The House on Dream Street

by Dana Sachs

  Still, I knew I’d leave, and soon. While I remained in my third-floor bedroom, riding a wobbly borrowed bike and working at a low-paying job teaching English, other Americans I knew with no more skills than I had found lucrative permanent positions with international organizations. They rented apartments with kitchens and invested in powerful motorbikes. They were willing to settle down here, while I couldn’t move beyond the early bloom of romance. On some level, I considered Vietnam, and my happiness there, a luxury that, if I stayed too long, I’d use up. I kept my life in Vietnam slightly temporary and considered it a sojourn that I’d eventually leave behind. Vietnam was the dream, I knew, not the States.

  One morning late in August, my mother called from Memphis.

  “When are you coming home?” she asked. The question caught me unprepared. Mom had never questioned my decision to come to Hanoi. In fact, she was so proud of me that she had developed a devious tendency, when speaking with friends, to drop apparently offhanded comments about her daughter living in Vietnam. While I was in Hanoi, most of our communication was through letters. Phone calls were harder. We’d speak for five or ten minutes, but neither of us enjoyed those conversations. She always seemed distracted during these trans-Pacific calls, as if half of her brain were occupied with the knowledge of how much money the call would cost.

  This morning, her voice sounded not distracted, but sad. “I just think you’ve been away long enough,” she said.

  I closed my eyes. “It’s hard,” I said.

  “Every month you say, ‘Next month,’” she told me. “We miss you.”

  I could see my mother’s face, my house, the dry heat of a San Francisco autumn. It would be liberating to walk down a city street unnoticed, to buy food that had a price tag on it, to feel absolutely comfortable in the language being spoken all around me. Getting back to real life might not be such a bad thing. “I’ll come back in early September,” I told my mother, surprising even myself with the certainty of the statement. “I’ll be home for my birthday.”

  I set the phone down and looked around my beloved room, not quite sure how I’d happened to make a commitment, so suddenly, to leave it. I felt a little shaken, but also relieved. My birthday was only a month away, and I didn’t want to turn thirty here. It would be impossible to exaggerate the number of times every day I was asked how old I was. As a foreigner who could speak Vietnamese, I was always getting into conversations with strangers, and they were always asking me my age. Partly, they needed to know what to call me—“older sister,” “younger sister,” “aunt,” “niece.” But they were also nosy. The most important single bit of information they seemed to learn from me was that an American woman could be twenty-nine years old and not married yet.

  My approaching birthday loomed large in my consciousness. I imagined everyone I knew nagging me with their conviction that I was avoiding my destiny, that I needed to settle down. I was tired of defending myself, tired of asserting that I still valued my independence and freedom.

  That afternoon, I pulled my plane ticket out of the back of a drawer, rode my bike over to the airline office, and set the date of my departure. I gave myself two weeks.

  My other reason for leaving Vietnam was Phai. And the two were, of course, related. If I was going to marry, then, surely, the man I should marry would be him. But I couldn’t see it. In the two months since we’d first become intimate, I hadn’t fallen out of love, but I’d become increasingly sure that I couldn’t spend my life with him. Differences of language and culture had always existed as a gap between us, but they’d once been part of the attraction as well. Ironically, as I got to know him better, as we communicated ever more easily, the factors that divided us became more overwhelming.

  I had hit what linguists refer to as a “plateau” in my language acquisition, a brick wall, a point at which a language learner perfects old skills rather than obtaining new ones. I now felt extremely comfortable speaking simple Vietnamese, but, over the last few weeks, my vocabulary had started to frustrate me. I had to characterize everything in life, it seemed, as “interesting,” “sad,” “happy,” “difficult,” “complicated,” or “vui.”

  Huong had no qualms about teasing me when I forgot a word she’d taught me. She considered me ignorant, and perhaps a little bit slow, because I still couldn’t communicate at a more expert level. Sometimes, in the midst of a serious conversation, she’d simply give up, shrug her shoulders, and, looking at me as if I were a seven-year-old, say, “It’s just too complicated for you to understand.” Huong’s intelligence seemed boundless to me.

  Phai, on the other hand, was kinder. Whenever I happened to come out with a new word, he would clap his hands and shower me with kisses. At the same time, he limited his own conversation to the capacities of mine, speaking so simply that I never had trouble understanding how “complicated” opening a bike rental business might be, how “sad” he was after his mother sold the family pig, or how “happy” he felt whenever the two of us were together. After a while, I became as impatient with him as I was with myself. Phai started to strike me as annoyingly simple.

  The conversation we had after I’d set the date for my departure didn’t help. Phai was sitting on my bed that night, watching me wander around the room, getting my things together before we went to Linh’s house for dinner. I sat down beside him and picked up his hand. “I’m going home soon,” I told him. “In two weeks.”

  The expression on Phai’s face shifted, but only briefly, like the shadow of a cloud passing over, then moving on. “Well, it’s good,” he responded. “Your family needs you.”

  During dinner, Phai seemed as relaxed and content as ever, but when we got back to my room, he sat down on the bed and put his face in his hands. After being so “happy” with me, he now felt “sad” that I was leaving and he knew that his feelings would become even more “complicated” once I was gone. I sat down next to him and ran my fingers through his hair, explaining that I, too, would be “sad” to say good-bye, especially because he made me so “happy,” but my reasons for leaving were “complicated,” and so I hoped that he could understand. Of course, both of us were more distraught and confused than our words could express.

  There was one thing I couldn’t have told Phai, even if I had actually had the words to say it. Over the course of the past month, I had come to realize that, as much as I loved him, that love had bloomed, in part, because I had wanted a human object of my passion for Vietnam. I couldn’t tell how much of my love was for Phai himself and how much was for this place he came from. Sometimes, when the two of us were together, I’d look into his eyes and try to separate my love for him from my sense of his country. Maybe Phai had similar trouble distinguishing me from America, but I couldn’t know for sure. I never asked.

  Leaving Vietnam seemed the simplest and least painful way out of this relationship. Let distance separate us, I thought. Let us miss each other across the span of the ocean, not across the streets of Hanoi.

  In a practical sense, I had very few responsibilities in Hanoi, and it wasn’t hard for me to extricate myself from any of them. None of my jobs demanded long-term commitments. My teacher and I planned my lessons week by week. All I had to do, really, was pack up and go.

  Emotionally, of course, my situation was much more complicated. I knew that the more time I had to say good-bye, the harder it would be to do it. Two weeks was plenty of time to say good-bye to everyone. Except for Tung.

  He was in still in jail. According to Huong, the authorities were holding him in some nondescript building behind a district police station on the other side of town. He shared a cell with two other men, and though he’d grown pale from lack of sunlight, he was otherwise still healthy. We knew these things because Huong was finally allowed to visit him once a week. Every Sunday, she filled plastic bags with bunches of rambutan fruit, a kilo of fresh phở noodles, packages of pork pâté, and several loaves of bread, then hung the bags on the handlebar of the Dream and drove off to th
e jail. She always came back late in the afternoon, tired but no sadder looking than when she had left. Now that she was running the household, raising her son, managing a guesthouse, and trying to get her husband out of jail, she didn’t have time for extraneous emotions.

  Tung’s punishment seemed extreme. The police must have realized pretty quickly that Tung didn’t know anything about the Chinese women’s fake passports, but they continued to hold him nonetheless. The Vietnamese authorities, so wary of China, must have decided that Mr. Huey’s colleagues were spies (and, judging from their association with Mr. Huey, they may well have been). Keeping Tung in jail would punish him for his involvement. Secondly, Tung had never been a stickler for following regulations, especially if he could save a little money by ignoring them. In his dealings with Mr. Huey, he’d probably bent the rules a little bit. The authorities wanted to demonstrate that nothing got past them. Still, Tung could have learned that lesson in a single night. The police didn’t need to hold him indefinitely. These days, I could barely ride past a cop without stifling an impulse to spit at him.

  But neither Huong, nor anyone in their family, showed any anger at all. Everyone treated Tung’s incarceration as one more setback, like an illness, or a war, to be endured. One evening, when I asked Huong if she felt bitter about what had happened to her husband, she merely shook her head. “Bình thường,” she told me. This is normal. A volcano had erupted, and Tung, unfortunately, had gotten stuck in the path. His destiny, lately, just wasn’t so great.

  The weeks had dragged on. As time passed, we grew less and less optimistic about when he’d come home. The date of my departure, however, was fast approaching. I was becoming concerned that I would have to leave Vietnam without saying goodbye to him. About five days before I was scheduled to go, Huong had an idea. She would ask Tung’s captors if she could bring me by the jail so that we could say good-bye to each other. When she left for her visit that morning, she gave me one of her rare smiles. “I think it will be okay,” she said.

  I was sitting in the living room with Nga when Huong pulled up on the motorbike late that afternoon. She remained on the bike for a moment, pulling off her sunglasses and putting them back in her purse. Then she looked up. As soon as she saw me walking toward her, she shook her head. “They said no?” I asked.

  Huong got off the bike and pulled her purse out of the front basket. “They didn’t even say no,” she said. “They didn’t take the question seriously enough to say no. They just laughed.”

  We walked inside. Nga had a glass of cold water waiting to offer her sister. Huong sat down on the couch, took a sip of water, then used the bottom of her shirt to wipe the sweat off her forehead. “Tung told me to tell you good-bye,” she said, looking up at me. “He said that you should be careful and make sure to stay healthy. He’ll miss you, so you have to come back soon.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say that could make him as happy as his message made me. “Tell Tung,” I said, finally, “that as soon as he gets out of there, I’m going to send him a pair of Levi’s.”

  I had been in Vietnam for six months, but in only a few hours my bags were packed and I was ready to leave. I’d like to be able to say that the speed had something to do with my own innate efficiency, or a desire to restrain myself from accumulating too many possessions. In fact, I planned to travel home with three times as much luggage as I’d brought to Hanoi. For one thing, as soon as I’d decided to go, I had to take whatever I could of Vietnam home with me, and so I began a mad rush for souvenirs. I’d bought every style of bowl, silk scarf, lacquer box, and tablecloth that the city had to offer. I became even more weighed down because of the Vietnamese tradition of offering good-bye gifts. During my last few days in Hanoi, I received, among other things, a large ceramic tea set from Huong, a kilo of jasmine tea from Nga, ten pairs of Chinese underpants (decorated with turtles and rabbits) from Linh, a hefty Vietnamese-English dictionary from my teacher, and an extremely fragile, foot-long handmade scale model of a wooden sailboat from one of my students, a mechanical engineer I called Frank. No one took into consideration the problem of how I would get their precious gifts back to the States, least of all Frank, who arrived at my house the evening before I left and handed me the sailboat as if it were something I could stick in my pocket.

  The reason that my luggage got packed so efficiently was that I didn’t pack it myself. Huong and Phai only had to see the way I sat in my room, panic-stricken, staring at the mountain of my belongings, before they grabbed the bags and some rope and shooed me off to the side. Within an hour, the job was finished. Somehow, they even managed to find room for the boat.

  The night before I left, Phai showed up at my room holding a package. It was conical, thicker on the bottom and narrowing toward the top, and about the size of a small chicken. “This is for you,” he said, holding it out to me.

  I looked at him, suddenly feeling shy, but he pushed the package into my hands. It was heavy, tightly wrapped in newspaper and tied with twine. “Open it,” he urged.

  I sat down on the bed and lay the package on my lap. It took me a while to untie the twine and get my fingers beneath the paper, which was heavily taped. Then, with a little maneuvering, I was able to tear a small section of paper away from the bottom of the thing. Inside, I could see the ruffled edge of a dark metal surface. I looked up at Phai. “This is bronze,” I said. “You made it.”

  Phai smiled and his face looked so proud and sad and beautiful that I had to stop what I was doing and hold my hand against his cheek. He pulled my hand down and held it, then looked back at the package on my lap. “Go ahead,” he said. “Look at it.”

  It was a Buddha, sitting in lotus position, with its hands resting gently on its legs and its face looking straight ahead, as if gazing toward the truth and the future. The color of the bronze was deep and rich, traced with hints of gold, like something alive, and old, and changing. It was so beautiful that nothing I could say seemed good enough, and so I sat there staring at it, saying nothing.

  “You’re going to miss the pagodas, when you get back over there,” Phai said. “Now, even in California, you’ll have a place to pray.”

  I’d been shopping like a crazy person, collecting as much as I could in hopes that, months from now, these objects would help me remember my life in Vietnam. But Phai’s little Buddha was really all I needed.

  The next morning, Phai woke up early and was standing, wet from the shower, when I opened my eyes. I lay there, staring at him, trying to remember if I’d ever, even once, seen him sleep. “You’ve got to leave soon,” I whispered. “I can’t bear it if you don’t.”

  For a few minutes, we sat next to each other on the bed, staring out at my mass of luggage. I could see the soft bulge of the wooden boat at the top of one of my bags. My backpack sat next to it, still open, with Huong’s ceramic tea set well wrapped and gently nudged into a corner of it. The Buddha, back in its newspaper and twine, was at the bottom of my carry-on.

  I turned and looked at Phai, wanting to memorize his face, but it was so full of pain that I had to turn away again. The fact that I was leaving hadn’t, I realized, registered for me yet, and I found myself wiping the tears from his eyes and telling him not to be sad. Phai stood up. “I love you,” he said, as he pulled me toward him. I prepared to touch my lips to his. But the kiss he gave me wasn’t the kind of kiss I knew. His face came close to mine, his fingers slid into my hair, and then he inhaled, very deeply, as if memorizing my scent. He moved across my face, behind my ears, through my hair and over my neck, breathing in all of me in quick, short gasps. Then, suddenly, he pulled back, gazed into my eyes one more time, then let go of me and walked toward the door.

  “I love you,” I said, and Phai turned around and smiled at me one more time, then he opened the door and disappeared behind it.

  I ran out to the balcony and stood for a long time, watching for a sign of him. But the sidewalk was empty except for two guys lackadaisically washing a motorbike. Gra
ndmother Nhi sat at her empty tea stall, watching the traffic pass.

  Huong and Linh had both offered to come with me to the airport, but they rode in cars so rarely that the experience nauseated them. I’d seen it happen. They threw up discreetly, rolling down the window and quietly thrusting their heads outside, then, afterwards, pulling themselves back in and using a handkerchief to wipe their faces, which were pale and trembling and beaded with sweat. I didn’t want to put them through that. Tra’s sister, Hoa, had volunteered to come along. She’d lived in Europe, so she was used to cars.

  Huong and I stood on the steps in front of the house. Little Viet was standing beside us, leaning against his mother and hanging on to my hand as if I were a balloon he didn’t want to fly away. Huong held my other hand, gently squeezing it. “Write,” she said, biting her lip.

  “You write, too,” I told her.

  She giggled, wringing my hand with both of hers. “You know me,” she said. “I’m lazy.” Her eyes were bright and sad, and looking into them I felt a sharp pain in my throat. I quickly leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek, then kissed Viet.

  “Good-bye,” I said.

  Huong shook her head. “Don’t say ‘good-bye,’ she told me. Say, ‘See you again.’”

  I smiled. “See you again.” As we pulled away from the curb, Huong stood watching us from the doorway, one arm folded against her chest, the other hand waving listlessly. I turned around in the seat and watched her through the back window as we drove up Dream Street.

  The car headed north and west through the city, past the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum and then past Truc Bach Lake. We circled the perimeter of the West Lake, driving past the new-money villas, the farms that produced the city’s flowers, and the restaurants that specialized in dog meat cuisine. We headed out of the city across the new Thang Long Bridge. In the countryside, the view beyond the window was little more than rice fields, scattered brick kilns, and women trudging down the road, leading water buffalo on long ropes behind them. The scene looked so normal to me now.