by Dana Sachs
“Don’t worry about it,” I told her. “What’s going on?”
Huong looked at me. “Don’t tell anyone, even Phai. Okay?”
I nodded impatiently. “I haven’t told Phai anything.”
Huong sighed and leaned back, letting her head fall against the chair. She stared up at the ceiling and said, very quietly, “Tung’s in jail.”
10. Dreams, and Waking Up
HUONG, HER SISTER NGA, AND I were sitting in the downstairs living room/dress shop, arguing with a tall, skinny French-man. He was insisting that $325 a month rent would put an unhealthy strain on the small salary he earned teaching French at the Foreign Language College. Huong and Nga turned to each other and conversed quietly in Vietnamese, then Huong sat for a moment, doing silent arithmetic in her head, before turning back to me. “Tell him I’ll give him breakfast every morning, whatever he wants.” Then, she added, “And laundry. Tell him I’ll throw in laundry for free.”
Huong’s face was set. Her eyebrows bunched over her eyes in an expression that suggested firm determination. To look at her at that moment, one might have guessed that she was an experienced businesswoman, the type of high-heeled Hanoi lady who zipped from meeting to meeting on a pink Honda. Of course, she wasn’t dressed like a businesswoman. She was wearing the same old flat rubber sandals she always wore, and her soft, pajama-like shirt and pants. But Huong had a look on her face that even the Frenchman could recognize as shrewd. She’d picked her price and she wasn’t budging.
It was my job to be translator, but, unlike Linh’s husband Son, I wasn’t a foreign ministry diplomat trained to be objective. I turned to the Frenchman and did my best to make Huong’s offer of breakfast and laundry sound inviting. “It’s a good price,” I told him, not mentioning the fact that I only paid $220 a month myself. “And Huong’s an excellent cook.”
“Ffffft,” said the Frenchman, half closing his eyes and letting his fingers flutter through the air dismissively. He was about my age, with close-cropped dark brown hair and an air of stubbornness that made me curious to see which of them would give in first. “As if I cannot buy my own breakfast on the street every morning for two thousand dong,” he said, looking at me and rolling his eyes.
In the few minutes since Huong had dragged me down the stairs to act as her translator, the Frenchman and I had conversed just enough for me to establish that his name was Hugo, he came from Bordeaux, and that, on several occasions, he’d visited the States. Now, after that brief conversation and, more importantly, because of the implicit solidarity of Westerners, Hugo was treating me as his ally. He regarded Huong and Nga skeptically, and he spoke to me as if the two of us were in this thing together.
Huong had seen enough old French movies to know what “Ffffft” meant. She tried another tactic. “Tell him I’m an excellent cook,” she urged.
I mumbled, “I did already,” then I turned to Hugo. “It’s a good deal for you,” I told him. “I don’t get breakfast, and I have to do my own laundry.”
Hugo shrugged and looked around the room uncertainly. I could easily remember the morning Tra and I first trudged up the stairs to that multicolored, overfurnished room I now called home. I’d once wondered if that uneven staircase would lead me to break my neck, and now I raced up and down it ten times a day without a thought. I’d once looked at Tung with the same suspicion with which Hugo now gazed at Huong. In a country where the average citizen made less in a year than he was being asked to pay in one month’s rent, the Frenchman probably thought that she was trying to grab every dollar he had. In addition, Hugo, like me, came from a country that had a rocky history with Vietnam. Maybe he was wondering if the high rent demonstrated how much the Vietnamese still hated the French.
Hugo sat back and looked around the room. A recent shipment from Hong Kong made it appear even more like a dress shop and less like a living room than ever. “These two sisters own the place?” he asked.
I shook my head. “It’s just Huong and her husband, who’s away on a business trip to Saigon.” I said. “He lived in Germany for a long time.” Hugo’s eyes opened wide, and I could see that the European connection impressed him.
“So, is he very Westernized?” Hugo asked.
I nodded. “Very,” I told him. I went on to describe Tung as a Vietnamese in blue jeans and loafers, a fan of Metallica, drinker of Heineken. I could see Hugo begin to relax. Tung became comprehensible, which was a very attractive quality to foreigners just starting out in a city as incomprehensible as Hanoi. At the mention of Metallica, Hugo began to laugh, but the memory of Tung standing in front of his stereo, tapping his feet and cranking up the heavy metal, just made me sad. I wasn’t just trying to paint a portrait of Tung. I was trying to conjure him.
Huong had told me that on the previous Tuesday afternoon, two policemen had arrived at our house. They weren’t the regular guys who came by periodically and sat in our living room drinking tea with Tung and questioning him about the foreigners who rented his rooms. Within a few minutes of their arrival, they had already disposed of the requisite small talk and had begun to interrogate Tung about the Chinese women who’d been staying on the fourth floor. Tung said that he didn’t know much about the women, only that they’d been friends of Mr. Huey and that they’d rented his room for a month before leaving Vietnam several days earlier. What Tung didn’t know, and what Huong had only been able to figure out piece by piece in the days that followed, was that the Chinese women had been traveling under fake passports. When they tried to leave the country, their passports had been confiscated and the women had been arrested. Because the women had been living at Tung’s house, the police turned to Tung.
After a half hour or so, the policemen stood up and invited Tung to join them at their office for further questioning. In the four days since then, Huong had neither seen nor heard from her husband. All she knew was that the police could hold him as long as they liked.
Huong’s face had grown thinner over the course of the last few weeks, and it seemed to be set in a permanent expression of worry. But her magnificent self-containment, that quality that made her seem lazy and indifferent to everything around her, had now evolved into an impulse toward self-preservation. Everything about her suggested competence and determination, and it gave a hint of the kind of internal strength people like Huong must have mustered in order to endure all those years of war. As the Vietnamese themselves liked to point out, they weren’t victims, but survivors.
“Duyen,” she nudged me, “will he take the room?”
I’d done everything I could to market the room as fabulous. I looked at Hugo. “What do you think?” I asked.
Hugo sighed and shrugged, as if defeated. But after a moment he looked over at Huong and smirked. “I like croissants from the French café down the road. And my coffee must be very, very hot,” he said.
Huong must have understood that the news was good. She was already smiling as she waited for my translation.
Phai only asked me once where Tung had gone, and when I told him the Saigon story, he didn’t question it. Phai’s own life was in such a state of flux that he was in no position to notice inconsistencies in anyone else’s. He’d found a new job on the other side of town, but he left it after only a few weeks because business had been just as bad as it was at his old job. All over the city were signs that Vietnam’s economy had taken off. Modern luxury hotels were filling rooms that cost two hundred dollars a night. Importers did a brisk business in Rémy Martin, Heinz ketchup, and Snickers. A sports boutique around the corner from my house sold tennis racquets and exercise machines, products that could only attract consumers with significant disposable income. International business magazines forecast that Vietnam was fast becoming the next Asian dragon. And still, on a busy day as a mechanic, Phai could only hope to earn 10,000 dong, or roughly a dollar. That was barely enough for a bowl of beef noodle soup, much less a meal in one of the city’s new restaurants. As the economy boomed, Vietnam’s proletariat could only wa
tch in wonder, poor cousins invited to a debutante ball, but not allowed to dance.
Phai wanted to dance. Unlike the farmers out in the fields, who only saw urban luxuries on their communes’ TVs, Phai stood so close to all this glitter that he could feel the warmth of its glow. Since he’d become friends with Tung and, of course, with me, the wealth of the world had come to seem like a possibility to him. Even if fixing motorbikes had earned him a decent wage, which it didn’t, he was sick of dirty hands, torn clothes, and low prestige.
As Phai struggled to change, he and I struggled with the differences between us. The economic gap between the two of us was so enormous that money issues were both extremely awkward and very simple. We had ridiculous races to see who’d be quicker to pay for a two-dollar dinner, although that expense, which set him back a week, wouldn’t amount to the loose change I could find wadded up in a pocket. Still, I usually ended up letting him pay. To assert that I was rich and he was poor, especially in our neighborhood noodle shop, would only humiliate him. And so I let Phai make a show of reaching into the pocket of his pale yellow shirt and pulling out his small stash of bills.
When we were alone, we were more honest and practical. Phai never asked me for anything, but when I offered to help him embark on a new career, he accepted gratefully. That I had money and Phai didn’t seemed like an obvious fact of life between us, intrinsically related to my being born in America and his being born in Vietnam. Late at night, we would sit talking in my room, visualizing all the possibilities for his future. If my financial capabilities seemed miraculous to him, they seemed no less so to me. With a simple investment of a few hundred dollars, I could help him change his life.
In his free time, Phai had been making bronze ornaments and Buddhas at the family kiln across the street from his house. Though he seemed to enjoy it, he considered the craft a sideline, nothing that could sustain him. For the long term, he thought he should learn English and computer skills. Although he’d learned some English words, he didn’t know any grammar. As for computers, Phai had never used one, but his mechanical skills seemed to promise that he’d pick it up quite quickly. I had a different idea in mind. I imagined him opening a bike rental business to cater to the increasing numbers of foreign tourists visiting Hanoi. To both of us, it seemed reasonable that he embark on all three ventures at the same time. The English would help him communicate with tourists. Computer skills would give him entry into the world of the office or help in the bike-rental business. Using the $400 he got from me, Phai enrolled in an evening computer class, found space to rent near the tourist hotels, and bought six Chinese bikes.
He also found a way to improve his English. Along with the change of wardrobe, the shy motorbike mechanic had metamorphosed into an extrovert. Once, as we rode Tung’s motorbike through the center of Hanoi, we saw a Western tourist pedaling a bike. Phai slowed down alongside him. “Can I help you?” he shouted, over the rush of the traffic. “Where you going?” His English was garbled, and I wondered if the foreigner could understand.
The scruffy, bearded man looked at us. “Hanoi Hilton,” he said, using the nickname the Americans had employed to describe the famous Hoa Lo Prison, where POWs had been held captive during the war.
As we puttered along beside the Westerner, Phai launched into an enthusiastic, if not terribly effective, set of directions, complete with hand signals, that gave the foreigner enough information eventually to know when to turn right. We slowed to watch him pedal off down the street.
“Do you think he’ll find it?” I asked, uncertainly.
“Maybe!” said Phai happily.
I was Phai’s first foreign friend. Hugo was his second. On the evening that I told Phai that a Frenchman had moved into the second-floor room, he raced downstairs to say hello. He returned an hour later, his eyes gleaming and his face bright red from drinking beer. I was lying on the bed with a book in my hands, and he lay down beside me and closed his eyes. “Hugo’s so vui,” he said, and then he fell asleep. I had no idea how the two of them had managed to carry on a conversation, but before Hugo had been in the house for two nights, he and Phai had come up with a plan. Twice a week, Phai would teach Hugo Vietnamese and Hugo, the Frenchman, would teach Phai English.
Hugo’s vui-ness became obvious to everyone else before me. I might have been the only one able to carry on an extensive conversation with him, but they appreciated him sooner. Huong liked to peek out at him from the kitchen and watch the ritualistic way he drank his morning coffee. Sa thought Hugo was such a funny guy that all he had to do was smile and she would dissolve into giggles.
One night, Huong invited Hugo, me, and Phai to have dinner with her, her mother, Sa, and Viet. After we’d cleared away the dishes. Huong passed around a big bowl of lychee fruit.
We talked for a while about Hugo’s native Bordeaux, which, he explained, was famous for wines. Then the conversation drifted from a discussion of France to one of Vietnam. The Frenchman had only recently arrived here, and Huong and Phai were curious to hear what he thought of their country.
“Ffffft!” Hugo answered immediately. “The country is quite nice. But this government of yours, this Communist government. They talk about helping workers, but they don’t care about anything except their own power.” He paused and smiled in my direction, waiting for me to translate.
“Are you sure you want me to say that?” I asked. I’d never said anything so critical of the Vietnamese government.
Hugo looked at me and nodded as if his words were a dare. “Yes, I’m sure,” he said.
“What?” Huong asked. Her mother had gone upstairs to lie down. Sa was in the kitchen doing dishes, intermittently peeking out to watch us talk. Among themselves, foreigners criticized the Vietnamese government all the time. I’d come to have plenty of complaints of my own, after finding out that my “friend” Harry was a member of the secret police, after learning that my neighbors were keeping tabs on me, and, worst of all, after Tung was jailed without trial or even the benefit of a lawyer. I had a lot of thoughts about Vietnam’s government, but I would not have expressed them to my Vietnamese friends.
Huong and Phai were obviously curious to hear what Hugo had to say. I thought for a moment. “Well, he doesn’t like Communists,” I finally told them.
Phai and Huong looked at each other, their eyes wide with surprise. They began to chuckle, then their chuckles got louder until laughter filled the room, making Sa look out of the kitchen to see what was going on. It wasn’t an easy laughter, like the reaction to a silly joke. Instead, it sounded shocked, like the inadvertent hilarity when a child utters a string of dirty words. “He doesn’t like the Communists,” Huong said, between breaths. Her eyes were glowing.
For a while, Hugo said nothing, although the glimmer in his eyes told me that he was pleased. He leaned forward, took a lychee out of the bowl on the table, peeled it and pulled out the seed, then slid the smooth white fruit into his mouth. “I don’t know why the people don’t rise up and overthrow the bastards,” he said.
The words were barely out of his mouth before Huong, like a soap opera fan desperate for the next installment, yanked my sleeve for translation. I leaned back, giving up. “He wants to see a revolution,” I said.
Huong and Phai went speechless with laughter then, leaving Hugo and me to sit there silently, watching them in wonder. Huong’s laughter was something beautiful to behold. For those few minutes at least, it smoothed the tension from her face, as if erasing the many weeks of worry.
The next day, I asked Huong why she’d found Hugo’s comments so hilarious. Perhaps the simplicity of Hugo’s judgment had struck her and Phai as comically naïve. Or perhaps she felt exhilarated to hear someone declare, so emphatically and fearlessly, ideas that most Vietnamese would be afraid to utter, even to their closest friends. But Huong wouldn’t say. Hugo, a foreigner, could say whatever he wanted, in English, about Vietnam. But Huong had a $5,000 debt to the government and a husband in jail. Speaking openly about politic
s was a luxury she could not afford. In answer to my question, she only replied, “Hugo’s so vui,” and refused to say more.
I had a recurring dream in Vietnam, and each time I woke up I felt shaken. In the dream, I found myself back in America. Friends rushed over to see me. My family gushed with pleasure that I’d finally come home. My garden spontaneously bloomed with a dozen varieties of beautiful flowers. I couldn’t tell anyone the truth: It was all a mistake. I wasn’t supposed to be in the States. I was still supposed to be in Vietnam. Somehow, and I never could figure out exactly how, I’d ended up back home by accident.
I always woke up relieved from that nightmare, grateful to hear the blaring noise of morning traffic and to see the dirty teacups and candy wrappers scattered across the glass coffee table by my bed. I had to lie there for a long time, thankful that I was still in Vietnam and that I hadn’t even set a date to go home yet.
I was not hiding out in Hanoi, or afraid to go back to the States. Of course, there were things back home I didn’t like. It was tiring, hustling for writing assignments from editors who didn’t care if I wrote for them or not. But life there did have attractions. I had good friends in San Francisco and no language problems in communicating with them. Despite the aggravations of the career, I liked being a journalist—more, surely, than I liked teaching English in Hanoi. I missed my family. The noodle soup and rice I ate almost every day in Vietnam had gotten very boring. Still, I loved Hanoi. Despite the nearly intolerable summer heat, the fatigue I felt bargaining for every tomato, I was as consistently happy as I’d ever been in my life. I got an extraordinary sense of satisfaction out of simply managing to survive here. I didn’t take a single thing for granted about being an American living in Vietnam: not the fact that the Vietnamese government had been willing to grant me a long-term visa to study here, not the fact that I could have a friendly conversation with a man who’d had his leg shot off by my countrymen, not the fact that I could fall in love with a man who had grown up being taught that I was the enemy.