The House on Dream Street (16 page)

Tung, Tan, and the translator nodded as I spoke, as if what I was saying confirmed their understanding of economics in the States. But Phai looked amazed. He was barely managing to earn a living. Competition among motorbike mechanics had become fierce. He spent most days sitting in our living room, thumbing through the Vietnamese-English dictionary or smoking cigarettes with Tung. And now I had just transformed myself into a Rockefeller before his eyes.

“What about phone bills?” he asked hesitantly. His effort to understand what life was like in the States was competing with a need to seem unfazed by what he learned.

“I’ve never heard of a five-thousand-dollar phone bill,” I asserted, suddenly compelled to put some distance between myself and the high-rolling Mr. Huey. I pointed out that, while Mr. Huey made international phone calls all day long, I’d only called home twice, for five minutes each, since I arrived in Vietnam. Of course, each of those five minutes cost me twenty dollars, money Phai could subsist on for weeks. But Phai was nodding encouragingly, as if he, too, needed to convince himself that I wasn’t rich and he wasn’t poor.

The door to the upstairs creaked open and Mr. Huey appeared at the top of the stairs. He hurried down and greeted everyone boisterously, then, spotting the paper bag, he glanced at the translator, asked a question in Chinese, and dumped the
cash out on the table. He quickly counted the bundles, not bothering to count out individual bills. Clearly, a bag full of 5,000-dong notes was insignificant to an international trader like himself.

The Vietnamese watched Mr. Huey with a mixture of respect and envy. In all the time that he’d lived in our house, Mr. Huey’s big-time living had inspired a number of emotions, especially in Tung, but I’d never seen any hint of resentment. That lack of animosity surprised me, because Mr. Huey was Chinese. Despite the fact that the United States and France had been responsible for most of Vietnam’s suffering over the past fifty years, China still managed to elicit the deepest bitterness among Vietnamese. Most Vietnamese had ethnic roots in China, and Chinese traditions had influenced Vietnamese culture in everything from the roots of its language to the rhythms of its poetry, from the way Vietnamese practiced politics to the way they worshiped God. For the past two thousand years, however, relations between China and the region now known as Vietnam had fluctuated between strained and sour. During all that time, the Vietnamese had either been living under Chinese occupation or been consumed by the threat of it.

The fact that Tung and Mr. Huey got along so well was almost as surprising as an old white southerner suddenly setting up business with a black man. The relationship seemed strange, and rather tenuous, but it also represented some easing, at least on an individual basis, of the tension between the two neighbors. I didn’t know what to make of it. Maybe Tung was more open to foreigners than other Vietnamese. Or maybe he just needed the money.

Mr. Huey picked up the bag, rolled it closed, and then, with a laugh, tossed it to our landlord. Tung caught it, but the gesture startled him, and he couldn’t figure out how to hold it. At first,
he gripped the bag uncertainly between his two hands. Then he tried lifting it by the roll on the top. Finally, he shoved the whole thing under his arm and stood up. “Okay, let’s go,” he said. He looked like an uncertain child desperate to be taken seriously by the grown-ups.

Mr. Huey glanced at the translator and grinned, then said something in Chinese. The two laughed, looked at Tung, and laughed again. Then they walked out the door. Tung squeezed the paper bag tighter under his arm, then followed. Just before he turned away completely, I saw a strange expression cross his face. It was a look one would see on a person racing to catch a train, both focused and panicked, as if a single misstep would seal his fate.

      If you set any two Americans down together in Vietnam, they’ll inevitably end up discussing history. For Carolyn and me, the war became a ghost that haunted our conversations. We couldn’t stop remarking on how strange it was for two Americans to be wandering so comfortably through the streets of Hanoi. With Carolyn around, the war became present in my life again. And if it weren’t for her, I would never have followed a one-legged veteran up the side of a mountain, just to ask him some questions.

Carolyn and I had gone with Linh, her husband Son, and their ten-year-old son Giang to the Perfume Pagoda, a Buddhist holy place a few hours outside of Hanoi. The weeks and months following the Lunar New Year celebrations of Tet, which had taken place just before I arrived, served as the main festival season in the north of Vietnam. Thousands of pilgrims were making the trek to the Perfume Pagoda in order to leave offerings to the Buddha and his female incarnation, the Goddess of Mercy.

We left before dawn, drove in a hired car for two hours, then took a two-hour boat trip along narrow canals before finally reaching the base of the Perfume Mountain. From there, we hiked, following a trail that wound its way like a rough staircase up the forest-covered mountain. The path showed signs of years, perhaps centuries, of human passage. Where the trail was dirt, it remained as bare of vegetation as stone. Where it was stone, it had been worn as smooth as paper. Trees surrounded us like lush green walls, and through the leaves I could see a sky so white it seemed that the sun itself had a shade around it. The air was heavy, soaked with moisture, smelling ripe, and the mud that sat in patches on the dirt path and on the great slabs of stone had a deep sheen to it, as if, once wet, it had managed to get wetter.

The trail was as crowded as any sidewalk in Hanoi, but, because of the hundreds of Buddhist pilgrims making the trip to the top, it was much more convivial. Families stopped for snapshots at every shrine and scenic view. Groups of old women sat sipping tea in refreshment stalls crammed between the side of the trail and the edge of the mountain. Teenage boys made daredevil leaps from rock to rock, and young lovers held hands as if their romantic futures depended on their remaining physically attached throughout the trip. Through all of this trudged the laborers, hauling ice, cans of Coke and Heineken, and baskets of apricots—the specialty of the region—from the bottom of the mountain to the refreshment stalls that lined the trail all the way to the top. The scene was some combination of natural wonder, amusement park, and holy shrine, like a Vietnamese version of Yosemite National Park mixed with Vatican City.

Although Son was a Buddhist who had carted a bag full of offerings all the way from Hanoi, Linh let us know that she was “a Catholic person” who had no more reason than we had for climbing to the top of the mountain. Catholics accounted for
approximately 10 percent of the population here, and the percentage would have been higher, but the government had already scared away hundreds of thousands of Catholics. Fear of religious persecution led nearly one million North Vietnamese Catholics to flee to the south after the Communist takeover in 1954 (encouraged, perhaps, by a U.S.-sponsored propaganda campaign claiming that “Christ has gone South” and “The Virgin Mary has fled the North”). After the American War ended in 1975, many more Catholics left the country altogether. The repression that followed placed such severe limits on religious practice that by the early 1990s many Catholics, like Linh and her parents, had a hard time even remembering what Catholics were supposed to do.

By the time I arrived in Vietnam, restrictions on religion had eased somewhat, but most of the tension over religion in the country still centered on conflict between those who believed—no matter what god they believed in—and those who didn’t. Unlike the religious conflicts taking place in other mixed-religion countries like Northern Ireland or India, people of various religions got along quite well in Vietnam. They didn’t even regard mixed marriages, like Linh and Son’s, as strange or unacceptable. Perhaps the reason lay in the underlying open-mindedness of Vietnam’s majority Buddhist culture. Perhaps the government had succeeded in watering religious practice down to such an extent that there just weren’t that many differences between religions anymore. Linh didn’t just tolerate Buddhists; she’d married one. And she was as curious as we were to visit the Perfume Pagoda.

Our hike quickly fell into a rhythm, with Son leading the way. He was the only man, and the only Buddhist, in our group, but it was hard to imagine a situation in which he would not have taken the lead. Son was a low-level official in the Foreign Ministry,
a translator and diplomat-in-training, and, although he had the fresh and untried face of a teenager, his manner and diction, even in English, were purely bureaucratic. “It is most necessary that we walk at a brisk pace,” he had announced to our group before we started up the hill. “We must conclude our program well before dusk.” Although he, like most of my friends, was too young to have fought in the war, he was the only person I’d met whom I had no trouble imagining standing at attention or barking out orders.

I followed closely behind Son. His English may have been officious, but he was the perfect hiking partner for me because he was willing to answer all the grammatical questions I’d been ruminating over for weeks. Behind us, often not even within sight, were Carolyn, Linh, and Giang. Linh was the slow one. She wasn’t in good condition because her full-time job and duties as a mother and homemaker wore her down. She’d also chosen inappropriate footwear for the trip. She had on a pair of dainty sandals, which kept causing her to stumble as she tried to walk up the uneven trail. For a while, in an effort to distract Linh, Carolyn sang a Vietnamese folksong she’d learned. Every few minutes I caught the notes of the song floating up the trail. Carolyn’s strong voice mixed with Linh’s shriller one, which was way off key.

Son was listening, too. “I did not marry Linh for her singing voice,” he told me, and I could tell by the tone of his voice that he thought he was making a very funny joke.

I didn’t do much but chuckle. Even in my sensible Tretorn sneakers, I had to walk carefully, my eyes locked to the ground to keep from slipping. When I heard “
A Di Đà Phật!
” floating down from the path above us, I didn’t even look up.
A Di Đà Phật
is the greeting exchanged by Buddhists in their holy places, and we’d been hearing it, and repeating it, for hours. Then my eyes
locked on a pair of feet stopped on the ground in front of me. They were tough feet, bony and wrinkled, splayed out over the tops of a thin pair of red rubber flip-flops and covered with mud as thick as grease. I raised my eyes and saw an old woman watching me. Behind her, six or seven other women came to a halt as well. They all wore the same Vietnamese grandmother outfit of thin black trousers, brightly colored long-sleeved shirts, knit vests, and velvet scarves tied like turbans around their heads. “
A Di Đà Phật!
” said the first old woman, holding out her hand to me. For a moment, I thought she wanted money, that she was appealing to the generosity a Westerner might feel in this holy place. But the woman’s smile had nothing of entreaty in it. Rather, she was simply offering me a touch of the hand, from one ancient soul who had already made it to the top of the holy mountain to a younger one just beginning to climb it. I smiled and took her hand in mine. “
A Di Đà Phật!
” I said, and the old woman’s smile opened into the widest grin.

Maybe she thought she had met a fellow believer. Maybe she thought that despite our different colored skin, different hair, and different language, she and I followed the same path toward God. If so, she was mistaken. I was good at faking. I could hold hands with an old woman on a holy mountain in Vietnam and pretend that four incomprehensible syllables actually carried meaning for me. It wasn’t simply that I didn’t understand Vietnamese spirituality, or even that I was a Jew and thus felt out of place at a Buddhist shrine. The fact was that spirituality itself was foreign to me.

The old woman couldn’t know this. She gave my hand a gentle squeeze, moved on to Carolyn, then shook Linh’s hand, and Giang’s, and Son’s. She turned and continued her walk down the mountain. One by one, each of the old women shook our hands,
calling out one more “
A Di Đà Phật!
” before disappearing on down the mountain.

The sound of that chant was steadier than my breathing, more enthusiastic than the cries of the drink vendors, more rhythmic than the
tap tap tap
of a thousand pairs of pilgrim feet. Although I didn’t understand it, I loved the sound of it. I loved the way the words flew out of my mouth like little birds. I loved the way it sounded holy, the way it made me feel that it might, in fact, be holy.

I was raised a Reform Jew, worshiping in a grand and impersonal synagogue a God who was no more tangible than the air I breathed. “God’s like love,” my mother once explained, offering me a vague, well-intentioned definition that hardly helped me find a spiritual path through the long and (I had to admit it) boring hours of Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur. Judaism’s abstraction stems from its early history, when the Ten Commandments rejected object worship. As a kid, I had a hard time relating to a deity that I couldn’t see. I had to ask myself the obvious question: Why did my God exist and not the others? After that, Judaism became even less compelling to me. I was still curious about spirituality, though. Now, in Vietnam, I was drawn to what was taking place in temples and pagodas. In this venture, I wasn’t so different from many Vietnamese people, really. I was discovering their religion. And they were rediscovering it, too.