The House on Dream Street (11 page)

The classes were not structured at all. We practiced telling time. We played house. We sang “Head and Shoulders” and “If You’re Happy and You Know It Clap Your Hands.” One night, a few days after my American dinner, I carried to class a packet of Starbursts I’d brought from the States; using the candies as examples, we learned the words for fruits. When class was over, Lily raced up to her father, who was standing outside our classroom. “Daddy!” she squealed. “Appe! Oran! Bana!” Then she leaped into his arms.

Harry beamed at me. “She’s learning so much,” he said.

It had been weeks since he’d proposed I go with him to his private cottage, but I still had trouble looking Harry in the face. “Kids learn quickly,” I answered.

“Oh, no. She likes her teacher.”

The other parents arrived to pick up their kids, and within a few minutes, I was left alone with Tra. “Come upstairs for a while,” she said. We hadn’t seen each other in days.

With its CD player, VCR, and late-model TV, Tra’s living room was the most Westernized space I’d seen in Vietnam. Novels lined the bookshelves, dozens of Vietnamese titles alongside translations of the latest Sidney Sheldon and Danielle Steel. On a piano bench sat video copies of
When Harry Met Sally
. . . and
Touch of Evil
and two well-worn Ninja Turtle action figures. On the afternoon I’d first arrived in Hanoi, the sight of this room had surprised me. Against the backdrop of my carefully manufactured concept of Vietnam—the peasant culture I had seen out the windows of buses on my first trip to the country—nothing in this room had seemed Vietnamese. Rather, it had seemed generically cosmopolitan, the happy family quarters of elite professionals in any country in the world. Now, I read this room differently. I knew that the teacups, upside down in their saucers on the coffee table, were perfectly arranged according to local custom, as a way of protecting clean dishes from gathering dust. Beside the teapot, the bowl of mandarin oranges served as the requisite offering for guests. Despite all the Western accoutrements, Tra’s living room had as much of a particularly Vietnamese quality to it as the firm swing of a peasant’s scythe in the fields of the Mekong Delta.

I settled down on the couch. “What do you think of Harry?” I asked.

Tra was standing at a table a few feet away, absorbed by the task of making tea. “I don’t know him. Why?”

I told her about his invitation to go with him to the West Lake. Tra looked up at me, then she began to laugh. “Why should I be surprised? He’s just a Vietnamese man. It’s a good thing you aren’t interested in Vietnamese men.”

“I’m interested in Vietnamese men,” I protested.

“Not really,” she said. In some ways, Tra was like Huong. She often felt the need to teach me things about myself. “Why would you want a Vietnamese man when you could have an American man?”

“I like Vietnamese men. I just don’t like the married ones.”

Tra looked up at me and shook her head. “Well, you should
know better,” she said. Her voice was teasing, but her eyes were serious.

We were silent for a while. Tra carried the tea over to the table and sat down next to me on the couch. “I’m just having a bad day with Vietnamese men,” she explained.

The issue of whether or not Tra would go back to the States had been a point of contention with her husband since I’d arrived. She had postponed her return twice already, but now she was scheduled to leave in less than a month. “Are you really going back to Michigan?” I asked.

“Of course I’m going back,” she said. She scratched at a mud spot on the cuff of my jeans, sending a tiny cloud of dust into the air. “I don’t know, maybe not.”

I knew how Tra was suffering to get her M.B.A. When I was still in San Francisco, we’d often talked to each other by phone. Once, I’d gotten a call from her at eleven o’clock at night. In Michigan, it was 2:00
A.M.
“Dana, I’m dying here,” she’d whispered.

“What’s wrong?” I’d asked. In my mind, I was already racing to Michigan to get her to a hospital.

“Exams. And I have a twenty-page paper due next week. How can I write twenty pages in English?” she groaned.

I knew how Tra had to ride her bike home from the campus library in the freezing cold of winter and that she survived on $350 a month, $200 of which went to rent. I knew that her roommate, a nurse on morning shift, liked to run the vacuum before leaving for work at dawn. I knew about the local supermarket that only sold tasteless chicken and about Tra’s regular trips across the border to Asian groceries in Canada to stock her freezer with poultry she could eat. Tra had always told me these stories as if she were trying to entertain me with her comical adventures in America, but when I came to Vietnam I began to understand
how hard her life in the States really was. I didn’t know how much she suffered from homesickness until I saw the pleasure she got from eating a simple bowl of Hanoi
phở.
I only understood her longing for her son when I saw the way she watched him play. It seemed like those years away from Vietnam were tearing her in two.

With Tra’s English skills, she could probably do extremely well in Vietnam, even without another degree. An ambitious person with a good grasp of English could earn more in Hanoi these days than almost anyone who didn’t speak English, Ph.D. or not. Of course, a Ph.D. was no ticket to wealth in the United States either, but I’d met enough Ph.D.s working as tour guides and secretaries for foreign companies in Vietnam to know that in a country that had traditionally placed a supreme value on education, wealth had begun to supplant knowledge as the great status symbol. With her background in economics and mastery of English, Tra could get a prestigious, well-paying job whenever she was ready. “Are you sure you need that M.B.A?” I asked.

Her head jerked up from her cup of tea. “Of course I do,” she said. “You know how much I want it.”

“But you have to struggle so much over there.”

Tra leaned over the coffee table and opened a plastic bag of yellow candies that looked like sugar-coated garbanzo beans. “This is
mứt sen,
candied lotus seeds. They’re a Vietnamese specialty. You should try them,” she said. She attempted to pour them into a dish but they fell out in one large clump. “They’re a little sticky from the humidity.”

I pulled one candy apart from the pile and put it in my mouth. It tasted like a sugar-coated garbanzo bean. “Delicious,” I said.

Tra nodded, absently chewing her candy. She said, “You know how well educated my family is.”

I nodded. Tra’s father was in Ho Chi Minh’s first cabinet. Her mother was one of the only Vietnamese ever elected to the French society of engineers. Her sister and brother had gotten doctorates in Moscow. Her husband had trained to be an architect in Prague. “What do I have?” Tra asked. “A bachelor’s degree from Hanoi.”

“It doesn’t make any difference,” I said, launching into the same argument I’d given her before. Tra wanted to a be a businesswoman, not an academic.

Tra started scratching at the mud spots on my pants again.

“What does Tuyen think you should do?” I asked. She and her husband had been married eleven years, but because each of them had spent so much time abroad, they’d only actually lived together for five of them. As strange as this sounded, Tra and Tuyen’s arrangement was quite ordinary among the educated classes of Vietnam. Apparently, however, Tuyen wasn’t satisfied with Tra spending so much time away. He hadn’t complained about the separation when he went abroad, but now that she was leaving he advocated a much more traditional model of family. He never showed his resentment openly, but I’d seen the way he teased her. Tuyen was a slight, almost scrawny-looking man, but he carried himself with a confidence he must have earned from his intellect and the power he’d accumulated through his high-ranking position as a government architect. At first, he’d struck me as reserved, even shy, but I quickly learned that his wit could be scathing. His English was terrible, but he used it to great effect with his wife, when he called her “Miss Tra” or “my American wife.”

In private, it seemed, he was more direct. “Tuyen thinks I’m wrong,” said Tra. “He says, How can I leave him alone here? How
can he take care of our little boy as well as I can? What kind of family is that?” When she looked up, she seemed close to tears. “The thing is, I don’t even disagree with him.”

It was nearly eleven when I stood up to go home. Tra walked me downstairs. When we got to the front gate, the family’s new dog, Johnny, ran up and started throwing himself at Tra’s legs. In the past year, extremely expensive Japanese dogs had become a new symbol of wealth among Vietnam’s elite. At the same time, the ranks of the wealthy in Hanoi were swelling with people who’d made their fortunes breeding these animals. In fact, Japanese dog breeding had become something like a pyramid scheme among Hanoians anxious to get rich. By borrowing small amounts of money from a large circle of family and friends, a person could accumulate, say, one hundred dollars to purchase a puppy, expecting to raise the dog, breed it, then sell its puppies a few years later for a lot more money. The problem, however, was that the dogs were delicate, not well suited to the Vietnamese climate, and they often died. Plenty of Hanoians had lost their shirts on Japanese dogs.

“Is Johnny Japanese?” I asked.

“No. Of course not. He’s worthless,” Tra said. Indeed, Johnny was cute only to those who equate small with cute. He had a frantic personality and the challenge of his life centered on escaping from the courtyard of the house so that he could dash in mad circles up and down the sidewalks and in and out of traffic. Tra regarded Johnny with a disdain reserved for the very lowest orders. Ignoring his given name, she referred to him as “Stupid Dog.”

Now Tra used her legs to block the dog’s escape, but she was still thinking about our conversation upstairs. “Vietnamese people say there are four stages of love,” she said, going on to define them as
bí mật, trăng mật, vỡ mật, mất mật
. Roughly translated, the
first stage would mean “secret honey,” symbolizing the moment two people fall in love but haven’t told anyone yet. The second stage is “honeymoon,” when everything is perfect. The third stage, “broken honey,” marks the beginning of problems, and the fourth stage, “lost honey,” represents the end of the romance.

“What stage are you and Tuyen at?” I asked.

The dog started to bark, and Tra gave him a shove with her knee. She was coy. “I try to stay away from sweets,” she laughed.

I pulled a pen and paper out of my bag. The four stages of love didn’t sound too poetic in English, but I liked the idea of it. “Repeat that,” I told her.

Tra looked at me. “Why do you want to know these silly things?”

“I’m collecting Vietnamese idioms.”

The dog got more determined, and Tra squatted down and held him by the skin of his neck. She slowly repeated the four stages of love while I wrote them down, then she added with a wicked grin. “Why don’t you learn an American idiom? Here’s a joke my landlord in Michigan told me: What are the three stages of sex?”

“What?” I asked. I was less interested in American humor.

“First there’s house sex. That’s when you have sex all over the house. Then there’s bedroom sex. That’s when you have sex only in the bedroom. Finally, there’s hall sex. That’s when you walk by each other in the hall and say, ‘Fuck you!’”

Before I even had time to laugh, Tra poked her finger at the piece of paper in my hand. “It’s true,” she said, “write that one down.”

“It’s not Vietnamese,” I said. “I’m interested in Vietnamese culture.”

“Well, I’m interested in American culture,” she said. “Maybe I should start writing things down, too.”

      One morning, I walked downstairs at 7:00
A.M
. on my way out to breakfast. Because neither Tung nor Huong held down a regular job, most mornings they slept later than I did. Today, though, both of them, as well as Viet, were already out of bed and downstairs in the living room. Huong had hauled the couch out from the side of the wall and was sweeping mountains of dust from behind it. Tung, his face still misty from sleep, was rubbing a wall mirror clean with a rag. Viet leaned against the kitchen doorway, eyes half-closed, mechanically sliding a dry toothbrush in and out of his mouth.

“Viet! Use the toothpaste,” his mother ordered.

“I’m hungry,” he whined.

“Use the toothpaste or you won’t eat,” she answered.

I stood watching them. “Why are you up so early?” I asked.

Huong stopped sweeping and glanced up at the clock. “The new renters arrive today,” she said.

I couldn’t help but feel disappointed. I had forgotten that today was the day the Thai-Chinese couple would enter our lives. I liked being the only foreigner living in the house. I sometimes felt more like a member of their family than a tenant. Once I became one of a crowd, I felt, my special status would change.

Actually, the house was more crowded already. Tung and Huong had hired a young woman from the countryside, like Lua, the servant at Tra’s house, to clean and cook. Sa was a distant cousin of Huong’s who had grown up in the countryside west of Hanoi. She was a tall, fresh-faced girl who had never been to Hanoi before her arrival at our house. Now I could see her, scrubbing a sheet in the kitchen, quietly singing a folksong as she worked. Sa seemed thrilled by every aspect of life here. I hadn’t had a chance to speak with her yet, but every time I saw her she smiled at me happily, as if the American woman who
slept on the third floor was just one more exciting attraction of the big city.