by Dana Sachs
Tung rode in the car with me to the airport. We talked for a while about his plan to open the Kangaroo Pub with Max, a dream for him that had never materialized, but in which he still believed. Tung’s dreams were as grand as ever, but, these days, he seemed more content with what he had, less desperate to make every new dream come true. Sitting in the car with him, I wondered if it was age or experience that had mellowed him, but I didn’t have a chance to ask. Tung was so worn out from Tet that when I turned to look at him again, just after we’d crossed the bridge out of the city, his eyes were closed and his breathing was already heavy in sleep. I turned again and looked out the window. I didn’t mind the silence at all.
The night before I left, I’d invited friends over. Phai came, but he didn’t stay long. When he got up to go, I walked outside and stood on the steps with him. The night was quiet, with only the occasional rumble of a motorbike passing by on Dream Street. Behind us, I could hear Tung and Paula laughing. Duc, lying in Huong’s arms, began to cry. A cassette tape of Vietnamese pop music, which my former student John had brought, formed a sugary, synthetic backdrop to the murmur of people’s voices. Phai seemed distracted, but anxious to say something before he left. Just as he was about to speak, however, Tung’s mother arrived on her bicycle. After a minute, she went into the house. I waited to see if Phai would speak, but I didn’t press him. Whatever it was he wanted to say, I wasn’t anxious to hear it. I wanted this good-bye to be kind to both of us. These days, I felt grateful to him in a way that, even in my most articulate moments, I couldn’t have expressed.
I lunged forward and hugged him. When I pulled back, he was looking at me. He was smiling, but I could see the hurt, again, in his eyes. He took my hand and squeezed it, then he turned and walked down the steps. I watched him pass the building that had once housed the motorbike shop, the spot where he’d squatted on the sidewalk taking apart a carburetor while I stood on my balcony, gazing down at him. The two of us had walked along that sidewalk together so many times, heading off for a bowl of noodle soup after spending hours in bed. All of that seemed long ago now, years in the past, but not impossible.
“Duyen!” Huong called to me from inside the house.
In the gray morning, the road that led to the airport passed along rice fields and was dotted with puddles from a predawn rain. We drove past a man carrying a bride on the back of his motorbike. The woman sat sidesaddle, her white dress hiked up to keep the ruffles from dragging through the mud. Her arm was around his waist, and her face was impassive as she stared ahead, up the road. Looking at them through the car window, I remembered a photograph I’d seen once of an image like this one, published in some magazine somewhere in the States. It was supposed to reveal the quintessence of modern Vietnam: the fascination with Western style, the contrast between the novelty of technology and the timelessness of the rice fields, a bride’s hope for the future competing against the hopelessness of keeping her wedding gown clean as she passed along this muddy road. The image was perfect, really, but I didn’t like the thought of it. Looking out through the window, I could already feel the growing distance between myself and this place I had come to love. It was so easy, from far away, to turn people into symbols, a bride into “Vietnam,” the indefinable into apparent truth.
When we arrived at the airport, I nudged Tung awake, and he helped me with my bags. He wasn’t allowed into the terminal, but, since I had two hours before my flight took off, he suggested that I check in, then come back outside and drink a cup of coffee with him. Tung was getting a free ride back in my taxi, but that wasn’t until after the next international flight arrived, in several hours. I knew how much he hated to wait.
It only took me half an hour to put my luggage through the X-ray machines set up to make sure tourists weren’t taking any antiquities (or seditious videotapes or books) out of the country, then to check my luggage, pick up my boarding pass, and pay my airport tax to leave Vietnam. By the time I got back outside, Tung was talking to a man I didn’t recognize. “This is my friend, Minh. He drives a taxi,” Tung explained.
I nodded at Minh, then turned to Tung. “Do you want to go for coffee now?” I asked.
Tung looked at me, then glanced nervously at his friend, who was peering out across the parking lot and twirling a key chain on his finger. “Minh’s on his way back to the city now,” Tung said. He left it at that, looking embarrassed.
I understood immediately. “Go with him,” I said, emphasizing more satisfaction in my words than I actually felt inside.
Tung looked at me, his face uncertain. Minh had already started off across the pavement, headed toward the parking lot.
“Go on,” I urged.
Tung stood there, hesitating, and I imagined that he was trying to figure out what Huong would say he should do. I could tell by the look on his face that the lure of the ride was too much for him. He grinned at me, embarrassed, then we hugged each other, American style. A moment later, he was jogging off across the parking lot, getting into the little gray car, and driving away. And that was it. I turned around then, went into the airport, and prepared to return to America. During all my time in Vietnam, I’d never wanted anything more than to see these people as people, not as the enemy, not as poverty, not as a focus for America’s anger or guilt. The image of Tung dozing off in a car heading back toward the city didn’t say as much about modern Vietnam as a bride on a motorbike might have done. But it was the Vietnam I knew. It was true. And it was what I’d always wanted.
EPILOGUE
When I returned to Vietnam in May of 1998, the house on Dream Street wasn’t a house anymore. Tung had managed to lease it out, long-term, to a Vietnamese company that had converted the whole building into an office. I felt a bit sad knowing that I wouldn’t get to sleep in my sweet bedroom anymore, but I wasn’t surprised by the news. I had known about their move for months already. These days, Tung had e-mail. We didn’t communicate very often, because we were still pretty lazy correspondents, but we managed to exchange all the important information nonetheless.
Tung and Huong knew that Todd and I had married in 1995, that Todd had been hired as an English professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and that we had moved there from San Francisco in 1996. They also knew that in 1997 our son Jesse was born. Of course, Huong had been ready for me to have a baby for years, and she’d even managed to send, through mutual friends, two packages of baby clothes: the first as a wedding present (a not-too-subtle hint) and the second after Jesse actually arrived.
Now that they’d leased their house, they were living, again, with Huong’s parents, where they’d spent those first few months after Duc was born. Tung had never opened the Kangaroo Pub; now he was putting his energy into arranging tours for foreigners traveling through Vietnam. He’d introduced Sa, the young woman who’d stolen the $100, to a German man looking for a Vietnamese wife. But Sa’s strong spirit didn’t appeal to a Westerner who wanted a demure Asian bride, and the German ended up marrying Ly instead. Now, Ly was living somewhere in Germany. Sa was back in the countryside, working in the rice fields with her father again.
I also knew about Phai. Sort of. In one e-mail, after telling me the news about Ly’s marriage, Tung had added, “Phai also got married last year, his wife already five months gone.” I spent a long time trying to decipher that one. Had Tung’s English gotten so good that he knew that “gone,” in this context, could be taken to mean “pregnant”? Or, when he wrote “gone” did he mean gone?
The telephone in our guesthouse room rang just a few minutes after we arrived. Todd was holding Jesse down on the bed, changing a diaper. I’d been unpacking our suitcases, and I walked over to the phone and picked it up. “Hello?” I said. Except for a few intermittent conversations with friends in San Francisco, I hadn’t spoken Vietnamese in more than two years. Luckily, except for a slight difference in pronunciation—“allo” instead of “hello”—Vietnamese answer the phone just like Americans do.
�
�Duyen? Dana?” It was a man’s voice, and vaguely familiar.
“Yes?” I said in English.
“I am Phai!”
My mind raced around like a nearsighted person trying to find her glasses. Finally, I was able to stutter a ridiculous-sounding, “Có khỏe không?” I remembered that it was the wrong thing to say, that Vietnamese reserved “How are you?” for people who’d been sick, but I was out of practice.
“Rất khỏe,” Phai answered. “Có con gái rồi!” I’m just fine—I’ve got a baby girl!
“Really?” I was so thrilled that I dropped the Vietnamese entirely, and I was grateful, for once, that Phai had enough English to keep the conversation going.
“My family. Party. Wednesday. You come?” he asked.
“Yes!” I said.
Because I returned to Vietnam with a husband and a child (and a male child at that), my friends treated my arrival like the homecoming of a hero. Finally, after all these years, I’d fulfilled those womanly duties about which they’d been needling me all along. “Now you are a happy lady!” cooed Linh. “You have every dream come true in life.” Huong, who was less given to hyperbole, said, “It’s about time. You’re old already.” And Tra, who was more skeptical about the institution of marriage, and more taken by the West, told me, “I’m happy you found a good American. Vietnamese guys are too much bother.”
Linh called herself a happy lady, too. She and Son and their boys had recently returned to Vietnam from France. In addition to his job at the Vietnamese embassy, Son had moonlighted by translating legal documents for French families adopting Vietnamese babies. He’d amassed a considerable fortune that way, and their house in Hanoi, which they’d renovated once already, was now a four-story palace. They had two bedrooms, two kitchens, two bathrooms, an exercise machine, a washer and dryer, an aquarium full of tropical fish, and a life-size sculpture of a tiger.
Much more than Linh and Son’s material life had improved. Their experience showed that money could solve an awful lot of problems. Of course, Linh still complained to me that she didn’t believe her husband loved her enough. She had yearnings he couldn’t satisfy, and those desires would probably never fade away. But she was a stay-at-home mom now. She had her own motorbike and no longer had to argue with her husband over transportation. For a couple that had struggled, daily, over such issues, being rich was no small thing. I would never forget the envy in Linh’s eyes, years back, when she came over to my house in Hanoi and saw the expensive furniture and frivolous knickknacks with which Tung and Huong had furnished their home. Now, she was a woman of leisure herself, spending her days taking Japanese classes, visiting friends, and cooking. She spoke of the changes in her life with such joy and relief that it seemed she would never take a single luxury for granted.
Linh’s life had improved, but Tung and Huong’s appeared to have gotten worse, at least in terms of material convenience. They were living in a cramped two-room house in Huong’s parents’ compound, some distance from the center of town. Compared to the average living conditions in the West, compared, even, to what they had enjoyed on Dream Street, their new conditions were almost squalid. Tung and Huong slept in the main room, which contained, in addition to their bed, as much of the furniture from their old place as they could squeeze in: a couch, chairs, bureaus, a wardrobe, desk, television, and computer. Off the main room, Huong’s “kitchen” was a cold-water sink with a bit of floor space underneath it. Beyond that was a tiny toilet and the boys’ bedroom, which didn’t have much more space than a closet.
Given such an obvious change, I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear Huong and Tung complaining, but I didn’t. Like Linh and Son, they had achieved a degree of contentment with their lives that I couldn’t have imagined a few years before. It wasn’t that either of these couples had solved all their marital problems, or even that they now communicated better than they had before. But, as Huong explained to me when the two of us had a moment alone, she and Tung had finally learned “to understand each other better, without having to talk.” She seemed more content than I’d ever seen her, and she took better care of herself, too. She wore makeup, jewelry, pretty dresses, and even high heels. In another woman, such attention to fashion might not have meant a thing, but with Huong it demonstrated that she’d started to care. She wanted to do more than sit around her house all day and watch TV. The two of us zoomed around on her motorbike, ate in restaurants, and went shopping. When she heard Todd and I worrying about whether or not restaurant food would be hygienic enough for Jesse, she offered to make him rice porridge to eat instead. For the remainder of our visit, she cooked a batch of it every morning, then brought it over to our guesthouse on her motorbike.
Not all of my friends were happier now than they’d been when I met them. In the summer of 1997, Thailand’s economy had collapsed, sparking the beginning of the Asian economic crisis. Vietnam’s excessive bureaucracy and rampant corruption had already helped to dim the once-glowing forecasts about foreign investment and the country’s economy, and this new regional crisis didn’t help. Fewer multinational corporations were willing to invest in Vietnam, and some that had already invested were pulling out. Among all of my friends, Tra had suffered the most. Armed with her American M.B.A., she had returned to Vietnam in 1996 and, at first, been offered a number of jobs. None had thrilled her, and she’d decided to take her time before settling on anything permanent. Then, as the economy declined, the offers started to dry up. Now, Tra had the exact same job at a Vietnamese government institute that she’d had before she ever left for the States. Her salary amounted to something like thirty dollars a month, hardly the income she’d struggled all those years in Michigan to earn.
As expected, Tra’s personal life had changed as well. Her marriage to Tuyen had finally ended in divorce, and their son Minh, a teenager now, preferred to spend most of his time with his father. Tra lived alone, renting out the spare rooms in her big house to boarders. She was philosophical about her bad luck, and tried to joke about it, but she couldn’t hide her sadness. “You’ve got to find me a good American husband,” she told me and Todd, as if a perfect spouse were as easy to come by as the jars of Oil of Olay I’d brought her from the States. “I’ve had enough of these Vietnamese men. I want someone progressive!” Tra was forty years old and as attractive and resilient as ever. But it was hard to say that her future looked bright.
Before coming to Vietnam, I’d traveled quite a bit. I kept moving, however, and almost never returned to a place I’d already seen. The Scotland I know is from 1983. India, for me, is frozen in 1989. After coming here over the course of nearly a decade, I had enjoyed the luxury of watching it change. I remembered when there were twice as many bicycles as motorbikes in Hanoi. These days, it seemed like just the opposite. I remembered when the typical summertime outfit for a Hanoi woman would be a thin cotton pajama set and plastic slip-on sandals. Now, she’d be as likely to have on hot pants and platform shoes. I remembered when red banners hung over the streets, proclaiming the wisdom of Ho Chi Minh. You could still see the banners these days, but it was hard to spot them among all the billboards for Coca-Cola and Toshiba. I felt grateful to have witnessed this country’s transformation over all these years. But it was the more intimate changes that moved me most. Tung had gray hairs now. Linh’s son Giang had grown into a shy and gangly teenager. Grandmother Nhi had taken ill and passed away.
And after all this time, I could see how much I’d changed as well. Living in Vietnam had caused a shift in the way I saw the world. When I read about the war in Bosnia, the genocide in Rwanda, or our bombing of Iraq, the people of those countries no longer seemed so far away, or impossible to comprehend. They could have been Huong, or Linh, or Tra, or me. I had learned, finally, that I am not so different from all the other people in this world. The idea seems simple, and obvious, and I’m sure that my teachers tried, again and again, to teach it to me years ago in school. But it is one thing to hear something and another to figure it out
for oneself. I had to spend some time in Vietnam to learn it.
On the night of Phai’s party, Todd, Jesse, and I took a taxi to the Nghia Dung neighborhood. Phai was waiting for us in front of his house. As soon as we appeared, a huge smile spread across his face and he hurried toward us, both arms outstretched. “Allo!” he said, immediately grabbing Todd’s hand and shaking it vigorously. Then his eyes swept over to me. “Duyen!” he said. He’d changed a bit. He sported a sparse mustache, and his skin, older now, had grown less smooth and fresh. His body was as small and wiry as ever, but his face had filled out enough that a Vietnamese would have clucked approvingly, “Béo hơn!”—You’ve fattened up! What struck me most deeply, and what stayed with me longest, was the change in his expression. Tonight, he emitted confidence and satisfaction. His eyes showed none of that too-familiar pain, or the failed attempts to hide it. “Baby!” he exclaimed, and, with one scoop, he lifted Jesse out of my arms and carried him like a tiny prince into the house.