by Dana Sachs
Van pulled his bowl of porridge closer, as if to signal that he’d had enough of this conversation. After only a couple of spoonfuls, though, he looked up again. This time he had a grin on his face, and I could see that he’d thought of a way to move the conversation toward friendlier ground. He leaned forward and poked Duc in the arm. “Remember the Gulf War?” he asked.
Duc laughed. “Yeah,” he said. He kept eating his porridge.
Van turned to me. “We Vietnamese appreciated the Gulf War. For once, there was this huge international conflict going on and we didn’t have to fight in it. We just sat around like everybody else in the world, watching it on TV.”
Loud voices behind us made us turn around. The proprietor, back on his stool by the charcoal cookers, was yelling at a newspaper boy, one of the hundreds of often homeless children who spent their days walking the city streets, selling papers, cheap magazines, and horoscopes. The “boy” was at least twenty, with a slightly deranged look on his face. He wasn’t arguing as much as whining, but the angry proprietor suddenly jumped up and boxed his ear. The newspaper boy raised his hand to his head and howled.
“I’m bleeding,” he screamed.
The proprietor sat back down, pulled out a rag, and began to wipe the table in front of him.
“My ear! I’m bleeding,” the newspaper boy screamed again. I had a momentary worry that he would pull out a gun and shoot us all, but this was not America. He cried for a few more seconds, then turned and wandered off down the street, holding his hand to his ear.
Street fights took place so regularly here that spectators watched them like fireworks, focusing for the instant of the flare and then losing interest as soon as it faded. I had more trouble forgetting such incidents. An American could hardly complain about the violence in Vietnam—after all, violent crime was relatively rare here—but the easy acceptance of petty brutality always bothered me. I watched the newspaper boy, who was peering into the rearview mirror of a parked motorbike, checking for signs of blood.
“Let’s go,” I said.
As we got up to leave, Duc pulled a pack of chewing gum out of his pocket and handed sticks to me and Van. Van tore the wrapper off his gum and tossed the paper onto the asphalt of the road.
“What’s wrong with you?” I snapped. “How can you pollute your country?”
Van turned and looked at me. “Americans,” he said calmly. “You think you can tell us how to keep our country clean after you dropped napalm and Agent Orange on us?”
I was so angry and humiliated that I couldn’t look at him. But I no longer felt the guilt I’d always experienced when I thought about the war in Vietnam, as if, just by being an American, I was responsible for what my country had done. I regretted the war more than I ever had, having seen how it affected this city and the lives of the people I’d come to know. But over the past eighteen months, my sense of this place had changed dramatically. I’d once thought of Vietnam with the same stereotypes that one would use to describe a battered woman: miserable, victimized, helpless. Now, I would have used an entirely different set of adjectives: tough, resilient, passionate. As much as Vietnam had suffered, it didn’t need my guilt. It might need my help—normalizing relations was a good start—but what Van had said was true. The only thing Vietnam was famous for were the wars. I’d come to see the place as more complex than that. If I could go for weeks at a time in Hanoi without even remembering the wars, perhaps Americans could forge a different kind of relationship with Vietnam and move beyond the past.
So I didn’t break down when Van mentioned the napalm, and I didn’t apologize either. And that was a good thing, too, because when I looked over at him, I saw that he was grinning, waiting to see how I’d react. I looked at him for a moment. “I don’t know,” I said. “Napalm or a Wrigley’s wrapper. It’s not an easy call.”
In what might have been the clearest sign that the war was truly over, a Vietnamese and an American discovered that it wasn’t that hard, actually, to joke about it.
Something happens in the last few weeks of a woman’s pregnancy. Just when it seems impossible that her belly can grow any larger, it does. She totters under all the weight, can’t bend over, needs help simply to stand up. Her body becomes the object of public fascination. Strangers stop to stare, as if they think she’ll go into labor at that very moment. In Vietnam, the whole neighborhood becomes expectant.
Huong reached that point at the end of September, after I’d been back in Hanoi for about two months. Moving around became so difficult that she spent most of her time in bed, lying on her side reading magazines, or propped up on pillows like a Buddha. Huong had never been an energetic person, so she didn’t complain about her sedentary lifestyle. Aside from the discomforts of heartburn and the muscle strains associated with carrying forty extra pounds, she seemed perfectly content. Often in the late afternoons I’d lie on the bed with her and watch her stomach. At that time of day, the baby pushed against her belly with such force and in so many places at the same time that it looked like little animals were scurrying beneath her shirt. It was a peaceful time in the house. Tung wasn’t in jail. He and Huong weren’t fighting. Another American graduate student, Whitney, had rented the last room in the house.
It was during one of those quiet afternoons that Huong finally told me what had happened to Sa. After I left Vietnam, Huong had rented my room out to a string of long-term travelers, young Western backpackers who usually stayed a week or two in Hanoi before moving on to Laos, or Thailand, or China. Two Dutch women had stayed for three weeks. They were nice women, friendly, and Huong liked having them around. Then one day, one of the women discovered that $100 was missing from the spot where she’d hidden it at the bottom of a drawer. Huong was horrified. Nothing had ever been stolen from her house and, with Tung still in jail, the last thing she needed was more trouble with the police. The only person who’d been alone in that room was Sa, and Huong confronted her.
At first, Sa had only laughed, denying the charge. Then she’d gotten angry at Huong, declaring that she wasn’t a thief. Huong remembered that, in recent days, Sa had shown up in a new pair of blue jeans. And she had a wristwatch that her wages would never have enabled her to afford.
“Where did you get the watch?” Huong had asked.
Sa looked startled, but then she recovered. “I found it,” she declared.
“Where?”
“On the street!”
The chance of that was close to impossible. This was a country where scavengers competed for old newspapers and random bits of string. One of them would have grabbed a fallen wristwatch before Sa’s mind could even register that she’d seen it.
Sa finally broke down and confessed that she’d taken the money. She still had most of it left, squirreled away with the rest of her meager belongings, which hung in a plastic shopping bag on a hook in the kitchen. Huong replaced what was missing and gave the $100 back to the Dutch woman. Then she sent Sa, who was now hysterical, back to her father in the countryside.
Huong was more sad than angry about the incident. “Sa swore that she would never steal again, but I couldn’t let her stay,” she said. “I have to have someone here that I trust. I couldn’t keep a thief.”
I nodded.
“I can guess what happened when she got back home,” she continued. “Her father beat her, I’m sure. He was a mean man. She hates it there.”
I’d never seen Huong so regretful, so uncertain about a decision she’d made. But her choice had been difficult. She cared about Sa, but her livelihood depended on the reputation of the guesthouse. She couldn’t have people stealing from her guests. Still, both of us felt terrible. Here was a girl who had never seen anything but the desperate poverty of the countryside, suddenly confronted by more wealth than she could have possibly imagined. She’d seen foreigners spend more money on a cyclo ride than she could earn in a week. The temptation must have been unbearable, particularly to a girl like Sa, who’d only known the thinnest joys of life and ach
ed for more.
“She’s not a bad girl,” Huong had sighed. “I just got a letter from her last week, apologizing all over again, and telling me how much she wished she hadn’t done it.”
The last days of Huong’s pregnancy seemed to pass in slow motion. I’d never been so close to one before. Babies, in my experience, arrived prepackaged. A pregnant woman disappeared into the hospital and reappeared a day or two later, thinner, and with a newborn neatly swaddled in her arms. I’d never seen anyone go into labor. I’d never timed contractions or tried to ease the pain by massaging a lower back. The whole process was quite fascinating to me, but Vietnam wasn’t like the States, where pregnant women could invite almost anyone they liked into the birthing room with them. When Huong went into labor, she would disappear until she had the baby.
These days, I had a hard time leaving the house because I was so afraid that she would go into labor while I was gone. Every morning, I rushed down the stairs to find out whether or not her contractions had started. Every night before I went to bed, I made Tung promise that if anything happened during the night he wouldn’t forget to wake me. Tung started to joke that this was my pregnancy, not his wife’s. Whenever I appeared in the doorway, Huong would simply smile and say, “Not yet, Duyen. Not yet.”
Both of them assumed that my interest in the impending arrival was a result of how tardy I’d been in starting a family of my own. Though their assumptions were the same, their conclusions were different. Tung suspected that I had no intention of ever having children, and he took it as his mission to convince me that I should. Huong, on the other hand, believed I wanted children, and she assumed that my interest in her pregnancy was a sign that, at long last, I’d be getting down to business pretty soon myself.
Both of them were wrong, but Huong came closer to the truth. I did want a child, but I didn’t want one immediately. For nearly two years, I’d been listening to Vietnamese tell me that if I didn’t go ahead and have a family I’d be “ế,” as they called it, rotten fruit. There was a gap between when Vietnamese considered a woman “on the shelf” (mid-twenties) and when Americans did (mid-thirties or even forties). I preferred to follow the American standard, which, supposedly, had more to do with biological clocks than with one’s waning ability to catch a man. But now that I was over thirty, I was starting to take even the American schedule more seriously. I worried that I’d never find anyone I’d want to settle down with, and I also began to see my future as a choice: husband and family, or Vietnam.
The question of husband and family had begun to weigh on me even more of late. I hadn’t told Phai, or anyone in Hanoi, the entire truth. I did have a new boyfriend. Sort of. It was one of those situations that I thought Vietnamese would not be able to understand. I had met Todd in San Francisco in February, eight months earlier. He was a tall, dark-haired graduate student from the English Department at U.C. Berkeley, miserably writing his dissertation. Todd’s biological clock wasn’t ticking quite as quickly as mine was and, after a couple of dates, he told me that he wanted to continue to go out with different people. After that, our relationship was determinedly casual. We agreed that we weren’t monogamous, but he was the only one who actually wasn’t. I kept meaning to call the whole thing off. Somehow, I never did. I loved going out to movies with him, eating pizza, debating the merits of Shakespeare’s plays. When we fought, we ended up laughing. We grew to like each other more and more. Strangely, what seemed destined to fall apart didn’t. Still, it was impossible to define what was happening, and after a while that became hard to take. The idea of marriage and family had started to loom over my life, and I had to know whether I wanted to be with him or not. After six months of not being able to decide how I felt, I had tabled it for both of us and gone back to Vietnam.
My flying halfway around the world had, not surprisingly, forced a change. Letters started arriving once, twice, sometimes three times a week. Consciously, I dismissed it, but, unconsciously, riding my bike through the crowded streets of Hanoi, I found myself composing long letters to Todd in my head. I couldn’t figure it out at all, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell Tung and Huong, much less Phai, about it.
With that strange prescience of hers, however, Huong had guessed. “You’re in love with someone new,” she said one day, not even bothering to pose it as a question.
I denied it. “Love” was a word that came easily to couples in Vietnam, as I, from experience, could attest. In the United States, people could have sex with each other for weeks, or months, or even years and never say they loved each other. When Todd and I were together, the word “love” came up to describe favored toppings for pizza, Martin Scorsese movies, two-year-old nieces and nephews, but never each other. “I am not,” I told Huong, and I believed it.
Despite Huong’s impending labor, I managed to leave the house long enough to earn some money. My column on foreign investment was taking me into the business community, the sphere of Vietnamese society that, these days, was getting all the attention in the national and international press. Riding from appointment to appointment on my rickety borrowed bicycle, I interviewed heads of banks, high-level government officials, directors of multinational companies, and in-ter national business consultants. Normally, business and finance didn’t interest me, but I knew that economic development in Vietnam was having a transformative effect on topics that did interest me—the social, political, and cultural life of the country. In Vietnam, which traditionally placed so high a value on scholarship that it set aside a day every year to honor its teachers, money had taken on such importance that the country’s best students were dropping out of school to become real estate developers and tour guides. The change was, of course, most trans-parent in the cities. I only had to remember the anxiety with which the young Hanoi actress had asked for the proper pronunciation of “Rémy Martin” to understand just how deeply the commodities of the international market were beginning to affect the once-insular life of this city.
One day, I went to the restored colonial-era mansion that now served as the Vietnam headquarters of the Korean conglomerate Bright Star. As part of my research on how foreign companies set up businesses in Vietnam, I was going to interview Mr. Choi, a high-level official there. Mr. Choi’s secretary, Mrs. Lien, ushered me into Mr. Choi’s office, which was more spacious than an entire floor of Huong and Tung’s house and filled with solid, finely crafted furniture. As Mrs. Lien poured hot coffee into a porcelain cup for me, I looked at the framed photographs on the walls, most of which showed groups of Asian businessmen smiling widely and shaking hands. For the next fifteen or twenty minutes, I heard about Mrs. Lien’s studies at Hanoi University, her husband and children, and how she’d managed to land this coveted job at Bright Star. “And you,” she asked. “Please tell me how you feel about our country, Vietnam?”
The charming thing about Mrs. Lien was that she wasn’t stalling at all. Western-style business practices were still new in Vietnam, and though a secretary like Mrs. Lien seemed capable of scheduling appointments, typing, filing, and taking messages as well as any secretary in New York, she didn’t make the same distinctions between work life and home life, between the personal and professional as, I imagined, a New Yorker would. As I’d noticed so many times before, Vietnamese do not value personal space as much as Americans do. “Càng đong càng vui,” Vietnamese like to say. The more crowded, the better. By the time Mr. Choi finally showed up for our meeting, I’d given Mrs. Lien advice on how to teach her children English, and she’d told me which shop on Hang Gai Street was the best place to buy silk and which market in the city sold the highest quality velvet. Then, as smoothly as she’d transformed herself into a mother and connoisseur of fine fabric, she reverted back into the demure and efficient secretary and installed herself silently behind her desk.
Mr. Choi was nearing middle age, a tall, robust bureaucrat who wore his dark business suit very naturally. He carried out the interview with the same professional ease and confidence as any execu
tive in the States. But, in contrast to the frankness of his secretary, Mr. Choi displayed much more reserve than I would have expected from a typical American executive, who might, at least, have asked me how long I’d worked for the newspaper or where I grew up. He seemed convinced that the reputation of his company depended on erasing any hint of his own personality. Polite and formal, he answered my questions carefully, jumping up to check in his files for any additional information he thought might help him make his points. There was only one glitch. Though his English was better than Mrs. Lien’s, his accent was much worse. I found myself in the embarrassing position of having to ask him to repeat such essential words as “authority,” “electronics,” and “Tuesday.” Several times, we had to turn to Mrs. Lien and ask for her translation. Somehow, I managed to get several pages of information on Bright Star projects, at least enough that I could write, with confidence, that the company was building an $82 million refrigerator manufacturing plant on the outskirts of Hanoi.
At the end of the interview, I stood up and put my notebook and pen in my bag. Mr. Choi got up and, from what I was able to gather, told me to call if I had any questions. I nodded, shook his hand, and followed the secretary out the door. As soon as he was out of earshot, Mrs. Lien took my hand and walked me down the stairs. “Don’t forget, buy the French velvet, not the Chinese, and definitely not the Vietnamese,” she told me. “It’s more expensive, of course, but it’s worth it.”
In the middle of October, Susie, a friend of mine from California, came to visit. We decided to go to Ha Long Bay and invited Linh to join us. Then, the day before our departure, Huong went into labor. I came home from my Vietnamese lesson in the morning and found the front door to the house closed. When I opened it, the living room was deserted. Even the new servant who’d been hired to replace Sa wasn’t in the kitchen. I threw my bag on the floor and ran up the stairs to Tung and Huong’s loft. Huong was leaning against the pillows in her Buddha position, and Tung was sitting beside her massaging her legs. The new girl, Ly, was as reserved as Sa had been exuberant, as calm as Sa had been energetic. She was squatting in a corner, folding clothes and packing them neatly into a bag. “Finally,” Tung said, not bothering to hide the smirk on his face. “We couldn’t leave for the hospital before you got home.”