by Dana Sachs
It wasn’t until later that morning that I remembered what Phai had said. He’d said it quietly, not knowing if I was asleep or not, as if he only wanted to try the words on his tongue. Perhaps he wanted to give me an out. That might have explained my own behavior, had I been the one to whisper words of love to someone sleeping, but Phai’s mind didn’t work like mine. Whether he was fixing a broken faucet for Tung or spending his last few thousand dong to buy an ice cream for Viet, Phai’s generosity flowed freely. Love would be a gift from him, like a warm towel draped across my back. He’d whispered it because he felt it. And, for that moment, at least, he needed nothing back.
From my previous romantic relationships, I’d come to believe that love was a complicated experience that filled you with passion one day, aversion the next, and, on the third day, tortured you with some mind-numbing mixture of the two—so many emotions piled on top of one another that love itself ended up a tiny pearl buried beneath a heap of trash. With Phai, it never seemed to include the trash. He loved so completely, and without hesitation.
Still, I wanted to avoid the subject. If I could have controlled our relationship, I might have decided that we’d only say such things while the other person was absent or sleeping. Words seemed to complicate things. Loving Phai was easy, but our future together wasn’t.
I wasn’t the only American to fall in love with a Vietnamese. During the time that I lived in Hanoi, I came to know a number of Americans, most of them my age, most of them scholars or staff members of international aid organizations. Our small circle of expatriates relied on one another for everything from emotional support to loans of money to carrying letters and packages for one another when we returned to the States. Other groups of foreigners were trying to create tiny Western enclaves for themselves in Hanoi, and the city did have its cocktail parties at the Australian embassy and a pizza parlor or two. But for more than financial reasons, my friends were not among this set. Jack spent his free time translating an ancient Chinese text into Vietnamese. Olivia learned to play an obscure type of bamboo flute. Norma raced off to every village festival that took place within a hundred miles of the city. We didn’t focus our intellectual or personal passions on one another, but on Vietnam. Not surprisingly, few of us became involved with each other romantically and almost all of us fell for Vietnamese.
Most of the men in that circle have since married Vietnamese women. Only a couple of the women have married Vietnamese men. Somehow, the cultural gap between our nations has been easier to span for one gender combination than the other, and the traditional interest of Western men in Asian women doesn’t fully account for it. My male American friends did not travel the countryside in search of fresh-faced farm girls to cook, clean, and raise babies for them in Kansas. Jack married Nga, who became such an asset to Save the Children in Vietnam that the organization sent her on a year-long study course in Australia. Steve married Lan, who raced so quickly up the corporate ladder at Cathay Pacific in Hanoi that, when the couple decided to move to the United States, the airline offered to transfer her to its prestigious Los Angeles office. David married Thuy, who, while completing a fully funded graduate program at Harvard, had to rush back to Vietnam to translate for groups of visiting VIPs who refused to hire anyone else.
The American women I knew didn’t end up with partners like these, probably because of two factors: our nationality and our gender. Two specific attributes—being American and being male—were the qualities most likely to enhance one’s power in one of these cross-cultural relationships. If a member of a couple was both American and male, there wasn’t much of a problem. Jack, Steve, and David could marry phenomenally successful Vietnamese women and not feel threatened by the success of their mates. All three of them could both believe in equality for women and, at the same time, appreciate having a wife who felt she had a duty to cook dinner. Such relationships didn’t disrupt the established dynamics of power.
When American women took up with Vietnamese men, however, power got split down the middle, and not always with positive results. Though Vietnamese men may have appreciated our independence, most of them were raised to expect dinner on the table when they came home at night. If I cooked, I’d expect the guy to do the dishes. In more subtle ways as well, such as my desire to have male friends or his need for a wife willing to be subservient to his mother, my nationality would invariably clash with his gender. We American women gravitated toward Vietnamese partners less likely to make oppressive demands on us: eccentric artists, easygoing workers, curious but unambitious intellectuals who sat around all day drinking rice wine and talking about books.
It was hard to imagine, though, bringing a guy like that back to the States. Nga, Lan, or Thuy could make it in any country in the world, but Phai couldn’t. As long as we remained in his own country, where he functioned well, power remained fairly balanced between us. Once we got to the States, however, the scales would tip dangerously in my direction. After a blissful honeymoon spent standing atop skyscrapers, riding escalators, and sampling Big Macs, we’d settle into normal life. Phai would look for a job fixing motorbikes and, because he didn’t speak English, no one would hire him. Unable to work, he’d stay home alone, squatting in front of the television, trying to make out the meaning of every episode of Days of Our Lives. At some point, my mother would fly out to meet her new son-in-law, and her brows would bunch with worry because she couldn’t even speak to him.
No, I couldn’t imagine that kind of future with Phai.
Phai lived with his parents and younger sister and brother in a neighborhood at the edge of the Red River. He had described for me the large room where the family slept, his father’s garden, and the shed where his mother was raising a pig. But these descriptions weren’t enough for me. I kept asking him so many questions that, finally, one afternoon, he invited me for a visit.
On our way out the door of my house, I heard the sound of running water in the kitchen. For reasons I could never understand, Huong regularly left water running in the sink. I regularly turned it off. Now, however, when I walked into the kitchen, I nearly tripped over Huong herself. She was squatting on the floor, ardently scrubbing a black cloud of mildew that hovered like a thunderstorm above the tiles. Her posture suggested that she was involved in some form of meditation.
Phai leaned through the door behind me. “Where’s Tung?” he asked. Neither of us had seen Tung for days. The two Chinese women living on the fourth floor had left a few days earlier, and I assumed that Tung had been busy searching for someone to rent his two now-empty rooms.
Huong’s hand moved in slow circles across the floor. She mumbled something about a business trip to Saigon, but didn’t look up. Her head was bent so that I couldn’t see her face at all, and, like a robot, she continued scrubbing. She had never been an ardent housecleaner, but now she was acting like nothing in the world interested her so much as the sparkle on her kitchen floor. I knew that she was lying. Tung didn’t have any business. Had he gone off in search of Mr. Huey? The idea seemed ridiculous, expensive, even dangerous. If it was true, then of course Huong would be upset. If it wasn’t true, where was he? I couldn’t ask Huong anything. I was still keeping my promise to her, that I wouldn’t tell the truth about Mr. Huey’s departure to anyone, including Phai.
“Can we borrow the Dream for a while?” Phai asked.
Huong nodded, still not looking up. Phai took my hand and pulled me away from Huong.
Phai’s neighborhood, Nghia Dung, not only sat right next to the Red River, but was actually situated somewhat below it, protected from the water by the strength of Hanoi’s ancient dikes. In recent years, Hanoi’s building boom had begun to transform areas like Nghia Dung, converting land traditionally devoted to small houses and flower cultivation into real estate for private mansions and luxury hotels. Much of the construction had taken place without government approval, or with the help of corrupt officials willing to look the other way. Development had grown to such proportions that scien
tists and engineers now warned of a potentially disastrous strain on the dikes. Although Phai’s neighborhood had yet to see much physical change, the threat was obvious: on one side, developers sat anxious to get their hands on this valuable swath of land; on the other, the river strained against the beleaguered dikes, a trapped monster, biding its time.
Phai’s house lay between two lanes in a small line of long, narrow concrete houses that paralleled the dike. As soon as we arrived on the motorbike, the requisite group of curious children immediately crowded around to look at the foreigner. Phai parked the motorbike, then grabbed one little boy by the shoulders and drew him closer. “This I cousin,” he said in English.
Phai had been studying my language on his own for several months already, mostly by the extraordinarily inefficient method of paging through the Vietnamese-English dictionary, reading the words. He rarely tried out his new skills on me, however. Communication between us was difficult enough, and so we relied on Vietnamese, our strongest common tongue. But I smiled at him encouragingly and looked at the boy, whose face was buried in Phai’s leg. “Chào cháu.” Hello, Nephew, I said.
The little boy’s face burrowed deeper. Phai laughed, then forcibly turned him around and nudged him until he said hello. All the other kids screamed with laughter. They found it unbelievable that they could communicate with a foreigner.
An elderly face peeked out from a doorway and looked at us. It was a soft, gentle-looking face, but it disappeared quickly. Phai turned and walked into the house, motioning for me to follow. The old woman hurried down the hallway in front of us. Just inside the doorway, the opening to a small, dark pen revealed black mud, hay, and a large pink pig.
I leaned across the railing of the pen and looked at the pig. “He’s kind of sweet,” Phai said. “I’ll be sad when my mother sells him.”
“Was that your mother?” I asked, feeling remiss at not saying hello to her.
Phai nodded and gave my hand a squeeze. Then he led me farther down the corridor. We weren’t inside or outside, exactly. The narrow hallway opened into a roofless, plant-filled space. Traditionally, Vietnamese homes had two courtyards. The “dry” courtyard was usually full of plants and trees, a space in which a family might sit on pleasant evenings to enjoy the fresh air. The “wet” courtyard, fitted either with running water or a storage tank, served as a domestic work area, where the women rinsed vegetables, washed dishes, and scrubbed clothes. My house on Dream Street, being more of a Western-style home, had no courtyard at all. Phai’s house used one space for both purposes. In one corner, a water spigot stuck out from the wall above a drain. A plastic bowl of green beans and another of lettuce sat on the concrete floor, next to a pile of wet clothes.
I followed Phai into a spacious room that looked out over the courtyard. The room had a concrete floor and plaster walls painted in the pale turquoise common in Vietnamese homes. Decorating one wall was a monthly calendar with a picture of an Asian man kicking a soccer ball. The other walls were bare. We sat down at a table in a corner. In the other three corners were positioned broad wooden platform beds, their thin bedding rolled into cylinders and placed against the wall. Phai’s mother and younger sister slept in one bed, his father and younger brother slept in another. Phai had a third bed to himself, which was separated a bit from the others, at the far end of the room. On Phai’s bed sat a wooden guitar and the only piece of technology I’d seen since we left Tung and Huong’s Dream out in the lane: a portable radio that might have been manufactured in the 1970s.
“I’m planning to build a private room for myself,” Phai said, pointing out the window and explaining that he would wall in a small section of the courtyard and put a bed in it.
Phai’s mother reappeared with a thermos of hot water. Phai had told me she did a Jane Fonda—inspired aerobics routine every day, but it was hard to imagine. She was a tiny, fragile-looking woman and wore the loose-fitting black trousers and thin cotton blouse favored by most matrons in Northern Vietnam. I was struck, all over again, by the strangeness of my situation here. Phai’s mother would remember all of the war, the air raids, the bombs dropping on the city, her fear of Americans. How would she feel, right now, to have an American in her living room? How would she feel—did she know?—about an American sleeping with her son? If she felt any concern, she didn’t show it, but then again, she didn’t show any other emotion either. She moved about the room without even looking at me.
“Mother, this is my American friend, Duyen—Dana,” Phai told her. “She lives at Tung’s house.”
I started to say hello, but Phai had barely completed his introduction before his mother, in a sudden burst of nods and smiles, disappeared again out the door. That was the last I saw of her.
I didn’t have time to react. A moment later, we heard a shout from the other side of the courtyard and a white-haired man in a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers appeared in the doorway. He was small, thin, and probably close to sixty, but his body moved like that of a very young man. In his face, I saw Phai’s eyes.
“Bonjour! Bonjour!” he said, rushing over and taking my hand in both of his. “Je suis Papa Phai.”
“I father,” Phai tried to translate the French into English. His father threw himself into a chair.
In Hanoi, traditionally, people who perform the same craft or trade settle in the same neighborhood. Phai’s neighborhood was a community of bronze workers, many of whom still practiced their craft, either by making Buddhas and other ornaments for religious shrines or by making smaller objects to sell to the growing tourist market. I’d once gone with Phai to a pagoda where we’d seen a bronze bell bigger than a small room that had been made by his grandfather. Many of Phai’s relatives still practiced the ancestral trade. Phai’s father, however, had given it up in favor of a career in sports fitness. He taught swimming to members of the army.
I tried to say a few words in Vietnamese, but Phai’s father insisted on speaking in French and Phai insisted on speaking in English, neither of which I could understand. After a few seconds, this form of discourse came to a halt and we sat in silence. Phai’s father leaned back in his chair, grinning at me. Phai poured tea.
“You have a nice house,” I finally said in Vietnamese.
“You speak our language!” exclaimed Phai’s father in Vietnamese, as if I hadn’t just been talking. “You like our house?”
I nodded again. Phai’s father looked at his son. “Your American friend likes our house,” he said emphatically. “Is it nicer than the houses in America?” he asked.
I considered the question for a moment, then said, “It’s nice how you have all this outdoor space. We don’t have that in America.”
Phai handed his father a cup of tea. The older man said to his son, “She likes our houses here better than in America.”
We lapsed again into silence. Then, suddenly, the questions began. Phai’s father spoke quickly and, because I couldn’t easily understand him, I turned to Phai for help. In the months that we’d known each other, he’d become a competent translator for me, converting complicated Vietnamese into words and phrases I could easily understand. Now, however, he insisted on using his English vocabulary of about twenty words, only three or four of which he could pronounce accurately.
Phai’s father shot out a question about my stay in Vietnam. I wasn’t sure if he wanted to know how long I had been here or how long I planned to stay.
When I looked over at Phai for help, his eyes grew wide and he pursed his lips in concentration. “Vietnam many days,” he finally said, then cocked his head in order to let me know these three words constituted a question. Phai’s father acknowledged his son’s facility in English by clucking admiringly. Phai, who seemed to believe his English actually made sense, waited patiently for me to respond.
I took a sip of tea, trying to figure out what to do. I knew I would embarrass Phai by insisting he speak to me in Vietnamese. But I was annoyed that he was using me to show off his English. I turned to the older man
and said, “I’ve been here five months.”
Phai’s father continued to stare at me expectantly, but when I didn’t say anything more, he looked over at Phai and mumbled, “She’s still learning, isn’t she?” Phai nodded like a patient teacher.
Phai’s father leaned closer toward me. “You stay in Vietnam a long time,” he said, in language so slow and simple that I could understand every word. “When you take a Vietnamese husband, you’ll learn to speak just like one of us.”
I smiled, unable to answer, unable to look at Phai. I took a sip of tea and glanced out the window into the courtyard, at the space where Phai and his future bride would enjoy the luxury of a private room.
Phai didn’t stay over that night, but I still couldn’t find a chance to talk to Huong. Her mother had now apparently moved in. Every time I came home, she was sitting in the living room, staring at the TV, or standing out on the front steps, shouting for Viet. It wasn’t as if Huong wasn’t taking care of herself and her son quite adequately. She hadn’t fallen apart. But she seemed distracted. Something was definitely wrong; Huong, who almost never left the house was, these days, hardly ever home.
For a few days, I lurked around, trying to find an opportunity to talk to her, even to see her. Then, late one night, I heard the familiar rattle at my door. “What’s wrong?” I asked, as soon as I’d let her in.
Huong smiled grimly. She walked over to one of the armchairs and sat down. As usual, my room was a mess. The remains of several oranges created a little mountain in the middle of the coffee table, and books and papers lay in heaps all around it. One armchair was completely covered with clothes. My bed was a mass of tousled sheets. “I’ll come clean up this place in the morning,” Huong told me.