The House on Dream Street (2 page)

I heard a squeal on the other side of the wall. The teenager pulled back the gate to reveal a young woman bounding toward me. She was wearing a burly white sweater, Day-Glo aquamarine biker shorts, and brand new Nike sneakers. With her hair pulled back into a high ponytail, she looked more like a college gymnastics star than a Hanoi wife and mother. I smiled. It was Tra.

We passed the next minutes in a frenzy of loud, American-style greetings. The neighbors, the cyclo driver, and the teenage girl watched us as if we were enacting the reunion of long-lost sisters in a traditional folk play. “Don’t just stand there,” Tra said, finally, ready to drag me by the hand into her house. I paid the cyclo driver and grabbed my backpack. As the gate slammed shut behind us, I felt, for a moment at least, that I was safe.

      The yellow, two-story house curled around the sides of a courtyard. The older section at the left looked over the high wall into the street outside and had the elegant symmetry of French colonial architecture. Behind it sat a more modern U-shaped addition, a utilitarian two-story structure with a balcony running the length of the second floor. Together in its two parts, Tra’s house looked like a stately Paris mansion run up against a Motel 6.

The two of us stood in the blue fluorescent glow of the kitchen. We’d spent an hour or two catching up over tea and candy and now I’d offered to help cook dinner. Tra was planning to serve rice pancakes wrapped around grilled pork, a sort of Vietnamese version of the burrito. To accompany the dish, she
was preparing a platter of rice noodles, lettuce, bean sprouts, sliced lemons, hot chilis, and a variety of herbs. Tra pushed a bowl of herbs in my direction.

“This is what you do,” she said, the tone in her voice reminding me of the way she used to beat the blackboard with a nub of chalk while trying to explain some complicated rule of Vietnamese grammar. Today’s lesson centered on a sprig of basil, from which she plucked off the smooth green leaves. “What do you call this vegetable in English?” she suddenly paused mid-demonstration to ask. Tra believed that her chances for success in the world outside of Vietnam were directly related to her aptitude in English. “Basil” was a word she needed to know.

“You should learn to say these things in Vietnamese, too,” Tra said, after I had carefully pronounced “basil,” “cilantro,” and “mint” for her. Slowly, she said each word for me in Vietnamese, adding the names for several mysterious-looking herbs that sat before us on the table. The one called
tia tô
was maple-shaped, green on one side and royal purple on the other. Chewing the leaves, Tra said, would cure a sore throat. The
rau răm
had long, thin leaves and a spicy smell. Tra held it up and looked at me with one of her wicked grins, the kind of expression that she would describe as meaning, “I have something in my sleeves.”
Rau răm,
she whispered now, “is for the monks to eat, so they won’t want to have the sex.” Then she dissolved into laughter.

I tried to pronounce the new words correctly, but I couldn’t absorb a thing. At this point, I could hardly recall the Vietnamese for “eat” or “buy.” Meanwhile, Tra stood next to me, slicing cucumbers and repeating “basil,” “cilantro,” and “mint” to herself as if she were trying to remember the recipe for some complicated salad.

I moved slowly through the bowl of basil. Back in the States, I might have rushed to finish such a task, but here I took my time.
I didn’t have anywhere else to go. Tra had described some possible rooms for rent, but nothing sounded promising. My great secret hope had been dashed when she told me that she didn’t have government permission to house a foreigner. At this moment, Tra and her house felt like my only refuge. I picked through the basil carefully, hoping that if I were a good enough guest at least she’d invite me back.

A hinge creaked and I looked up to see the husky teenage girl peek in through the door of the kitchen, then disappear again.

“Tra, who is that girl?” I asked.

“That’s Lua,” Tra said. “She’s from the countryside. Her family’s very poor, so she came here to work for us.”

“The Vietnamese government lets people have servants?” I tried to place this in the context of Marxism.

“Of course,” said Tra. “We could always have servants.” She explained that, in the past, if a family had servants the government would consider it an exploitation of labor, but as the economy started to pick up, no one cared as much.

The girl was back, eyeing me again through the doorway. Lua was taller than average, with a physique that in another decade might have hiked the length of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, one more able body in the intricate network that supplied the Communist forces down south. Now, her family probably spent its days bent double in the rice fields, backs burning in the sun. Lua had managed to get away from all that, taking up the less strenuous life of a servant in the city. She didn’t look like either a fighter or a farmer. No famous black pajamas. No conical hat. She had on pink pastel pants and a frilly yellow top. Perhaps she was wondering why I wasn’t wearing a pith helmet and a flak jacket.

I pulled together a few words in Vietnamese. “My name is Dana,” I said to Lua. She giggled and ran away. I looked at Tra quizzically.

Tra dumped the last handful of cucumber slices into a bowl. Wiping her forehead with the back of her hand, she said, “She’s never been so close to a foreigner before. She’s scared.”

“What can I do?” I asked.

“You can’t do anything. People from the countryside, they don’t know anything about foreigners.” Tra gave a wave of her hand that showed her impatience with Lua’s lack of sophistication, then she looked at me for a moment. “I was thinking about something the other day. What is the word in English for a person with a nice face, so nice that it means good luck for their children?”

I thought about it. “I guess we would say a nice face.”

“No. It’s more than that. In Vietnamese we say
phúc hậu,
a face that means good destiny.”

“I don’t think we have a word for that in English,” I said.

Dissatisfied, Tra pulled a handful of greens from my bowl and began to tear them apart impatiently. Despite her years in the States, she hadn’t realized that the concept of destiny is not as important to Americans as it is to Vietnamese. Tra took destiny, and the role it played in people’s lives, for granted. I, on the other hand, never thought of destiny at all. It wouldn’t be long before I began to realize how fundamental it was in Vietnam.

      I couldn’t sleep at Tra’s, but her neighbor across the street, Nhung, had permission to rent rooms to foreigners. Nhung’s place was clean and convenient, but I didn’t fancy the brand-new carved wood furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl, or the price, which seemed to reflect the cost of the opulent surroundings. On the bedside table, perhaps to entice me to stay longer, I found a plate of bananas and oranges with a little note that said, in simple Vietnamese, “Enjoy! All of this fruit is a gift
for you, and you don’t have to pay for it.” For a long while, I lay sideways across the imperial bed, eating a banana and staring at the ceiling. I’d lived in Hanoi for more than eight hours, and so far, I reminded myself, things were going just fine. On the other hand, I’d spent seven of those hours cloistered inside Tra’s house, and my hour-long journey from the airport had felt a bit dicey. I considered the fact that, for as long as I lived in Vietnam, I would always stand out in a crowd—bigger, paler, and richer than everyone else.

Maybe I was a little out of my league as an independent traveler. I doubt that Paul Theroux or Graham Greene got shaky every time a group of old women stared at them from across the street. Eric Hansen, author of
Stranger in the Forest,
trekked through the jungles of Borneo—facing wild animals, debilitating ailments, and the constant danger of getting lost—and then he turned around and trekked right back. A guy like that wasn’t likely to quake when a cyclo driver demanded a better price.

But women and men, in general, experience travel in very different ways. A man carries a certain cachet in international society. He’s the explorer, and although locals might question his behavior, they’re not likely to question his very right to travel. When women venture into foreign societies, we often throw ourselves up against the hard surfaces of traditions that aren’t flexible enough to accept us there. Simply by daring to go, we break a taboo. Many local men regard breaking one taboo as license to break another, or so I had learned from a hotel bellboy in Thailand, who sat down on my bed, expecting sex as a tip, and from the tour guide who couldn’t keep his hand off my thigh, and from the sweet older man in North India who suddenly grabbed me from behind and tried to kiss me. Women travelers have to move through the world very carefully.

Sure, I’d heard about the woman who rode a camel by herself across Australia, but I didn’t know any women (or men, for that matter) like her. Most of the women I knew who traveled had to overcome huge obstacles in their own psyches before they even packed their bags. Growing up, I’d always considered myself a physical weakling. When I started to travel, I realized I had to either find my own strength or stay home. One of my most exhilarating experiences had been a very mundane one. It was my first day alone in Asia and I was terrified. My backpack felt like a small child hanging from my shoulders. At the airport bus stop, someone pointed out the bus I needed to go to Bangkok. I watched the vehicle pull alongside the curb and slow down and then realized it was never going to come to a full stop. With my pack bumping along behind me, I jogged to the open door, grabbed the metal bar at the side of it, and pulled myself up. I was still hanging over the side when the bus sped away. For one eternal moment, my arm muscles competed against the weight of the backpack and I knew that I could either pull myself into the bus or allow myself to come crashing down onto the street. With a strength I didn’t know I had—a powerful combination of desire and fear of disaster—I pulled myself into the bus.

For me, success in travel had always depended on that mix of desire and fear. Desire got me to buy the ticket, and fear of failure kept me from cashing it in. Coming to Hanoi was no different, except that the stakes were higher. My desire to live in Vietnam was so absolute that I could not imagine any other way to spend the next great chunk of my life. Fear, on the other hand, made me think that if I failed at this I’d have to take it as a general sign of failure in life. I pictured Eric Hansen, setting off into the wilds of Borneo, confronting the challenge of nature. But I wasn’t Eric Hansen.

It was nearly midnight. I rolled my banana peel into a little ball, tossed it onto the bedside table, and switched off the light. Upstairs, I could hear the landlady’s family watching TV. A dog in the house next door let out a whiny howl. I calculated the time difference between Hanoi and San Francisco—fifteen hours—and fell asleep.

2. The House on Dream Street

T
HAD VISIONS OF RENTING A LITTLE GARRET
in an old villa built by the French. I didn’t want anything big, and I could live with creaky doors and peeling paint, as long as I had a view of a tree or two. I pictured renting a room from a big family full of wise grandmothers and cooing babies. I would help them celebrate their weddings, and if someone died I would be with them to share their grief. This house would be my entry point into the culture and customs of Vietnam, and at the end of each eventful day, I would climb the stairs to my quiet little garret, where I would look out at my tree and reflect on what I had learned.

Unfortunately, this was not to be. Garrets, Tra explained, were hard to come by in Hanoi and seldom rented out to foreigners. Though the city had many villas, most were decrepit tenements that lacked such amenities as indoor plumbing. The families lucky enough to have government permission to rent rooms to foreigners were generally the people building the shiny new houses springing up all over town. I might have to make do with something a bit less quaint, Tra told me, but I’d be happier with the plumbing.

We went to look at a townhouse around the corner. The building was four stories high, towering over every other structure in the neighborhood, and so new that I was looking at it through a haze of construction dust. Its most prominent feature, aside from its startling gawkiness, was a strange hull-shaped trellis covering its roof.