sat in my room writing a long-overdue letter to my mother. I’d put on a cassette that Tra had recorded off an easy-listening radio station in Detroit. The tape wasn’t much, just a bunch of Barry Manilow, Neil Sedaka, and Carpenters interspersed with advertisements for Maytag washing machines and Kentucky Fried Chicken. But I relished it. I could listen to those saccharine tunes, even to the Maytag man, over and over without growing sick of any of it.

  Tonight, though, even Karen Carpenter at full volume couldn’t drown out the sound of Vietnam. Down on Dream Street, it sounded like all of Hanoi was charging by. In the intermittent lulls between the honks of horns and the roar of motors, I could hear the screams of the children playing flip-flop toss on the sidewalk in front of the house. I went out onto the balcony and looked out. Just below, Viet and his friends were standing in the blue dusk, hurling their shoes across the sidewalk, then huddling over them trying to decide whose flip-flop had come closest to the mark. A bike pulled out of the traffic and parked in front of them. Phai grinned at Viet and his friends, then he saw me peering down from my balcony above.

  “Duyen!” he called. “What are you doing?”

  I shrugged. “Writing a letter.”

  Phai shook his head, then locked his bike and disappeared into the house downstairs. I watched the children for a few more minutes, then went back into my room.

  After about an hour, I heard a knock on the door. When I opened it, Phai was standing on the landing holding two glasses of lemonade. The sight of him surprised me. I felt like I’d forgotten what he looked like, how beautiful he was.

  “Today’s a holiday,” he said, grinning. “You’ve got to enjoy it.”

  Vất vả is a word that doesn’t translate well into English. The dictionary defines it as “hard” or “strenuous,” as in “hard work,” but this definition ignores the broader scope of the concept. Among Vietnamese, the word often connotes absolute and unending exhaustion. In this onomatopoetic language, even the sound of vất vả—pronounced “vut vo,” with tones that trudge up, then down, then halfway back up again—comes out of the mouth like laborious breathing. Although my urban friends had plenty of time to hang out in front of the TV watching the latest Chinese soap operas, most Vietnamese were poor and lived harder lives. From sunup until sundown, each day was a chain of duties. Life itself was vất vả. When the rare holidays finally rolled around, the populace flooded the streets to enjoy them.

  It was eight o’clock, and Phai and I were driving Tung’s Honda Dream up Hang Bong Street, joining the stream of vehicles flowing toward Hoan Kiem Lake for a night of cruising. Within a few blocks, the stream had turned into a giant, churning rush of motorbikes racing down the narrow canyon of the road and emptying into the avenues that led around the lake. The momentum alone pulled us along, leading us through humid air scented by engine exhaust, squid grilling over charcoal cookers, and sugar-sweet perfumes. Whole families squeezed onto single motorbikes—Dad in front, Mom in back, and two or three balloon-gripping children sandwiched in between. Other motorbikes carried young men with slicked-back hair and wildly patterned polyester shirts, who forced their big machines to pass all the rest. Guys with dates steered with one hand and rested the other proprietarily on the woman’s stocking-covered knee. The women sat sidesaddle in their short, straight skirts, one leg daintily crossed above the other, as if the back of a motorbike were as stable as a barstool. I sat in the standard, one-leg-to-a-side position behind Phai, trying to figure out what to do with my hands. I should have clasped my arms around his waist, but I couldn’t do it. The gesture seemed too intimate, and so I hung on to the bike’s steel frame, telling myself that we were moving too slowly for any crash to be fatal.

  Inside the arc of all the traffic, white lights sparkled on the trees surrounding the banks of the lake, and the black water reflected these lights as if they were so many stars. Out on a little island in the middle of the lake, a twinkling electric Vietnamese flag seemed to flutter, mimicking the effects of a breeze. These displays of lights weren’t all that unusual. Hanoi made any excuse to light itself up, whether to celebrate a Communist party anniversary, to welcome visiting dignitaries, or to commemorate the birth of Ho Chi Minh.

  Phai pulled up to a vendor selling balloons twisted into the shapes of elephants, dogs, and rabbits. We picked out a pink rabbit, Phai revved the engine, and we sped back up Hang Bong Street. Within a few minutes, we were in Ba Dinh Square, the great civic plaza in front of the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum. The lawn that faced the resting place of Uncle Ho was dotted with families enjoying the holiday.

  Phai slowed down, then came to a stop next to the sidewalk. I pulled myself off the backseat to let him park the bike. Several policemen were standing smoking cigarettes, and they motioned to Phai to come closer. They were curious about the foreign woman he’d carried here on the back of his bike. I wandered away, staring across at the black marble mausoleum, which faced the square like a gigantic gravestone on a cemetery lawn. The words Chủ Tịch Hồ Chí Minh, “President Ho Chi Minh,” had been chiseled into the somber stone.

  I heard someone say my name and turned around to see the policemen leering at me. Phai pulled a pack of 555 cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and handed it to one of the cops, then he quickly walked over to where I was standing. “Come on,” he said.

  We hurried across the street and onto the great lawn. “What was that all about?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” Phai said. He walked more quickly than I did and I had to hurry to keep up. We turned down a cement walkway that led across the lawn. A young couple walked by us holding hands, pausing in their conversation to look at me. On either side of the square, towering panels of electric lights made the grass glow like a football field lit up for a night game.

  “Why did you give them your cigarettes?” I asked. I knew he’d offered cigarettes to keep them from bothering us.

  Phai glanced at me, then looked away. “I was just being friendly,” he said.

  We walked along silently. Perhaps Phai wanted to keep me from seeing how the police managed, in the subtlest of ways, to promote a sense of fear among the people here. I think he imagined me innocent, unable to understand that this place might be quite complicated. Maybe that was why I suddenly blurted, stupidly, “You know, cigarettes are really bad for your health.” I needed to show him that I knew a thing or two about the world.

  “I know,” Phai said.

  “You should quit smoking,” I told him.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “When will you quit?” I pushed.

  “I just quit,” he said. He pulled his remaining cigarettes out of his pocket and offered them to a young man who was just then walking past us. “Here you go, friend,” he said. The man, a young soldier, accepted the cigarettes with surprise, then continued on his way.

  After a while, Phai asked. “Have you visited Uncle Ho yet?”

  I nodded. I’d been to the mausoleum, seen Ho’s body, lying like a wax doll in a silent, guarded room. “Phai
,” I said, “what do you think of Ho Chi Minh?”

  Even among northerners, Ho was not always respected with the quasi-religious fervor the government demanded. My neighbor, Mrs. Thu, was a retired French literature professor. One afternoon when I visited her, I wore a shirt with a sketch of Ho Chi Minh’s face on it that I’d just bought. Just as foreign tourists might wear “Big Apple” T-shirts that New Yorkers wouldn’t be caught dead in, Vietnamese couldn’t understand the fashion impulse behind wearing a shirt with the visage of Ho Chi Minh. Still, I wasn’t prepared for the vitriol with which Mrs. Thu responded to my outfit. She’d hissed, “Why are you wearing that shirt?”

  “I just bought it,” I said.

  “I hate it,” she announced. “Drink your tea.”

  I lifted my cup and took a sip, unsure of what to say next. Was a T-shirt too lowly a frame for the exalted form of Ho Chi Minh? Had I been culturally insensitive to buy it?

  “Are you crazy?” Mrs. Thu scolded.

  “But I bought it in front of the post office!” I cried, hoping that the government connection would bolster my decision.

  Mrs. Thu waved her hand scornfully. “I don’t care,” she said, then added, “That terrible man.”

  “What?” I said. Now I was totally baffled. I’d met plenty of people who detested Ho Chi Minh, but all of them had fought against him in the war. Mrs. Thu was a northerner, even a member of the ruling class. “You hate Ho Chi Minh?” I asked.

  She leaned forward and looked me squarely in the face. “That man. He ruined this country. Look at the poverty here. Our people don’t have enough to eat. What kind of rubbish is communism? Tell me that! I never trusted him from the start, let me tell you. Disaster. They should have known it would come to this. Drink your tea.”

  Before I had a chance to take another swallow, Mrs. Thu was off again. “And let me tell you,” she said. “If you plan to go into business, don’t you ever visit that mausoleum.”