by Dana Sachs
Phai handed me a cup of tea. “How you mommy?” he asked.
I held the cup to my lips and took a sip, trying not to look at him. “She’s fine,” I answered. Following Vietnamese custom, Phai spent the next few minutes asking after every relative I’d ever mentioned to him, including all my siblings, my grandmother, and the housekeeper who had worked for my mother for twenty years. I couldn’t even remember if Phai had one brother or two. “How’s your family?” I asked.
“They fine.” Phai’s face wasn’t as open and happy as it had been a few minutes before. He hadn’t missed the fact that I was sitting across the room and that I was speaking to him as if he were a casual acquaintance. He was still smiling and chatting amiably, but his eyes had grown cloudy with hurt. Last month, I’d written him a careful letter, explaining that I still cared about him, but that I didn’t want to marry him and therefore didn’t think we should continue our romantic relationship when I got back to Hanoi. Phai had written back that he understood and he hadn’t argued with my decision. Now, though, I could see that no matter what he’d said, he had still hoped. For the first time, I realized how big a mess I’d made.
I made a show of looking around the room. The house was exactly the same, except for a new wooden partition blocking off the loft space where Tung, Huong, and Viet slept. Then I noticed there weren’t any dresses. “What happened to Nga’s shop?” I asked.
Phai shrugged. “Closed,” he said, then pointed out the doorway toward Dream Street. “The street’s one-way now. Nga didn’t get as many customers coming by as she did before.”
I turned and looked outside. On the way here, I’d noticed that the driver had taken a circuitous route to my house, but so many things confused me in Vietnam that I hadn’t bothered to figure that one out. Now I could see that all the motorbikes and trucks and cars were moving from right to left. Even when I was here a year before, the municipal authorities had been implementing changes to make traffic through Hanoi a bit less chaotic, and the shift on Dream Street had probably helped to make the busy intersection at the corner less of a nightmare. But I wondered if city planners considered the indirect consequences of these decisions, like the fact that they’d put one small dress shop out of business.
“That’s sad,” I said. My vocabulary in Vietnamese had shrunk badly. I glanced at Phai, but he was hardly listening. His eyes were on me, but his mind was somewhere else.
It would be hard to imagine a worse way to reunite than the way we chose, with me pulling back and Phai feeling hurt by it, with Phai speaking impossibly bad English and me having trouble remembering even the most basic Vietnamese. I looked around the room, up to the ceiling, out the door, back to the furniture, and down to my feet without once glancing at Phai. I longed for Tung and Huong to return home.
“Good see you, Duyen,” he told me. “Happy very very.”
Luckily, Phai and I had only been sitting in the living room for about fifteen minutes when Tung, Huong, and Viet finally drove up outside. Plastic shopping bags were dangling like pastel balloons from every handlebar and every hand. I leaped from my seat and rushed outside to meet them.
Phai had looked exactly the same, but everyone on the motorbike looked different. Little Viet had grown from a three-foot wild thing into a tall, skinny schoolkid with a sweet smile and a surprising eagerness to help carry several heavy suitcases up three flights of stairs. Huong was seven months pregnant, and, though I’d known about it, I’d had a hard time picturing her until she dislodged herself from the motorbike and tottered toward me, her full-moon belly pressing against the thin fabric of a summer shirt. Tung was altered as well, but not in ways I might have expected. Wearing the Levi’s I’d sent him and a freshly pressed button-down shirt, he looked more like a slick, self-confident businessman than ever.
As soon as the motorbike pulled to a stop, I did what Americans do, rushing outside and hugging every one of them. Viet squirmed a bit, but didn’t run away. Tung looked embarrassed but pleased. Huong dragged me by the hand into the house, forced me to sit down beside her on the couch, and then proceeded to examine me from head to toe.
I’d tried, I really had. On this trip, I’d packed a pair of nice trousers, which I could wear with a belt and either of a couple of pretty blouses. I had a dress and a few good wool sweaters to wear when the weather got cold. I’d brought jewelry and two different shades of lipstick. I didn’t have any high heels, but I didn’t only have sneakers, either. I even had new glasses, with smaller lenses this time.
Tung noticed the glasses first. “You don’t look like an old grandmother anymore,” he said with satisfaction.
Huong sat for a moment, still making her assessment. Finally, she said, “You’re fatter,” obviously impressed.
“Huong,” Tung chided, “Americans don’t like that.”
“They hate that,” said Phai, who was, like Tung, proud of his understanding of the Western psyche.
“No, really. I don’t care,” I argued, glancing in the mirror behind the couch. Maybe I did look fatter, I thought, despairing. Then, I turned toward Huong. “You look fatter, too,” I said.
Huong’s smile rippled into a laugh that sounded like a soft breeze. She squeezed my hand with both of hers. “I’m so happy you’re back,” she said, and I began to feel less anxious.
Over the next hour, I somehow managed to keep up my end of the conversation. Since leaving San Francisco, I’d hardly slept, and now the world around me seemed wobbly, as if I were looking out at it through a shimmer of heat. My Vietnamese felt thick and awkward in my mouth, like wet wads of cotton stuck between my cheeks and gums. In all the blur and nervousness of that afternoon, however, I was able to recognize one small miracle. They all were speaking rapidly to me in Vietnamese, and I had no difficulty understanding them.
Eventually, Huong ordered me to go upstairs to rest until she had finished preparing dinner. I tried to protest, but not very strenuously. As I got up and headed toward the stairs, Phai watched me uncertainly, as if he couldn’t decide whether to follow me or not. He didn’t.
Six people were crowded around the little coffee table in the living room. Each person held a bowl full of noodles in a rich broth of pork simmered with bamboo shoots. In addition to me, Phai, Tung, Huong, and Viet, there was a graduate student named Paula who was renting the room on the fourth floor. Paula, an American who’d been raised in Sweden, was tall and regal-looking, but her graying black T-shirt and ratty mustard-colored pants had the same worn-out quality that my clothes had developed after too many months of hand washing. Tung and Huong must have realized that I wasn’t the only Westerner who had trouble maintaining a presentable wardrobe in Hanoi.
Even though she was obviously fatigued by the effort, Huong made the dinner herself. Sa had returned to the countryside. Her disappearance puzzled me. She’d always seemed so thrilled by the life of the city, and whenever she spoke to me about her village, she’d made it clear that she hadn’t been happy there. Her mother had died and all her siblings had married and moved away. Her father drank too much and sometimes beat her. Sa had always viewed keeping house for Huong as an escape. When I brought the subject up with Huong, she just shook her head, unwilling to discuss it.
Tung pulled out his stash of Rémy Martin and held out a glass for me. “Rémy?” he asked, and the way he pronounced the word, “Ray-mee,” reminded me of a night, long ago, when I’d gone out with my student John and some of his friends. They were a wealthy bunch, the kind of young people who wore expensive leather jackets and spent their Saturday nights dancing in discos or competing in dangerous motorbike races around Hoan Kiem Lake. One night, one of the women, a pretty young actress who had already made a name for herself in Vietnamese films, turned to me with a look of concern on her face. “What’s the proper way to say it?” she’d needed to know, her expression so anxious that she might have been asking me to supply her with a vaccine for tuberculosis. “Is it Ray-mee Mar-tun or Ray-mee Mar-teen?” I hated to see the disappointm
ent on her face when I’d told her, apologetically, that I didn’t know the answer.
I looked at Tung and shook my head. I was so exhausted that alcohol might push me over the edge. He poured a glass for himself, one for Phai, and one for Paula. Then, after toasting to my return—One hundred percent! One hundred percent!—he told me he was planning to open a beer pub with Max, the Australian who had been living in my room. The two of them had found a nice spot across the street from Hanoi’s cathedral, and they were going to turn it into the Kangaroo Pub. They’d already made T-shirts on which a kangaroo, decked out in tourist garb, stood waving a Vietnamese flag. As soon as Max returned from Sydney, they’d open for business.
I tried to push out of my mind thoughts of Tung’s last foreign business partner, Mr. Huey. “Who’s going to be the bartender?” I asked.
“G’day mate!” Tung beamed.
“G’day mate!” Huong, Phai, and even little Viet chimed in. They’d been practicing.
Sitting next to me, Paula was already plowing through a second bowl of noodles. “You’re going to have to get some really good music,” she said. Paula spoke Vietnamese so fluently that I could barely understand her. I told myself that her accent was off. But the truth was that her Vietnamese was better than mine had ever been. Now that I wasn’t a major participant in it, the conversation raced along. After a while, I didn’t even try to keep up.
“Duyen?” I must have fallen into a daze, because the voice startled me. I looked up at Phai. “Are you okay?” he asked.
His expression was so absolutely kind that I felt a sudden ache of love for him. “I’m fine,” I said as brightly as I could.
Huong pulled my bowl from my hands and filled it with another mound of noodles and pork. “Eat or you’ll get sick,” she chided.
I held the steaming bowl close to my face, letting the pungent smell of pork and bamboo shoots float up to my nose. It was a fragrance that nothing in California could match.
Phai followed me upstairs after dinner, sat down next to me on the couch in my room, and took my hand. “So happy,” he said in English.
The feeling of love for Phai had, like some fickle ghost, vanished as quickly as it had appeared. “Let’s speak Vietnamese,” I said, trying to figure out how to pull my hand from his.
“Thank you for coming back,” Phai whispered. The expression of hurt I’d seen on his face this afternoon had shifted into something more steady and patient. He had waited ten months. He could wait longer.
I had once felt so confident in my love for Phai. Huong had warned me not to hurt him, and I’d hardly listened. I was convinced that I wasn’t capable of hurting him. Now, less than a year after the last time I’d seen him, I looked at him and felt completely blank. Not only was I no longer in love with him, but I was having a hard time remembering why I had loved him to begin with. At other moments, when I didn’t feel so besieged by guilt, I could have remembered, easily, how much delight and happiness I had gotten during those months that he and I had spent together. It had been easy to think that I had focused upon Phai all the love I felt for Vietnam, but, really, that was completely unfair to him. After all, I had met many men in Vietnam and he was the one with whom I fell in love. Phai had a soul that seemed richer, deeper, and more generous than the souls of other people.
Of course, I had idealized him, too, and there was no way that the real person could sustain an image of himself that was based, in many fundamental ways, on the fact that I just didn’t know him very well. What I did know was that those qualities that made Phai seem so good were also ones that made him so vulnerable. I only had to look at the hope on his face. I felt a wave of nausea.
I dragged my hand out of Phai’s and rubbed my eyes. Without looking at him again, I said quietly, “I am so tired. I have to go to sleep.”
Phai stood up, ran his fingers across the top of my head, and said, “Sweet dreams, Duyen.” It was the way he’d always said good night to me, as we lay together in that same dark room, hearing the sounds of the street sweepers brushing their brooms across the pavement down below. I gave a little wave of acknowledgement with my hand. I kept my eyes shut, listening to the soft sound of his footsteps cross the room and the click of the door as it opened, then shut, behind him. Only then did I look up.
A young woman I knew named Yen had been staying with Paula on the fourth floor. Early the next morning I walked upstairs to say hello. Yen was a recent graduate in English literature from Hanoi University. She spoke nearly perfect English and cultivated friendships with foreigners as if we were rare flowers in her garden.
She was in trouble now. Several years earlier, she’d fallen in love with an American graduate student named Nick, who had been her teacher in Hanoi. Their love affair hadn’t lasted long. Nick returned to the States, and to his girlfriend there. Yen was left in Vietnam with a broken heart. Then, a couple of years later, just when Yen thought she’d finally gotten over him, Nick returned to Vietnam. He asked her to translate the interviews for a documentary he was making about contemporary Vietnamese writers. She agreed to do the job, but resolved to keep her distance from him. He didn’t let her. As soon as he saw her again, he realized he’d been in love with her all along. He managed to wait twenty-four hours before asking her to marry him. She waited a couple of more hours before she accepted.
It seemed like the happy, rather saccharine ending to a bumpy romance, but then the Vietnamese government got involved. Nick didn’t have permission to film anything in Vietnam, particularly not the country’s politically controversial writers. Mysterious men on motorbikes began following the lovers around. Eventually, they were taken in for questioning, which lasted days. Nick and his American colleagues on the film were scared. Yen, who’d lived in Vietnam all her life and knew the limits of her rights here, was terrified. As the only Vietnamese on the crew, she bore the brunt of the inquisition. After a week of interrogations, Nick and his friends were expelled from the country. Yen, of course, was not allowed to follow them. It didn’t make for a very promising engagement.
Yen was lying in bed with a Vietnamese translation of Jane Eyre on the pillow beside her. She was small, like Tra, but while Tra was muscular and energetic, Yen was round-faced and languid. When she saw me, she smiled like a screen heroine and weakly reached for my hand. She’d been hiding out in Paula’s room for two days already, too afraid that her parents would be implicated if she ventured home, too weepy to get out of bed.
“Nick called,” she said quietly. “He told me he saw you.”
I’d run into Nick, whom I already knew from mutual friends in the States, at the hotel I’d stayed at in Bangkok. It was not as amazing a coincidence as it might sound. As a cheap hotel with basic amenities, it was frequented by English-teacher types like me and Nick. Yen and I talked for a while about Nick’s health, Nick’s emotional state, Nick’s desire to see Yen again. Hearing his name seemed to revive her, and after a while the color flowed back into her pale face and she managed to sit up in bed and eat a banana.
“The interrogations must have been terrible,” I said.
Yen shrugged. Nick, a fair-skinned, cynical Jewish historian, had complained that their story sounded like the script of a bad movie. But Yen took these circumstances as the normal course of events.
“What did they ask you?” I wanted to know.
Yen put the banana peel on the bedside table, then lay back down in bed. “They asked me about all my friends,” she said. “They wanted to know everything I know about foreigners.”
I got up and poured her a glass of water from a bottle sitting on the bureau, then sat back down and handed it to her. “They asked me about you, too,” she added.
I looked at her. Through my mind flashed those things that could make me suspicious: living in the home of a guy who’d been jailed, having a Vietnamese man spend the night. Nothing very exciting. Even during the days when Phai left my bedroom by way of my neighbors’ roofs, I’d never been afraid that the Vietnamese government wo
uld really care about what I was doing. I couldn’t have been a very interesting subject. But the ominous quality in Yen’s voice made me nervous. “What did they want to know?” I asked.
Yen laughed and pinched my arm. “Don’t worry. They love you,” she said. “They think you’re so nice because you teach the children English. They just can’t understand why you fell in love with that low-class man.”
I’d resolved, before I even returned to Hanoi, that I would not teach English again. I’d never been very good at it, and it didn’t pay the bills anyway. My friend Steve worked at the English-language Vietnam Investment Review, and his paper needed someone to write a column for prospective foreign investors. The editor didn’t seem to mind that I knew nothing about foreign investment, or business in general. All I had to do was pick a topic every week that focused on some aspect of investing money in Vietnam. I could start immediately.
The column promised to pay more money every week than my English teaching had brought in a month. After only a few days back in the city, I was already feeling flush. Then, a few days later, just as I was beginning work on my first column— “How to Find an Investment Partner”—Steve called again. He gave me the number of an American named Scott Stein who was looking for a writer. The job had something to do with condoms.
Scott Stein was the Vietnam director of RSI Worldwide, an American nonprofit organization that specialized in birth control and AIDS education. Using a standard Western-style marketing strategy, RSI had launched Rely, the first international-quality condom to enter the Vietnamese market. RSI’s preliminary marketing efforts had focused on brand-name recognition, and, so far, had enjoyed resounding success. After decades of socialism, Vietnamese were hardly overloaded with corporate insignia and so, through extensive television and print ad campaigns, as well as a blitz of freebie T-shirts, baseball caps, key chains, and balloons, RSI succeeded in making the Rely logo, a romantic silhouette of two birds soaring across a pale blue sky, almost as well known among Vietnamese as the swirling white-on-red cursive of Coke.