The House on Dream Street (12 page)

It was almost noon by the time I came home from my Vietnamese lesson that day. Tung was sitting in the living room with two men I’d never seen before. Both were Asian, but they were so well dressed it was obvious they weren’t Hanoians. Even Tung, who looked like a fashion plate compared to most Hanoians, came across as
nhà quê
—the Vietnamese term for “country bumpkin”—next to the two strangers in front of him. One of the men, sitting next to Tung on the couch, had an acne-scarred but not unattractive face. He was wearing a bright green Lacoste shirt, a foreign label I’d never seen, even as a knockoff, in Hanoi. The other man, slumped in an armchair, was portly, with thick jowls and hair drawn like pencil lines across his balding head. His fine cotton button-down was bulging at the seams. All three men were holding Dunhills between their fingers. It was not a brand I’d ever seen in our house.

Tung saw me and grinned. His eyes were shining. “Duyen! This is Mr. Huey, our new tenant,” he explained in Vietnamese.

The man with the acne scars stood up and shook my hand energetically. “Hello!” he said in English.

“Hello!” I said. “So, you’ve just arrived?”

The smile on Mr. Huey’s face became slightly less enthusiastic, and he turned and glanced at his companion, who merely shrugged.

Tung jumped in. “He doesn’t speak English,” he explained in Vietnamese. “He doesn’t even speak Vietnamese. He’s Chinese, from Thailand. Remember? This is his translator, a southerner, Tuan.”

The heavy man looked up at me and grunted.

Tung jumped out of his seat and grabbed the thermos to offer tea. Then he abandoned the tea and pulled his hoard of
Johnnie from the cabinet and began to pour it into four glasses. “Mr. Huey’s a businessman,” he announced. “He’s got a lot of plans in Vietnam.” The excitement in his eyes reminded me of the look on Viet’s face when I gave him a Barrel of Monkeys I’d brought from the States.

Mr. Huey was wearing a pair of Italian-style leather loafers that, I imagined, would quickly disintegrate in the inevitable Hanoi mud. “What kind of business is Mr. Huey in?” I asked in Vietnamese.

“Trade,” said the translator, answering for his boss.

Aside from the small-time deals I watched Tung working all day from his “home office” in our living room, “trade” was a realm of life in Vietnam I hadn’t observed yet. Something about Mr. Huey struck me as different from the other people I’d met in Hanoi, and I had a sense that it wasn’t simply that he was Chinese. Even though our conversation was purely chatter, he was scrutinizing me the whole time. His gaze wasn’t sexual at all, but calculating, as if he felt that the American might have something to offer, if only he could figure out what it was.

After a while, he put out a feeler. “You’re from America?” he asked, through the translator.

I nodded. “San Francisco.”

“Aah,” Mr. Huey said, then added, “San Francisco is a beautiful city. I want to go there. Maybe you and I could do business together there someday.”

“Duyen!” Tung fairly exploded. “You should do it. Maybe you’ll get rich. Then you can come back here and visit us anytime you want.”

“Maybe,” I said, smiling at Tung. I had no interest in trade, but even if I had, I wasn’t certain that I’d want to trade with Mr. Huey.

I heard the creak of the back door that led to the rooms upstairs. A woman appeared on the upper landing and began to walk uncertainly down the steep treads, clinging to the banister. She carried a bundle in one arm and a large canvas sack in the other. When she finally reached the bottom of the stairs, I saw that the sack was an empty shopping bag and the bundle was a tiny wire-haired dog who growled suspiciously, revealing yellowed teeth. Tung leaned over to me and whispered, “That’s Mr. Huey’s wife.”

Mr. Huey’s wife had stringy hair and a frightened, mousy face. She was wearing a mishmash of thin, ill-fitting clothes and looked extremely rural, like an older, worn-out version of our new housekeeper, Sa. With a touch of hesitancy in her gestures, she handed the little dog to her husband. Mr. Huey only glanced at her for a moment, but the look was severe. In quick, sharp syllables, he spoke to her and she nodded quickly, then hurried out the door.

Our conversation sputtered on for a few more minutes before fizzling out. Mr. Huey and the interpreter immediately slid into Chinese, no longer even making a pretense of translating for me and Tung.

“So, anything else new?” I asked Tung.

“Isn’t he
vui
?” Tung asked. His eyes were focused on his guests. I knew that I should go upstairs and prepare for my afternoon class, but for a long time I couldn’t pull myself away. It wasn’t the novelty of Mr. Huey that kept me in the chair. It was the sight of Tung, a man who ordinarily couldn’t sit still long enough to eat his dinner, suddenly made motionless by the guttural, meaningless phrases of Chinese, as if he believed that by concentrating hard enough, he could begin to understand them.

      Grandmother Nhi, the tea stall lady, was starting to regard me as a regular. When I got home from studying Vietnamese one morning a week or so after Mr. Huey moved in, Grandmother Nhi motioned me over to her table, around which sat three guys I recognized as motorbike washers who worked next door. “Duyen!” she said. “
Đi đâu vê?
” 

I locked my bicycle and walked over, forgetting, again, that “Where have you been?” does not require an answer. “I went to school, and then to the bookstore, and then I had to get my bike fixed,” I told her, but Grandmother Nhi was not paying attention.

“It’s too wet. You shouldn’t be outside,” she said. “Sit down. Drink tea.”

I sat down and she handed me a cup of tea. She refilled the cups of the motorbike washers, then put her hand on my knee and began to speak to me so earnestly that I didn’t have the heart to tell her I had no idea what she was saying. I caught a few words—“poor,” “old,” “so sad”—and nodded sympathetically. After a few minutes, she squeezed my hand, then looked at the people gathered around the table and said, “She doesn’t understand.” I shrugged, smiled, and sipped my tea.

Over the past few weeks, my comprehension of Grandmother Nhi had improved only a little, though my linguistic range had expanded significantly. Huong, Tung, and Phai had all learned how to speak to me, and they had become practiced at understanding my quirky Vietnamese. Any of them could serve as interpreters between myself and the rest of the world, simplifying complicated ideas and clarifying whatever mess of mixed-up tones and grammar came out of my mouth. Grandmother Nhi never got the hang of this. But I could hear her relaying my own vital statistics to a newcomer in the assembled clientele. I didn’t have much trouble understanding this because these explanations
always answered the same questions: Where was I from? How old was I? Was I married yet?

Today, the discussion hit a snag on the third question. The newcomer, a potato-faced woman I recognized as one of the hawkers from a nearby motorbike washeteria, could not believe that I was twenty-nine and still single.

“Why aren’t you married yet?” The woman looked at me suspiciously. Grandmother Nhi, her fingers curled around the toothpick dangling from her lips, was waiting for my answer with the undivided attention of someone planning to repeat the story in detail later in the day.

This question had become part of my daily routine. Now, I tried a little joke I’d learned from an American friend of mine who lived in Saigon. “
Không có gì qúy hơn dộc lập tự do,
” I said, adopting the famous saying of Ho Chi Minh: “Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom.” Grandmother Nhi understood my attempt at humor. She slapped her knee and said, “
Không có gì qúy hơn dộc lập tự do!
” to all the motorbike guys, pointing her finger in my direction.

My interrogator, however, persisted. As if she had a legal right to the truth, she asked again, “Why aren’t you married yet?”

“I don’t want to get married yet,” I said. Unfortunately, my Vietnamese pronunciation was off. I still had trouble with the
muốn
and
muộn. Muốn
means “want,” while
muộn
means “late.” The woman interpreted what I was saying as “I’m not late yet.”

“You’re late already,” she informed me.

“I don’t want to,” I insisted.

“Late already!” Then she leaned closer and put a pasty hand on my arm. “You can marry my son.”

“I don’t know your son.”

“He’s very handsome. He’s thirty-one.”

“Is he married?” I asked, just curious.

“Of course not!” She turned to Grandmother Nhi. “He’s very handsome, isn’t he?”

Grandmother Nhi had, I could tell, already decided that she would find me a Vietnamese husband. A single woman from a rich Western country, I was the best catch in the neighborhood. “Duyen,” she said, cajoling me, “he’s very handsome.”

I didn’t like the way Grandmother Nhi was looking at me. I could tell that she thought of me as
người Mỹ,
the American. I was like the prized fish she sometimes managed to land at her tea table, the one she could tell her friends about and use to attract more business. Now her eyes glimmered with the prospect of my marrying the motorbike hawker’s son.

I stood up. Grandmother Nhi’s expression suddenly changed. “Duyen, have you eaten yet?” she asked, not letting her desire to be a matchmaker overcome her instincts as a Vietnamese mother.

“No, I’m going inside to eat,” I said.

“Go! Go! You’ll get sick,” she said. She waved me toward the house, sweeping me away like dust, and as usual refusing to let me pay for my tea.

Inside, I found Tung sitting alone on the couch. Two half-liter bottles of beer, one almost empty, sat on the coffee table in front of him. Next to the beer, our telephone lay in a broken heap. Tung was staring down at it as if it were the remains of a favorite pet.

I sat down. “Do you have a problem?” I asked. My Vietnamese was improving, but I still had to take circuitous routes.

Tung poured some beer into a glass for me. “Huong and I are having a fight,” he shrugged.

“What happened to the phone?” I asked.

He made a gesture of hurling the telephone against the wall.

“Who?”

“Huong. And now she’s not speaking to me.”

“Not at all?”

“It’s only been one day,” he said defensively. Sometimes, he explained, he and Huong didn’t talk for a week. Once, they didn’t say a word to each other for ten days.

We sipped the beer in silence. The loss of the phone would be a problem. Before the arrival of Mr. Huey, the phone didn’t ring that much at our house. Now it rang a couple of times an hour. Calls came in from all over Asia, and Mr. Huey was always telephoning places like Taipei and Shanghai. Though he and I had extensions in our own rooms, the phone downstairs served as switchboard for the whole house.

Tung looked up at me and asked, “Do you miss home?”

“Of course,” I said.

“I know how you feel,” he said.

I’d heard so much about Tung’s years in Germany, but he’d never mentioned feeling lonely there. “Were you homesick when you were in Germany?” I asked.

The question pulled him back. “Sure,” he said, but he paused for so long that I could see that he was hesitating, trying to decide what more to say. Finally, he looked straight at me. “No. I miss
Germany.
Now I miss Germany.”

Tung had always seemed to me like such an operator here, trying to make himself a big fish in the little pond that was Hanoi. Now I saw that three years abroad had made his sense of the world too big for this place. While his wife thrived in this environment, he was suffocating here.

Tung fiddled with the telephone cord. Suddenly, he looked at me. “Huong’s upstairs now. Go talk to her.”

“I can’t talk to her.”

“Talk to her!” he pleaded.

I walked upstairs. Tung, Huong, and Viet shared a small loft,
an alcove in the landing off the first flight of stairs, which was big enough for a bed and almost nothing else. I tapped on the door. Huong was lying on the bed like an invalid. “Duyen, come in.” She moved over to give me some room and I lay down next to her. She picked up my hand. “Did Tung tell you to come up here?”

“Yes,” I said. “Why won’t you talk to him?”

“I don’t want to. I’m so angry. I don’t want to live with him anymore.”

“Why not?”

Huong stared at the ceiling for a long time, then leaned over and pulled open the drawer on the tiny nightstand beside the bed. Reaching under some of her son’s school notebooks, she retrieved a pile of photographs, all of which had been carefully laminated in plastic—
ép plastic,
as the much-admired process is termed in Vietnam. Huong began to shuffle through the pile, which amounted to the Vietnamese equivalent of the family photo album. The photos not only gave a history of Tung and Huong’s relationship, but also of Vietnamese photography over the past six years. The first picture was a purely Socialist venture, a black and white photo of Tung and Huong, the quality of which was so bad it reminded me of those “Olde Time Photographers” in American malls, where customers paid to dress in costume and received yellowed pictures of themselves as gunfighters and saloon girls. “This is our wedding,” Huong explained. In the photo, she looked like a terrified virgin, and Tung looked like his little brother. Even in their wedding finery, they both looked too young. Huong pulled out another picture, this one in color but so badly faded that I might have been looking at it through the algae-covered glass of a fish tank. “We’d been married a year already,” Huong said. The family was standing in front
of a dry fountain in a Hanoi park. Huong looked tired, holding baby Viet in her arms. Tung looked shocked, as if he couldn’t believe he could produce a child.