The House on Dream Street (14 page)

Laid out on the floor of her bedroom were several open suitcases, piles of clothes, a fake-fur jacket bought on a visit to Saigon, three plastic bags of medicinal herbs, a new Vietnamese-English dictionary, several pairs of plastic sandals, five packages of dried noodles, and six small lacquer paintings Tra planned to give to friends in the States.

The bustle in the room obscured the more central fact that Tra was leaving, and the occasional laughter did nothing to mask the strain on every face. Minh wandered sullenly in and out of the room or lay across the bed, playing with his Game Boy. Hoa squatted on the floor, silently folding shirts.

The three-month struggle between Tra and Tuyen had finally come to an end. Tra’s plane left for Bangkok at eight the next morning, and everyone knew, without saying so, that she was
buying an education at the cost of her marriage. Tra and Tuyen’s marriage was reflective of significant changes that were taking place between men and women in Vietnam’s middle class. In word, at least, women had been considered equals since as far back as the revolution, when female soldiers marched right alongside the men on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. These days, women occupied positions in most sectors of Vietnamese society, but, like American women, they were also expected to take care of the children and the home. And few Vietnamese men had begun to accept the possibility that they might, at the very least, help out at home. The women of Tra’s generation were beginning to rebel.

Tra had never mentioned the word “divorce,” and she planned to return to Vietnam as soon as she completed her degree, but it was impossible to ignore the potential implications of her decision to leave. Tra and Tuyen’s marriage, like a bone forced too far in the wrong direction, seemed destined to snap.

I hated the thought of being here without Tra. Besides the prospect of missing her, I dreaded saying good-bye. I remembered too clearly saying good-bye to her the first time, a year earlier, in New York. We had been at the end of a whirlwind rush through Manhattan, two days that had included the Statue of Liberty, the Metropolitan Museum, and the United Nations. Our last stop had been the New York Stock Exchange, where she and I had spent an hour on the observation deck above the market floor, about fifty minutes too long for me and many hours too short for Tra. Before Tra caught her bus to Philadelphia, I’d allowed a few minutes for us to sit and drink diet Cokes, trying to think of anything left to say. There was nothing to say but goodbye, and neither of us was ready to say it. Finally, we stood up, hugged three times, and pulled away.

I had walked a few feet up the street before I gave in and turned around for one last glimpse. Tra hadn’t moved at all. She laughed when I caught her, gave a little wave, then slowly began to walk in the opposite direction up the street. The two of us kept on like that for the length of the block—walking, turning, laughing, and waving—until Tra became a tiny black spot that disappeared beneath an ocean of gray business suits.

Now I sat there, watching her pack, telling myself I should get up and leave, but not being able to move. Finally, we heard a knock at the bedroom door, and Tra’s elderly aunt poked her face into the room. It was nearly ten-thirty at night. I pulled myself out of my chair and said, “Tra, I’ve got to go.”

Tra looked up from her suitcase, crinkled her nose, and nodded. “I’ll go downstairs with you,” she said.

Tra held my arm as we went down the creaky wooden stairs of the old house, then walked across the courtyard to the front gate. “Check up on my family sometimes, okay?” she said quietly. “Keep teaching the children English. Make sure that Tuyen learns English, too. He’s so lazy. Make sure he learns.”

We heard a shuffling behind us and turned to see that Minh had followed us down the stairs. He stood watching us, unwilling to let his mother out of his sight. Tra ran to him and tried to hold him. Minh pulled away. At eleven, he was torn between a child’s anguish and an adolescent’s refusal to express it. He could only stand and look at us, grinning fiercely. Tra tried again, taking one step closer, but this time Minh slipped away completely, turned his face to the vines creeping up the courtyard wall, and made as if to examine them. Tra stood motionless, both eyes on her son, then turned back toward me and picked up my hand.

“Take care of him. Teach him,” she said. In the glow of the streetlight, I stared at her face and tried to think of how to reassure her. I would invite Minh out on Sunday outings to Lenin
Park. In our Tuesday evening class, I would let him play Monopoly as much as he liked. None of that could substitute for his mother, though.

I nodded anyway and squeezed Tra’s hand. “Don’t worry,” I told her. “He’ll be fine. Everyone will be fine.”

Tra smiled, but now the tears were streaming down her face. I pulled open the gate and we walked onto the desolate sidewalk. “Write,” she told me.

“I’ll write,” I said, and I felt a clinching in my throat. Above us, the streetlight buzzed. Quickly, I hugged her, then turned and walked away. Before I reached the corner, I had to stop and look. Tra was still standing there. She laughed and waved.

5. Pilgrims

A 
FEW WEEKS AFTER TRA LEFT
, I pulled my bike up in front of my house and heard Grandmother Nhi calling my name. When I walked over to her tea table, she greeted me with an enormous grin. “You’ve had a visitor,” she told me, breathlessly, as if she couldn’t believe her own good fortune. “Another American!”

I was standing on my balcony late that afternoon, scanning the rush-hour traffic. In my hand was a piece of scratch paper, a note from my friend Carolyn from San Francisco. “Sorry I’m late,” she’d scribbled. “I got sidetracked in Nepal. I’ll meet you here at five.”

“Late” was actually an understatement. I’d expected Carolyn two weeks earlier, but when I’d gone out to meet her at the airport, she’d never shown up. Carolyn was a traveler, and though a lot of Americans love to travel, few would want to travel the way she did. She once hid under the dashboard of a truck in order to avoid rebel fire on a remote island of Indonesia. She trekked alone through the Himalayas. She turned a bottle of aspirin and a box of Band-Aids into a rudimentary clinic for desperate villagers
in the hills of northern Thailand. I couldn’t help but wonder what had “sidetracked” her in Nepal.

Carolyn and I had known each other for years. During the mid-1980s, we had worked together at
Mother Jones
magazine in San Francisco, but we’d only become friends quite recently, because of Vietnam. Both of us had visited Vietnam in 1990, Carolyn only a few months after me. One day, not long after she returned, we’d gotten together in Berkeley. We sat on a bench on Shattuck Avenue, eating sandwiches and discussing our trips. Carolyn was the first person I’d talked to who completely understood the effect that Vietnam had on me. Like me, she had planned to return ever since.

At exactly five, I spotted a bicycle making a shaky left turn before pulling slowly up in front of my house. A frizzy-haired Vietnamese woman was pedaling. My Western-sized friend was balanced precariously over the back wheel. I watched them disembark from the bike, then I yelled down at them. The two women looked up. Carolyn waved with both arms, then pointed at the beaming woman standing beside her. At the tea stall a few feet away, Grandmother Nhi shielded her eyes from the setting sun to watch. Phai, working on a motorbike out on the sidewalk, paused and looked up.

“This is Linh!” Carolyn yelled up to the balcony. Linh and I looked at each other and waved.

Carolyn’s reason for coming back to Vietnam had a proper name: Linh. Linh had been a clerk in the hotel where Carolyn stayed in Hanoi and, somehow, despite the gaps of language and culture, each had felt she’d found a soulmate. A few months after Carolyn left, Linh had asked Carolyn to be her second child’s godmother. Carolyn had come back to meet her godson.

Of all the photographs of friends and family I’d brought to
Vietnam, Carolyn’s was the least successful at conveying the essence of its subject. Photographs could only capture her physical features, the small frame, thick brown hair, and large eyes that made her pretty in a not unusual way. But they failed to convey the spirit that became so obvious when one met her in person. She had an extraordinary ability to develop deep and lasting relationships with the people she met. Through simple facial expressions and pantomime, she could converse for hours with people without sharing a single common word. Perhaps this ability explained her success teaching English to new immigrants from places like Afghanistan, Eritrea, and Vietnam. She had a magnetism, an ability to draw people toward her. Photographs never revealed that.

A moment later, the two of them stood in my doorway. I turned and smiled at Linh. Carolyn had told me about Linh’s tiny one-room house, situated down a muddy lane in a workers’ neighborhood. I knew about her husband, a low-level bureaucrat who spoke hyperformal English. I knew about her ten-year-old son and her new baby. I even had a vivid knowledge of Linh’s experience as a child during the war. Her parents had maintained their jobs in Hanoi, and every Sunday they rode their bicycles twenty kilometers into the countryside to visit their daughters, who had been evacuated from the city. After each brief visit, Linh had to comfort her hysterical younger sister, who could never understand why their parents kept abandoning them.

Linh held out her hand to me. “I am very happy to make your acquaintance, Dana,” she said. She was rather tall and curvaceous, with honey-colored skin and eyes that were both sympathetic and curious. We shook hands and I ushered them both into my room.

Linh was gazing at me, smiling. I thought back to the adjectives Carolyn had used to describe her friend—“kooky” had
been prominent—and tried to connect them with this politely professional young woman. Hanoi was full of politely professional young women. Why was Carolyn so crazy about this one?

“I tried to find you,” I told Linh. Not long after I’d arrived in Hanoi, I’d gone searching for her at the Bodega Restaurant and Guesthouse, where Carolyn had first met her. (Although the name “Bodega” sounded like the word for an Hispanic grocery,
Bò Dê Gà
meant “Beef Goat Chicken,” which the establishment supposedly served.) Though I’d easily managed to find the place, I hadn’t found Linh working there. She’d quit her job at the government-owned Bodega in order to work as an assistant housekeeper at the newly restored, French-financed Metropole Hotel. It would have been hard to find a much greater contrast than that between the Metropole and the Bodega. The Bodega represented everything good and bad about the Socialist hospitality industry. It had a large but apathetic staff, good rooms with bad plumbing, and a restaurant that didn’t carry most of the items on its extensive menu. The Metropole, on the other hand, was the first swanky digs to open in Hanoi since the government introduced
đổi mới,
its economic renovation policy, in 1986. It had a modern swimming pool, a concierge, and a restaurant that served fine French wines. Well-heeled travelers could expect the same quality of service at the Metropole as they would get at international-standard hotels from Amsterdam to Hong Kong.

After only a month, however, Linh was already unhappy. Compared to the laid-back style of the Bodega, the job at the Metropole was as grueling as indentured servitude, except that the wages, at two hundred dollars a month, were excellent. The Metropole expected a lot for what it paid. Staff could be punished for arriving even a minute late. Linh’s uniform had to be
absolutely spotless. She had to greet every guest with a big smile, even on days when she had a headache. Plus, she told us, “I have problem with Mr. Dodson.”

“What’s the problem with Mr. Dodson?” asked Carolyn. “Who’s Mr. Dodson?”

“Mr. Dodson. My housekeeper. I have problem with slippers,” Linh said matter-of-factly. Though Linh’s English rushed out of her mouth with a fluency that impressed me, she made so many assumptions about our knowledge that I had no idea what she was trying to say. After much questioning, Carolyn and I began to understand that Linh’s problem resulted from a Metro-pole policy forbidding staff from taking anything out of the hotel. A few days earlier, Linh had found a pair of bedroom slippers in a wastebasket and brought them to her boss, the chief housekeeper Mr. Dodson, to ask if she could take them home. Mr. Dodson was so enraged by this request that he threatened to fire her.

Linh was shocked. In Vietnam people routinely, and quite practically, sifted through other people’s discards. Vendors across the city earned their livelihoods selling empty packaging—plastic Nescafé jars, Coca-Cola liter jugs, wine bottles—to customers who would take these items home and fill them with drinking water, dishwashing soap, or homemade rice wine. On days when the garbage trucks were due to come by my house, scavengers would pick through all the neighbors’ trash, collecting twine, pieces of plastic, newspapers, and cardboard, all of which they could later sell. Vietnamese were so thrifty that I once met an American doctoral student who was devoting his dissertation to the topic of waste and recycling in Vietnam, in hopes that we could learn from them. Linh was baffled by Mr. Dodson insistence that a discarded pair of slippers, even in good condition, must be discarded. Even Carolyn’s attempts at an explanation
of Western concerns about thievery failed to convince Linh that Mr. Dodson was anything but evil. “I hate Mr. Dodson,” Linh said. Then, suddenly, she sprang up from her chair, walked over to the mirror, and pursed her lips in front of it. “Caro-leen gave me this lipstick. Is it pretty for me?”

It was a deep red that contrasted nicely with her skin. “It’s pretty,” I told her.

“How do you say in English—It’s pretty for me?” Linh asked.

Carolyn and I looked at each other. “It suits you,” I finally said. “You would say that that color suits you.”

Linh considered the verb for a moment, repeating it as she gazed at her reflection in the mirror. “Suits me. It suits me.” Then she added, “Can I say that this dress suits me?”

We nodded.