by Dana Sachs
Scott Stein was becoming well known, too. Westerners in Hanoi were always noticeable, and the ones who lived there eventually grew rather famous. My upstairs neighbor Paula had achieved near star status when a Hanoi newspaper referred to her as the “European beauty queen.” My friend Jack had so wide a reputation around town that people who’d never even met him swore he spoke the best Vietnamese of any foreigner in the country. Six or eight months into his Vietnam tenure, Scott Stein had become nearly as famous as the others. Scott drove around town on a motorbike with racing stripes. Plastered on the back of his chili-pepper red helmet was a sticker bearing the now-familiar sky blue and black Rely logo. Vietnam was hardly a country that discussed its sexuality openly and, now that Scott Stein had begun to market his condoms all over Vietnam, a linguistic switch had taken place. Just as Americans hear the word “Vietnam” and think of war, Vietnamese now heard the otherwise incomprehensible English word “rely” and thought “sex.” Scott quickly became known as Mr. Sex around Hanoi.
As it turned out, Mr. Sex was actually a dark-haired, bearded Jewish guy from Boston (along with me, Nick, and Steve from the newspaper, Scott added to the already significant number of Jews in Hanoi and supported the conclusion among some Hanoians that about half the U.S. population was Jewish). I followed him into his private office, its white walls decorated with safe-sex posters from across the developing world.
The RSI operation, he explained, was bare-bones, employing a small network of regional salespeople, but its goals were extensive: to get the Rely insignia into the window, and the condoms into the inventory, of every pharmacy in the country.
Scott walked over to a set of cabinets in a corner of the room and bent down. A moment later, he stood up and deposited a Rely baseball cap on the table in front of me.
“This is for you,” he said.
I picked up the cap and turned it over. There was a small pocket under the bill, and when I reached inside the pocket I pulled out a silver-wrapped Rely condom.
Scott smiled proudly. “Túi cao su,” he said, obviously delighted with the cap’s design. “That’s what the Vietnamese call condoms—rubber pockets.” It was strange to hear Vietnamese mixed with the broad vowels of a Boston accent.
I nodded, trying to look impressed. I didn’t mention that I already had experience with túi cao su in Vietnam.
“I’ve never been a great language learner,” Scott continued. “I can ask for a bowl of soup, buy gas for my motorbike, bargain at the market. Other than that, I focus on the vocabulary related to my job. And that’s sex. I learn all the slang.”
Learning how to talk about sex in Vietnamese was a serious challenge. Linh was the only person I knew in Hanoi who would talk openly on the subject. Even Phai hadn’t been willing to go into the nitty-gritty of slang with me. Getting a Vietnamese to teach you the words for sex seemed like convincing the CIA to tell you their secrets.
“Who teaches you all this stuff?” I asked.
Scott smiled like the kid with the most Halloween candy. He motioned with his head to the door. “Mostly people in the office.”
I’d only seen two people on my brief swing through the front room of RSI Worldwide. Both were women. The receptionist couldn’t have been older than twenty. The other one, who’d been talking on the phone at a desk in the back, was primly dressed and middle-aged. I must have looked skeptical, because Scott called over his shoulder, “Mrs. Tuyet!”
After a moment, the older woman poked her head through the doorway. A haze of hair had escaped from the bun behind her ears and formed a gray cloud around her head, giving her the harried look of an overworked bureaucrat. But her face was full of happy anticipation, as if the part of her job she most enjoyed lay in joking around with her boss. “Yes, Scott?” she asked.
“What was that new word I learned a few days ago, Mrs. Tuyet?” he asked.
It took Mrs. Tuyet a few seconds to catch her boss’s reference, and then she broke into a smile. “Oh, Scott!” she scolded, pretending to be embarrassed. “Not now,” and then she escaped into the other room.
Scott leaned back in his chair, pleased with the exchange. “Mrs. Tuyet doesn’t really teach me the words,” he admitted. “I just tease her about them. Mostly, the guys who work here teach me, but she always makes sure I pronounce them exactly right. Can’t miss a tone, you know. You could screw up your delivery.”
I was beginning to wonder about Mr. Sex. He was looking for someone to write the script for a documentary about AIDS for Vietnamese TV, which was the reason for my appointment today. So far, however, he seemed more focused on collecting obscenities. I had to wonder if he was as committed to his work.
“The miracle of Mrs. Tuyet is that she’s not embarrassed about this stuff at all,” Scott chuckled, lacing his hands across his stomach. Then, his tone became, for the first time, quite serious. “I need a relaxed attitude from my staff, you see. If they’re going to work for me, they have to be comfortable with words like “dick,” “cunt,” “whore”—or whatever the equivalents are in Vietnamese. It’s not like I’m distributing farm implements here. We’re talking about sex, condoms, and AIDS. Obscenity comes with the territory. Mrs. Tuyet is a grandmother, for god’s sake, but I can say whatever I want around her and she won’t even blink. I tell her she was a sailor in an earlier life.”
Scott leaned forward in his chair and dropped his voice. “Phuong, my secretary, is different. Her first month here, she blushed so much she looked like she’d had a bad day at the beach. Now, if I ask her to find me some information about sexual practices among gay men, she’ll just nod and do it. Success! I had to change her.”
Scott reached out and picked up the baseball cap. “You see,” he said, tossing it in the air, “people have to be ready to do this work. Even the uglier stuff—and sometimes it gets pretty ugly—helps us understand how this society approaches sex. I’ve seen how people are dying of AIDS in Thailand. I don’t want it to hit Vietnam like that. But it might. People here know about AIDS and condoms, but they’re doing damn little to protect themselves. The Ministry of Health is giving us this TV time to get the message out. If you’re up for the project, I’d like you to do it.”
Of course I wanted to do it. As a writer, I’d never had a chance to affect people’s lives as directly as this TV show could, potentially, affect the way Vietnamese thought about AIDS. After a few seconds of consideration, I began to nod. Scott’s face broke into a wide grin, which didn’t seem so silly anymore.
Phai’s bicycle rental business had gone under. His attempts to learn the computer had given him a couple of skills, but no foreseeable prospects for the future. And the results of his English classes were all too obvious. I was annoyed. The money I had given him, which had once seemed like a simple gift of love, now felt like my half of a contract we’d made for him to get his life together. The only changes I saw were that his wardrobe seemed bigger.
Rather than discuss such matters with him, I avoided him. This wasn’t easy, because he was always at my house, trying to be helpful. Did I want to borrow one of his bikes? He had plenty. Did I need a ride to the bank? He could borrow Tung’s motorbike and give me a lift. Anxious to keep our contact to a minimum, I borrowed a bike from Tra’s family, who, even though she remained in the States, were still my friends. I took to leaving the house as early in the morning as possible, just to avoid seeing Phai. The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on me. After spending so many months trying to get close to Phai, now I was constructing my days around trying to stay away from him.
It seemed like a blessing that I just wasn’t home that much. My life in Hanoi was very different from the way it had been the year before. For one thing, I was working a lot. I still spent a good deal of time with Tung and Huong and Linh, but I was hanging out with other people, too. Paula, an art historian, invited me to gallery openings and introduced me to painters. And, after a week or so of lying in bed, crying over her boyfriend Nick, Yen got up, went home to her parents, an
d began to go out again. She and I roamed the city together, discovering new cafés, eating foods I’d never tried, going to films and the theater. She had grown up amid the small circle of Hanoi intellectuals, and she introduced me to some of Vietnam’s best writers and critics, whom she’d known since she was a child. At about the same time, my teacher, Professor Mai, decided that it was time for me to delve into something more provocative than the “Dick and Jane”–style readers he and I had been using for my lessons. We began to read contemporary literature and, eventually, to translate it. My sense of the country became more complicated, and richer.
I was away from the house a lot, but I couldn’t avoid Phai forever. A few weeks after I returned to Hanoi, he cornered me. Paula and I had just returned from a gallery opening downtown, and Phai was sitting in the living room, alone. A cigarette dangled between his fingers. Neither of us had mentioned the fact that he’d started smoking again. Paula started up the stairs, but I stopped and sat down beside Phai. “Do you want to go out?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I’m tired,” I told him.
Phai’s eyes roamed across the room, as if he were trying to find something he’d lost. “Let’s go out,” he said again, and his words sounded so desperate that I agreed.
We walked up to Dien Bien Phu Street, then across to the statue of Lenin, where we sat down on a concrete platform just beneath his feet. Phai put his head in his hands and said nothing. I stared out at the plaza in front of the statue, where three boys on bikes were riding back and forth, chasing the shadows cast by the floodlights. It was after nine at night, but so hot that the sweat rolled in streams down my face even as I sat still.
Without looking up at me, Phai took my hand. His skin was warm and smooth against mine. “Please, Duyen,” he said.
I left my hand in his, but I said nothing. “Duyen” wasn’t my name. How had I fallen in love with someone who didn’t even use my name? At that moment, the whole thing seemed impossible, like a freak accident that should never have happened.
“I love you,” Phai said. His breath smelled of alcohol and his words came out slowly, as if he were pulling each syllable straight from his gut.
The air was so heavy that I could hardly breathe. Leaning over, I lifted the hem of my shirt and wiped my face. “I can’t,” I said, and the words sounded hard, definite, as if I didn’t care.
Phai looked up and stared straight into my eyes. “You have a new boyfriend?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“You have a new boyfriend.”
“I don’t.”
He was wringing my hand with both of his. The boys on their bikes started closing in on us. I stood up. “Let’s go home,” I said. Phai remained seated. His lips were trembling.
We slowly walked back to my house. The street was empty, and the only open doorway was the one at my house, half a block ahead. “Why?” Phai kept asking. “We love each other.” I didn’t answer. He raised the heel of his hand and smacked it against his head. The sound echoed down the deserted street.
I stood still. “Stop it,” I said.
Phai smacked his head again. Then again. I turned and continued walking toward the house. “Duyen!” he screamed. I didn’t look back.
Tung was sitting on the couch watching the television news and smoking a cigarette. “Something’s wrong with him,” I said, pointing out the door. Tung stood up and walked outside. Phai was standing in front of the concrete electric pole by our neighbor’s front door, a pillar that, late at night, he and I used to stand behind when we kissed. Now he was banging his head against it. Tung walked over and took him by the shoulder. “You’ve got to go home,” he said gently. “You drank too much.”
Phai pulled himself away. He walked unsteadily up the sidewalk, then reeled around and walked back. Tung put his arm around him and spoke so quietly I couldn’t hear. After a minute, Tung turned around and looked at me. “Go upstairs and go to sleep,” he said. I stepped into the doorway. The last thing I saw was the two of them, huddled together, walking slowly up the street.
12. New Arrivals
I LOVED BEING IN VIETNAM as much as I ever had, but my relationship with the country wasn’t delicate in the way it once had been. I wasn’t worried that if I spent the day with another foreigner I’d somehow lose touch with the real Vietnam. Now, I no longer thought of my friends in terms of who was a foreigner and who was Vietnamese, and I didn’t worry about coming across as the Ugly American. My nationality no longer defined my identity here. If I did something stupid, it wasn’t because I was American. It was because I was stupid. And I found myself for the first time getting into arguments.
One night, I went with two new friends, Van and Duc, to see the French film Indochine. Van and Duc were talented painters I’d met through Steve. Their work would have fetched high prices had they chosen to pursue the increasingly hot market in Vietnamese art. But rather than schmoozing with potential patrons, they spent most of their time hanging out in Duc’s studio, a stilt house on the edge of the West Lake, where they painted, drank whiskey, and pontificated about the state of the world.
The screening of the film, which was playing at the August Cinema in the center of town, was a big event for Hanoi. Indochine, a film about the Vietnamese revolt against French colonialism, was one of the first Western films to arrive as the country slowly opened its door to the outside world. Everyone wanted to see it, and not just the starstruck Hanoians who had managed to capture a glimpse of the star, Catherine Deneuve, while she was filming on location. Outside the theater, ticket scalpers proved they knew a thing about capitalism by rushing back and forth across the sidewalks and jumping in front of passing motorists in a frenzied effort to secure their sales. Inside the theater, nearly every seat was filled, and the audience had to strain to see through a fog of cigarette smoke and to hear through the grinding crunch of sunflower seeds. But unlike the bemused, rather bored reactions I’d witnessed at The Tower of the Screaming Virgins, the audience at Indochine was clearly captivated. It represented most Hanoians’ first chance to see a Western film projected on the big screen, and people’s reactions to the production quality must have been similar to the way American audiences responded in 1939, when Dorothy stepped out of her black and white farmhouse and walked into Technicolor Oz. “Đẹp Đẹp,” I heard people whisper all around me: Beautiful.
After the film ended, the three of us went to get something to eat. It was nearly eleven already, past bedtime for most of Hanoi, and my favorite noodle shop had long ago pulled its metal doors shut for the night. A few establishments were still open, serving noodle soup and rice porridge to tipsy men trying to sober up on their way home. We sat down at a table on the sidewalk in the middle of the block, right next to a sewage drain that ran along the side of the road. The proprietor, a mustached man wearing a Tiger Beer T-shirt, was sitting on a stool next to his charcoal cooker.
“What do you want to eat?” he grumbled.
Duc and Van ordered fish porridge. I asked for a Bảy Up—Vietnamese for 7 Up.
Both of my friends were still feeling dazzled by the movie. They were used to the grainy black and white or washed-out color that characterized Vietnamese cinema. In contrast, the French film’s luscious palette and perfectly defined contrasts of light and dark left them breathless. They didn’t like the movie, though.
“The French!” Van said, with a dismissive wave of his hand. “They don’t know anything about the war. It’s worse than that movie, I’ll tell you.” Van, who was my age, was a thin, often grouchy man whose delight in the world only became evident in his gentle, romantic paintings. In contrast, Duc, who was nearly forty, was lumbering and cheerful, with a quiet voice and a shag of bushy hair.
Van lit a cigarette. During the movie, he’d smoked his way through half a dozen 555s. “Westerners will see that film and think they understand Vietnam,” he said. “It’s like me saying, because I’ve seen a few videos, that life is easy in America, that it’s just Walt Disney ove
r there.”
Duc and I laughed. The proprietor came over and plopped the rice porridge and Bảy Up down in the center of the table. Van hardly noticed the food. Duc immediately took his bowl and spoon and began stirring sprigs of fresh dill into the thick mass of porridge.
I pulled open my drink and took a sip of the warm soda. “It’s true,” I said. I knew that Van and Duc had both seen Hollywood war movies. “The only thing most Americans know about the Vietnam War is what they’ve seen in Apocalypse Now or Platoon.”
Instead of laughing, Van looked irritated, as if he found America’s myopia more disturbing than Vietnam’s. “Americans don’t know anything about war,” he told me. “You haven’t had a war in your country in over one hundred years. You’re lucky! But still, whenever a single American dies in battle, you’re fu-rious. You lost fifty-eight thousand Americans in Vietnam. We lost two million Vietnamese. You bombed us. We never bombed you. But still, it was the United States, not Vietnam, who held a grudge.”
In another situation, I would probably have agreed with Van. After all, at that time, the United States was still maintaining its vituperative trade embargo against Vietnam, keeping the struggling nation from fully recovering from the double economic disasters of the war and several decades of communism. But the antagonism in Van’s voice made me defensive. Not bothering to hide my sarcasm, I answered, “Oh, right. The Vietnamese would never, ever hold a grudge.”
We looked at each other for a long moment, each of us trying to decide how far to let this conversation go. Finally, Van pulled back a little. “It’s just sad, that’s all,” he said, his tone only slightly less caustic. “All over the world, people know about American hamburgers, American blue jeans, American cars. These are good things. They help to build a strong country. We Vietnamese beat the Americans and what are we famous for? War! In this century alone we’ve fought the French, Japanese, Americans, Cambodians, and Chinese. If we didn’t have to fight all those wars, maybe we’d be rich now. We’d be the ones visiting Walt Disneyland and making blue jeans.”