The House on Dream Street (21 page)

“Now try to swallow,” Phai said.

I grimaced. Asking me to swallow was like asking me to stab my throat with a pair of scissors.

“Just try,” he said gently.

I took a deep breath, then did it. The pain that cut into my neck was so severe it made me gasp, but at the same time the sweet tang of the
ô mai
slid into my throat muscles like water into parched earth. Something softened and grew numb.

I smiled and looked at Huong and Phai. Expressions of relief crossed their faces. Huong stood up. “I have to cook dinner,” she said.

Phai lingered. “Do you need anything? Do you want some tea?” he asked, his face full of concern. I shook my head. Phai followed Huong down the stairs. I leaned over and pulled another pinch of the
ô mai
out of the bag, then lay back down against my pillows, sucking on it. I wished Phai hadn’t left so quickly. Even though I couldn’t say a word to him, I’d wanted him to stay.

I must have dozed, because then Carolyn was sitting on the bed beside me.

“How are you?” she asked, brushing the hair out of my face.

I sat up, leaned over, and picked up a pen and paper off the coffee table. “Linh?” I scrawled.

Carolyn shrugged. “No change,” she said. “I saw her a little while ago.”

I turned the paper over and jotted, “Do you think it’s possible that the Vietnamese would have taken U.S. prisoners out to jog around Hanoi during the war?”

Carolyn read what I’d written and laughed. “Does this relate to Linh?” she asked.

I shook my head.

Carolyn considered the question for a moment. “You know,” she finally said, “it sounds strange, but I guess it’s possible. What were they going to do, run away? This whole city was a prison. The whole country. They didn’t need any walls.”

I nodded. The prisoners would not have had anywhere to go. They might have jogged.

I put a bit more
ô mai
in my mouth and leaned back against my pillows.

“I’ve been thinking about the old man,” Carolyn said. “When I get back to San Francisco, I’m going to call Senator McCain’s office in Washington. I want to find out if, the next time he’s in Hanoi, he’d be willing to meet with him.”

“Get some rest,” she said, then went downstairs. For a long time, I lay there unable to sleep, watching the sky outside grow dark with dusk.

      It didn’t take us long to get our answer from Senator John McCain. A few weeks after Carolyn returned to the States, I received a letter from her saying that she had telephoned Washington and relayed the old man’s story to one of the senator’s aides. The official was not surprised to hear the tale, nor did he deny it. Rather, he told Carolyn that Senator McCain wasn’t interested in meeting anyone connected with his capture in Vietnam. As the aide explained it, “That was one of the worst days in the senator’s life,” and he didn’t want to relive it.

Months later, I learned a bit more on the subject. My friend Norma Cline, an American writer who lived in Hanoi, showed me a response to a letter she’d written to John McCain, also about a Vietnamese who claimed to have saved him from drowning. “Dear Norma,” he wrote,

Thank you for your letter regarding Nguyen Ngoc Huan and the circumstances surrounding my capture by the North Vietnamese.

Over the years, numerous people have contacted me to inform me that they participated in pulling me from the Western Lake. I appreciate your interest and, of course, I am grateful to anyone who may have been motivated by humanitarian concerns to help pull me from the lake.

In any event the war is behind us and it serves no purpose to revisit the circumstances surrounding my
capture. I’m sure you will agree, what’s important now is to improve relations between the two countries, and to focus our efforts on building a future that is worthy of the many people who paid the ultimate sacrifice for freedom and democracy.

Again, thank you for your letter. With regards.

Sincerely,

John McCain

United States Senator

I didn’t know how to tell the old man the bad news, so I put off contacting him. Son never brought it up either.

7. Liberation Days

O
NE MORNING, ABOUT A MONTH
after Carolyn’s departure, I woke up and the world had changed. As soon as I stepped outside, Dream Street flashed before me in a burst of color. The commuters whizzed past on their Hondas and Chalys, their bright clothes trailing pink, orange, purple, and green across the blue-black asphalt of the road. Children, scattered in chattering pairs and trios along the sidewalks, appeared in their elementary school uniforms like moving blocks of white and navy blue. Even the drab concrete sidewalk sparkled, as if dusted by diamonds. Up until now, had I been director of
Hanoi: The Movie,
I would have cast the film in a muted black and white. Something miraculous had happened, though. Today, the city shined in Technicolor.

I walked across the street to where the sticky-rice vendor squatted on the sidewalk behind two shallow baskets full of steaming rice. Every morning for two or three hours, she set up a food stand in this exact same spot and served sticky rice. She arrived on foot, everything she needed dangling from the long wooden balancing pole she carried across her shoulders. She set three or four
tiny wooden stools down on the sidewalk, pulled the burlap cover off her rice, and opened for business. This morning, the motorbike washers perched on the little stools, carefully scanning the morning papers. The office workers loomed above, tottering on their high heels, and the children stood shyly to the side, exact change wadded between their fingers.

The sticky-rice lady looked up at me. She was a sturdy woman with skin as mottled as a bar of Vietnamese soap. “You want yours as usual?” she hesitantly asked. Even though I frequented her stand, the sight of a Westerner always unnerved her.

I nodded. Her sticky rice came two ways, either with green bean cake shaved on top or with large grains of butter-colored corn mixed into it. I liked a combination of the two, topped by a handful of crisp fried onions. Hold the dried pork. Hold the extra splash of oil. Wrapped to go in a banana leaf.

I had my bundle of rice in my hands and was pausing at the curb, waiting for a truck to pass, when something, perhaps the glint of light on steel, caused me to glance up. Then I realized that it wasn’t Hanoi’s colors that had changed; it was the light. For the first time in months, the sky spread above me in a solid blanket of blue. Looking up, I saw the sun, an acquaintance I remembered only vaguely from California, rising above the railroad tracks down the street. After the relentless mud of spring, the city was clean, crisp, and dry. Hanoi had become a different city overnight, one I’d have to get to know.

Summer had arrived.

      Linh was a single woman now. At least that’s what she called herself. She’d always dressed nicely, and her appearance didn’t change in any obvious way. But these days she had a kind of raffishness about her I hadn’t seen before. She went
around spouting the slogan of Ho Chi Minh—“Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom”—which she’d learned to use, in this context at least, from me. And she wanted to do the kinds of free, independent things that single women did, like go to the movies. One Saturday afternoon, she left me a note that said, “Dana, today is my holiday, your holiday, too. Tonight we’ll take dinner outside for short time and go to cinema at Ngoc Khanh cinema hall. It will take us forty-five minutes by byke. The very interesting film will begin at 8
P.M
. Hope to see you soon.”

When Linh arrived on her bicycle, she was in no hurry to leave again. “Today our holiday,” she said. “No one waiting for us. Tonight, we go slow, not quick, quick, quick.” We spent ten or so minutes lying on my bed, resting our eyes, then Linh popped back up again, went to the mirror and put on lipstick, and announced that it was time to go.

We rode to a small
co’m bình dân,
a “regular rice shop,” not far from my house, where we stood in front of a table covered with prepared food and picked out what we wanted. Linh insisted that we “eat like the pigs,” so we ordered plates of fried tofu simmered with scallions and tomatoes, four pieces of grilled fish, stewed bamboo shoots, a ham omelet, two deep-fried hardboiled eggs, sautéed water spinach, a bowl of vegetable broth, and two large bowls of steamed rice. The entire meal didn’t cost three dollars.

At Linh’s request, we ate slow, slow, slow, then we sat for a while over tea. Linh had decided that the only way to salvage her marriage would be if Son would agree to find them a house somewhere closer to the center of the city. If they lived in a more convenient location, she wouldn’t have to ride so far to her job every day and she wouldn’t be so exhausted when she got home. She’d have more time to spend with her family. All their problems
would be solved. Linh had been dreaming about this idea for years. But recently, it had seemed a true possibility, and then that hope had been dashed. After ten years of service in the Foreign Ministry, Son received a bonus, which was intended for the purchase of a home. But instead, Son came home with a small Sony color TV.

“That must have been an expensive TV,” I said.

Linh shook her head. “You don’t understand,” she told me. “I was wrong about the money. The ministry, they tell you they give you this money to buy a house, but when the money comes, it’s not enough. Vietnamese dong worth so little now that the same money used to buy a house now only good for a small TV—not even a big one. So my dream become like glass, broken.”

“Is that really why you’re so fed up with Son?” I asked.

Linh shook her head. “When I married my husband,” she said, “I loved him with all my heart. He loved me with all his heart. But then, after some years, he was not faithful anymore. That’s why I become fed up on Son.”

Linh’s raffishness, I was coming to realize, was mostly superficial, and, with the discussion of her marriage, she fell into a funk. I looked at my watch and saw that it was nearly seven-thirty. I pulled her up, paid the bill, and we rode out to the cinema. Somehow, the memory that we were two single girls going off to the movies cheered her up enough to serenade me with songs along the way. The theater was a fairly new brick building, simply built, with a crowd of mostly teenagers waiting to get in. Linh had a friend who worked in the ticket office, which meant that we got in for free. Screaming, “We are VIP!” in English, Linh pulled me past the paying customers and led me into the cinema.

We took seats in the back row. As the rest of the audience began to file in, each person made sure to take a long look at me, the foreigner. I was the most interesting thing in the house, apparently.
And somehow there was a pervasive sense of dreariness about the whole enterprise, as if no one was there by choice, but because there was nothing else to do in Hanoi.

But Linh was already staring up toward the screen in anticipation. “The film is an American film,” she told me. “I know that you will enjoy it very much.” She pulled from her purse two bags of sunflower seeds and handed one to me. As the lights went down, the entire theater became alive with the steady crackling of seeds. On the screen, the credits began to roll. The film was called
The Tower of the Screaming Virgins,
based, supposedly, on a novel by Alexandre Dumas.

The movie was in English, simultaneously dubbed into Vietnamese by a woman speaking into a microphone from the projection booth behind us. Between the pauses in the Vietnamese translation and over the cracking seeds, I could just make out some English, spoken in American accents. Although the film was set in eighteenth-century France, the haircuts, the particular thrust of the cleavage, and the grainy color made me suspect that it had probably been made in the 1950s. How it ended up in Vietnam I couldn’t begin to guess. The characters didn’t speak to one another so much as exclaim, crying and moaning and saying things like, “The walls have ears!” It was hard to pay attention, not just because it was silly, but because soon after it started, Linh began to fidget. She stretched this way and that, moving her body, taking deep breaths. A character by the name of Blanche Dubois began to cry. Linh lifted her knees up to her chest and buried her face in them. “Are you okay?” I asked.