The House on Dream Street

by Dana Sachs

  As much as I rolled my eyes over the things I heard from Tung, I found much more upsetting what I read in the books and pamphlets I’d borrowed from Scott Stein. One glossy booklet, a study by CARE International in Vietnam titled “The Risk of AIDS in Vietnam,” examined sexual practices and attitudes among urban men and “sex workers” (their less judgmental term for prostitutes). Ninety-seven percent of the people interviewed in the study knew about AIDS, and most knew something about its transmittal as well. That statistic seemed to prove that the Vietnamese government, which had plastered the country with frightening “do it and die”–style AIDS posters, had actually had some success in educating people about the threat. But aside from generally understanding that AIDS could be transmitted sexually, Vietnamese had a fuzzy knowledge of everything else related to the epidemic. Many believed, for example, that HIV carriers looked sick and could therefore easily be avoided as sex partners. Some claimed that AIDS hadn’t arrived in Vietnam and that they couldn’t get the virus unless they had sex with a foreigner. It was, of course, possible to combat such ignorance with education. But there was something more disturbing that the study had uncovered. A significant number of Vietnamese believed that destiny, not their own behavior, would determine whether or not they got AIDS. As one sex worker, who wouldn’t argue when her clients refused to wear condoms, put it, “I have to accept my fate.”

  Vietnamese women were willing to use condoms, but they wouldn’t use them unless their partners agreed. Because of that, Scott and I decided to focus the documentary on convincing men to protect themselves and their families. We’d have to expose the myths surrounding AIDS, but that wasn’t enough. We decided to present a set of options: Celibacy was the safest way to protect yourself from AIDS. If you couldn’t be celibate, we’d say, you should be monogamous. If you couldn’t be monogamous, well, at least wear a condom. We took the practical approach.

  I knew, from my own experience, that these were racy topics for Vietnam. The government had put considerable effort into family planning programs, but, from what I’d seen, they hadn’t put much energy at all into simply teaching the birds and the bees. One unmarried friend had asked if she could get pregnant from kissing. And I remembered all the time I’d spent with Phai, explaining the connection between sexual intercourse and the birth of babies. As an American, I still found such ignorance astonishing, but people simply did not discuss sex in Vietnam.

  By the end of October, the script was ready. All we needed was to find someone to translate my English draft into Vietnamese. I suggested to Scott that he hire Yen. These days, she was much happier than she’d been after the government had kicked Nick out of Vietnam. Nick had spent most of the autumn trying to secure a visa to come back for a visit. His chances had seemed slim. But the Vietnamese government, always unpredictable, had suddenly decided to grant it. Nick would arrive in Vietnam a few days before Todd. Yen was elated.

  Still, the trauma of the previous summer had taken a toll on her. Before her troubles with the police began, she’d enjoyed a lucrative and highly respected position with an American consulting firm. Yen’s political problems, however, had alarmed her boss, a Yale grad named Edward who took pride in his good relations with the Hanoi government. Rather than defending Yen’s civil rights, Edward responded to the news of her troubles by firing her. Now she spent most of her time lying in bed at her parents’ house, reading novels. She seemed like a perfect candidate for translating our script. And she had excellent English skills (she’d translated Peter Pan into Vietnamese as her senior thesis).

  My only qualm about Yen translating the script had to do with its content. Yen was as sophisticated about the world as anyone I knew here, but she was still Vietnamese, and so uncomfortable talking about anything related to sex that she couldn’t even say the word “menstruation” without lowering her eyes and starting to blush. I didn’t know how she’d cope with the explicit dialogue in the script, not to mention Scott Stein himself. When I tried to warn her about him, though, she shrugged it off. “I’m going to be translating for you, not him,” she said.

  I found myself seated once more at the big conference table, facing Mr. Sex. This time, Yen was sitting beside me.

  Scott began the meeting by dropping a handful of Rely souvenirs—condoms, key chains, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap—onto the table right in front of Yen. Then he pulled up a chair and sat down, facing her. He had a friendly look on his face, but his gaze was focused on Yen as if he were a carnivore examining his prey. She began to shift in her seat.

  “So, Yen,” Scott began, “tell me something about yourself.”

  As Yen spoke, Scott reached his hand over to the pile of condoms among the freebies on the table. He tore one open. At first, Yen watched him, but as he slowly began to stretch the condom between his fingers, her face grew tense and she dropped her gaze. She didn’t stop talking, however. Barely missing a beat, she said that she was in the midst of searching for a Vietnamese publisher for her Peter Pan translation.

  Scott’s eyes widened at the mention of the children’s classic, then he asked, “Have you seen our commercials?” He didn’t look up. He was stretching the condom like a balloon between his fingers.

  “Yes,” Yen said quietly. She was rubbing the bridge of her nose with one hand, a gesture that served to shield her eyes.

  Scott must have wanted a more emphatic answer. “You have seen them?” he asked again.

  “I have seen them,” Yen answered, still refusing to look at him.

  Scott put the opening of the condom up to his mouth and began to blow. I didn’t move. Yen, hearing the sound of air expanding into latex, shrank into her seat. The condom expanded until it approached the size of a basketball, and then Scott tied off the end. “I want to make sure that you’re comfortable with all the subjects you’ll have to translate,” he said. “I can’t have anyone embarrassed around here.” With that, he lifted the condom balloon into the air, aimed, and bounced it like a free throw off Yen’s head.

  As soon as it hit her, Yen looked up. Her face was white, but she stared at Scott without flinching. “Are you looking for a translator or a foil for your comedy act, Mr. Stein?” she asked.

  Scott leaned closer to Yen. “I’m looking for a translator,” he told her.

  “Then I’ll do it,” she said. And then she added, “But you had better not tell anyone that I work for you.”

  Hanoi in autumn turned out to be lovely, golden, worth the wait. The cafés beside the West Lake were crowded day and night. People strolled, took meandering bike rides, rented paddleboats, fished. The air was cool and dry and breezy. The city seemed perfect.

  The documentary was the last bit of work I had to finish before Todd arrived in Vietnam. On top of that, I’d been rushing to write three columns in advance for my Vietnam Investment Review assignment so that I could take a vacation. For the first time since I’d lived in Vietnam, I was working the kind of schedule I might have worked in the States. It was a good thing Huong was at her mother’s house, because I wouldn’t have had time anymore to sit around in the living room, watching traffic. I hardly even had time to go by and visit her. I missed the freedom I’d once had to sit around and absorb everything around me, and I knew that I no longer paid attention to the world as diligently as I had in the past. In a sense, I took Hanoi for granted now, but feeling comfortable made me love the city as much as ever, perhaps more.

  I rarely saw Phai these days. I was hardly home, and he didn’t stop by the house much either. The tension of those first few weeks had eased, and sometimes when we saw each other we were even able to talk a little bit. On the afternoon I got my bag of gifts from Mr. Choi at Bright Star, Phai and I had examined it all together, like pirates going through their loot. Another day, we managed to have a serious conversation about his prospects for a wife, although the only thing he had to say on the subject was that he didn’t have any. Huong had explained Phai’s predicament to me already. Phai wanted a woman who was sophisticated,
educated, and pretty, but no woman like that would be attracted to a guy like him. One of the most interesting cultural differences I’d discovered between Westerners and Vietnamese centered on our varying concepts of beauty. Huong and I never tired of discussing who was good-looking and who wasn’t, and we disagreed a lot. Although, to me, Phai’s dark skin made him beautiful, Vietnamese valued pale complexions and, according to Huong, women here would not consider him attractive. Worse, he was poor and unskilled in anything that could provide a decent wage. The girls he liked weren’t interested. And the ones who might like him, country girls like Ly or Sa, he wouldn’t even look at.

  I kept meaning to discuss Todd with Phai, but put it off. Of course, he eventually found out anyway. One afternoon, he came by the house and asked if I wanted to go for a walk. It was a crisp, sunny day, and, with anyone else, I would have agreed immediately. But, with Phai, the prospect of an open-ended outing made me uncomfortable. Too many awkward topics could come up.

  “I’m sorry. I’m just so busy,” I told him.

  We were standing in the living room. Phai looked away, and, for a moment, stood gazing out the door. His expression wasn’t angry, just thoughtful, and I waited to hear what he would say. After a while, he turned around. “Your boyfriend’s coming for a visit?” he asked.

  My first impulse was to say no. I’d been denying that Todd was a boyfriend to myself for so long that I could certainly deny it to Phai a little longer. But he deserved frankness. “Who told you?” I asked.

  Huong, predictably, had taken matters into her own hands, telling Phai everything she knew, and then some. She’d even said that Todd and I had been planning this visit for months.

  “That’s not true,” I said. I hadn’t been entirely truthful with Phai, but I hadn’t lied to him, either.

  There must have been something desperate in my voice, because Phai smiled at me with such warmth that I felt ashamed at my efforts to protect myself at his expense. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s good. That’s what you want. He’ll make you happy.” He didn’t look upset. He looked relieved.

  Phai’s worry, I saw now, was not so much that I’d met someone new in the States, but that I would meet someone new in Vietnam. I’d always told him, truthfully, that I felt the cultural differences between us were too great for us to be happy together forever. Now I saw how deeply Phai wanted to believe that.

  “Do you think you’ll marry him?” Phai asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Though Phai didn’t look upset, I must have, because he said to me, very gently, “This is good. You’ll be happy with him,” as if it were me, not him, who needed consolation. I only felt worse. No matter how much I ever gave him, Phai always wanted to give me more.

  He left a few minutes later. I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to avoid thinking about what a jerk I’d been. I might have ruminated over it all evening, had something not come up that took my mind off my own problems. About six o’clock, Ly came by the house to pick up a bag of clothes for Tung and Huong. The baby, she told me, was running a high fever and showed signs of lung infection. He was back in the hospital.

  13. Firecrackers on Dream Street

  THE MATERNITY HOSPITAL WHERE HUONG had delivered her baby had been rudimentary and rather run-down, but it came to seem positively high-tech in comparison to the pediatric hospital where I visited the baby the next morning. Tung brought me with him on his motorbike, which we parked in a lot at one side of an empty courtyard covered in weeds and rubble. Simply negotiating the cracked and broken sidewalk that led into the building felt like crossing a rocky river. The building was small and unadorned, the kind of ugly, no-nonsense structure that went up quickly and cheaply in the Socialist bloc. Inside, the floors were covered with dust, the windows cracked or missing panes. In the empty hallways, the sounds of coughing, machinery, and crying babies swept along the corridors, bouncing back and forth against the hard, bare walls.

  We didn’t see anybody until we’d walked down one corridor, through a set of doors, around a corner, up another hall, and then into a large room filled with ten wooden mat-covered beds, none of which was wider than a narrow cot. Two or three people sat on each bed. Another couple of people squatted on the spaces on the floor between the beds. Every other available space was taken up by suitcases, water bottles, dirty dishes, blankets, pillows, newspapers, and plastic bags full of dry rice, oranges, and loaves of bread. The place reminded me of a cramped, crowded compartment on a Vietnamese passenger train, where whole families and piles of belongings shared the narrow confines of a single berth. Babies were everywhere, sleeping, crying, coughing, nursing, or lying on tiny specks of blanket, staring up at the spiderwebs that stretched like lace across the ceiling. No one spoke loudly, but the simple presence of so many people made the room throb with noise.

  Huong was sitting up on a bed near the far end of the room, her back against the wall, the baby, wrapped in a white blanket, sleeping in her arms. Ly sat cross-legged at the bottom of the bed, paging through the morning paper. When Tung and I appeared, Ly scooted over on the bed, making room for me to sit down. I sat closest to Huong and looked down at the baby. His skin was a rosy pink, but his breaths were thick and wheezy, like the slurpy sound of the last drops of liquid drawn up through a straw.

  “How is he?” I asked.

  Huong shrugged. They’d had a hard night, she said. The baby’s lungs were congested, and he was so exhausted from the simple effort of breathing that he didn’t even have energy to cry. He’d stayed awake the entire night, lying in Huong’s arms, desperately wheezing. Because he was breathing out of his mouth, he couldn’t nurse, and they’d brought him to the hospital because they were afraid he’d become dehydrated. The doctors had immediately put him on antibiotics, a series of injections that had made him scream in panic. When he finally slept, the sound of other babies screaming inevitably woke him up again.

  Huong’s face was pale and her eyes looked old and tired. “Are you okay?” I asked.

  She reached over, picked up a cup of water that was sitting next to her on the bed, and took a sip. “This is normal,” she said. “The same thing happened with Viet. Only with Viet it was even worse.” She spoke matter-of-factly, as if sojourns in the hospital were part of every woman’s childbearing experience.

  Tung was squatting on the floor, unpacking a metal canister filled with hot noodle soup. Huong gingerly handed Ly the sleeping baby, then picked up the soup and some chopsticks and began to eat. Tung pulled some oranges and hard-boiled eggs out of a plastic bag and set them on the bed. “We’re supposed to see the doctor again in a few minutes,” he said.

  Huong nodded. The two of them went through the simple tasks in front of them with serious concentration, as if they weren’t willing to think beyond whatever required attention at that particular moment. Huong silently ate her breakfast. Ly held the baby on her lap, swaying back and forth. I looked around the room. A few men wore jeans like Tung’s. A few women had on gold bracelets and sported stylish haircuts, but almost everyone else wore the simple garments of the countryside: faded cotton pants, shirts with patches on them, plastic sandals. To our right, a woman was dozing, her body curled into a ball at the top of the bed. Beside her, a little boy was singing to an infant who lay motionless on the bed, staring at the wall. At the other end of the bed, three runny-nosed little girls played peekaboo with an old pink shirt. To our left, a young girl was holding a medicine dropper full of red liquid over the mouth of a sallow-skinned baby. A teenage boy sat next to her, talking her through the procedure, holding the baby’s legs to keep them from thrashing.

  In comparison to these two infants, Huong’s son, with his pink skin and plump body, looked fairly healthy. Still, every few minutes loud coughs wracked his tiny body, forcing his parents to stop what they were doing and stare at him in silent agony. After one such moment, Huong turned to me. “Last night a baby died in here,” she said. The family had come from a village very far away
in the countryside and by the time they got to the hospital, the baby was already nearly dead. The family stayed at the hospital for two days, just waiting for the infant to die.

  “What was the problem?” I asked.

  Huong shrugged. “A cough,” she said, reaching over to take her own infant away from Ly. Feeling his body pass from one pair of hands to another, the baby’s eyelids opened slightly, then fluttered closed again. His open mouth rounded into a perfect circle and he drifted back to sleep. His breath softened into the purring of a cat. Huong stared down at him, her fingers gently smoothing his dark hair down across his forehead. I tried to imagine how I would feel holding my sick child in my arms, helpless to do anything to cure him or even to relieve his pain. Had Huong and Tung lived in a more affluent country, they would have had access to advanced medical technology. The baby from the countryside might have survived, had it lived in the States. Here was something worse than losing a child, I realized: losing a child and knowing that it didn’t have to happen. But maybe those parents didn’t know that health care could be more effective somewhere else.

  The teenage boy on the bed next to ours asked Huong something, then motioned in my direction. I was so used to being pointed at and discussed that I didn’t even pay attention until Huong began to laugh. I looked at her.

  “He thinks you want to adopt a baby,” she said.

  It was hard to tell if he was asking out of curiosity, or if he was interested in finding a home for his child. I looked at him and shook my head. Of course, I had no intention of doing such a thing, but I looked much more closely at the baby on the bed beside us. It was a scrawny little thing, only a few days old, but I had seen it kicking and screaming with an energy that belied its health and age. Calm now, it let out a sigh, then turned its head and, from beneath a shag of jet black hair, looked in my direction. My stomach clinched. I could imagine signing some papers and, in the not-too-distant future, having that baby lying on my bed back on Dream Street, then sleeping in my lap on an airplane headed to the States. Years from now, I’d tell my daughter—or son?—about that first moment when our eyes had met in that crowded hospital in Hanoi. The child would be big by then, an American Vietnamese, still scrawny and tough. A survivor. A kid in Adidas sneakers and Gap jeans, an Asian Jew who only knew what I could teach about Vietnam. Destiny, I would tell my child, had drawn us together.