The House on Dream Street (3 page)

“I designed the house myself,” said the owner, a man about my age named Tung, who had come outside to meet us. “I didn’t need an architect.”

“What’s that thing up on the roof?” I whispered to Tra in English. “It looks like a boat.”

“That’s the Hanoi style,” she said.

We followed Tung into the ground floor room of the house, which was bare, except for a brand-new gray sofa and matching gray armchair, both covered in clear plastic. Tung stopped and pointed to an empty place on the wall, then said something to Tra.

“He’s going to have a telephone,” she told me, obviously impressed. Tra’s family had a private phone, but they were among the few Hanoi families that had one. Tung explained that his name was at the top of the waiting list for private phones in the city and that he expected to have it installed any day. “We’re number three three four seven one,” he said proudly, and his future telephone number was the first thing he said in Vietnamese that I could understand.

We followed Tung up a flight of stairs to a second floor back door, which opened on to an exterior stairway leading to the rooms above. Behind the house sat an old French villa, built decades earlier at a stately distance from the road. Now its front and side yards served as real estate for newer buildings—stone cottages and concrete one-room homes cluttered together in such density that, except for a narrow bicycle path, the mansion
was completely cut off from the street. From the second-floor landing of Tung’s house, I gazed down at the villa with vague longing. Wouldn’t I be more likely to find my dream family in that villa than in this tall, skinny townhouse with a nautical trellis on its roof?

Tra and I struggled to climb the stairs. The landlord may have been able to design his own trellis, but he clearly didn’t understand how to build a simple staircase. The staircase was not only uneven, it was also excessively steep, and I nearly tripped over one sudden change in the elevation. Tung, meanwhile, was talking nonstop as he climbed the stairs in front of me. I understood few of his words, but it wasn’t hard to recognize the intonation and body language of a salesman. He was a modern guy, a Vietnamese Burt Reynolds, possessed of a thick mustache and that easy self-confidence that comes with good looks and financial security. Judging from his shiny loafers and well-tailored pants, I decided he wasn’t the kind of fellow who would take an interest in teaching me the old and honored customs of traditional Vietnam.

After climbing three flights, Tra and I were breathless when we finally reached the room. As Tung continued talking about the house, and Tra nodded politely, I looked around. It was large and airy, with a Western-style bathroom adjoining it and double doors at the far end that opened to a balcony overlooking the street. The color scheme was inconsistent enough to seem random—brown-and-orange tiled floor, yellow walls, a ceiling painted in two shades of baby blue, a pink coverlet for the bed, dark green curtains, and a pair of reddish-orange Naugahyde armchairs. Tapestry scenes of deer grazing in green mountain meadows (Vietnam?) hung on two walls, and at various spots around the room dangled the shiny metal balls I’d always thought of as Christmas tree ornaments. The room contained enough furniture
to fill a small house. In addition to the bed, desk, couch, coffee table, three-piece wardrobe, armchairs, and folding chairs, there was a Barbie-style mirrored vanity with matching red leather stool. I walked over to the faux-rosewood wardrobe and looked in at the contents of its tinted glass shelves: a pair of small porcelain ballet dancers, a green inflatable clown, a vase of synthetic-fabric flowers, a conch shell polished to a shade of pale peach, a small plastic reindeer, and a toy motorcycle. Tung carefully opened the cabinet, and Tra, who looked beguiled, reached inside to get a closer look at the reindeer. In the United States, such furniture would serve as a substitute—those who couldn’t afford real rosewood or mahogany could at least enjoy a laminated facsimile of the real thing. But here in Vietnam, where “rich” meant access to a few thousand dollars, the ability to buy a sumptuous fake was itself a sign of wealth. Here, most families both slept and ate their meals on the same mat-covered wooden platform.

My house in San Francisco was decorated with Indonesian woven baskets, Indian embroideries, and lacquer boxes I had carried back from Burma. Vietnam has its own highly developed traditions of lacquer painting, wood carving, and silk weaving, but just as I didn’t buy La-Z-Boy recliners, not all Vietnamese valued their local handicrafts. Tra handed me the tiny plastic reindeer, and as I turned it over in my hand I realized the decor made the place familiar and comforting. The pearl-inlaid lacquer furniture at Nhung’s seemed sterile in comparison. I glanced at the satin-fringed harlequin-doll lamp sitting on the vanity. Okay, so some of the furnishings were excessive, but the profusion of objects showed somebody’s careful attempt to turn a bare room into a pleasing home. Tung didn’t seem like a kindred spirit, or even someone I might choose as a friend. He was a businessman determined to rent out a room. But his face also betrayed an expression
of deep pride in this house and in having built it. It was that private look of satisfaction that made me want to live there.

The door creaked open and a little boy squealed and leapt into the room. “This my son,” said Tung, speaking in English for the first time. “His name Viet.” The child couldn’t have been more than five years old, and he was robustly skinny in that way that only healthy children can be—with limitless energy and absolutely no need for extra bulk. He stared at me with such intensity that, if his father had not held him firmly by the shoulders, I felt sure he would have tried to leap on top of me. I gave him an uncertain smile, and the boy, like a visitor to the zoo delighted to see that monkeys can put their toes in their mouths, began to laugh. It wasn’t the sweet tinkling giggle one might expect from an innocent young boy, but a deep, gravelly chuckle, the laughter of a child who had smoked too many cigars.

“Viet!” a voice hissed across the room. We looked up to see a young woman half hiding behind the door.

“This my wife. His name Huong,” Tung said, motioning for her to come inside.

I nodded at the woman as she gazed in my direction. She was rather tall for a Vietnamese, but thin and pale, with eyes that took in everything while revealing nothing. I would never have guessed that she was married to this businessman. The two seemed as mismatched as the clothes she was wearing: a lace-embroidered, mud-red shirt topping a pair of orange-flowered pants. (As I would later learn, Huong had a fashion sense that was quite common in Hanoi, one that was reminiscent of the leaner days of socialism, when personal style was dependent on the availability of products, not on choice between them.) Only her hair, which bore the unmistakable frizz of a perm, gave any indication that she had an interest in the modern fashions that so obviously delighted her husband.

The couple stood looking at me. He seemed anxious to hear my decision. She hovered behind him, exhibiting a shyness that would have been more understandable in the little boy now straining to touch me. It seemed to take all the effort she could muster simply to look me in the face and smile limply. I glanced over at Tra in her smart slacks and oxford-cloth shirt. Had I not known, I would have taken my friend Tra for the landlord’s wife. I tried to smile at Huong.

Tra said something to Tung and Huong that made them laugh.

“Duyen,” said Tung. “Yes, good.”

Tra looked at me. “I told them to call you Duyen. You should use your Vietnamese name, you know.” Tra herself had given me the name Duyen when I began to study Vietnamese back in the States. It meant “charming,” and Tra had chosen it not because of any particular attributes of my own personality (she had nothing to go on but a class roster when she picked it) but because, like Dana, it began with the letter
D.

“Duyen,” my future landlord said. He tapped his index finger against his chest. “I. Three years. Deutschland.”

“You lived in Germany?” I asked.

Tung nodded, beaming. “I speaks Germany. Germany no good.” He gave a little shrug and held his empty palms up. “I want study English.” Robbed of his smooth sales ability in Vietnamese, he didn’t seem as slick.

“I like your house,” I said slowly, in English, pausing between each word.

He nodded happily. “Yes, I want study English.” Tra looked at me and giggled.

Later, I counted. From my front door to Tra’s took ninety-three steps.

      The backpack I brought to Hanoi contained a few changes of clothes, a sampler of antibiotics, an armful of thick novels, a twenty-pack of black Uni-Ball pens, and a six-month supply of tampons, which were not yet available in Hanoi. I had so few things of my own that I felt grateful for the green plastic inflatable clown, the pair of porcelain dancers, and all the other knickknacks in my new room. Even if those weren’t
my
things, at least they were things.

As soon as I moved in, Huong started bringing me more. A few minutes after she saw me walk upstairs carrying a bouquet of flowers, she knocked on my door with a bright purple and orange ceramic vase. The next morning, she knocked again, this time to hand me a pair of pink rubber sandals to wear in the bathroom. A day later, after our new phone was installed, she brought me a copy of the Hanoi phone book, as if I would actually have numbers I needed to look up. None of these offerings led to conversation between us. I wanted to talk to her, but my Vietnamese was not comprehensible. Each time I uttered a word, Huong’s face froze in concentration. Sometimes, she’d nod as if she understood, but mostly she was just being gracious. After a moment of silence, she would simply smile, then turn and walk back down the stairs. Shutting my door, I would think back over everything I’d said, trying to figure out where I’d gone wrong.

A few nights after I moved in, Tung and Huong invited me to have dinner with them. When I came down, I found Tung sitting in the living room with two other men. He was holding the new telephone in his lap as if it were a prized cat.

“Sit down,” he told me. “Drink Johnnie.”

Vietnamese is a language that seldom gets bogged down by excess words, but, with me particularly, Tung made sure to speak even more simply, which only made me feel worse. Despite ten
weeks of intensive language study in the States, I was only able to understand Tung because he pointed to an empty stool and held up a bottle of Johnnie Walker so that I could see it.

I sat down. All three men were looking at me, but in very different ways. Tung was leaning forward, eagerly pouring the whiskey and grinning hospitably, as if he were trying to make up in facial gestures what he lacked in ability to converse. The man sitting next to him, a ruddy-faced fellow in his forties, was smiling broadly and openly staring. The third man perched on a stool, not so much with us as halfway between where we were sitting and the door, as if he’d just stopped by and meant to leave at any moment. He was younger than the other two, about my age, with fine features, honey-colored skin, and hair that fell in thick waves across his forehead. Unlike Tung and the other man, both of whom were wearing new jeans and bright, freshly pressed shirts, this man wore black cotton work pants and a wrinkled white shirt stained with something that looked like automotive grease. He didn’t look at me directly. Rather, he rested his elbows on his knees, staring at the cigarette dangling between his fingers, and glanced up at me every few seconds before looking down again.

I managed to endure this scrutiny for about ninety seconds. Then I heard the clatter of pots in the kitchen. Pointing in that direction, I made an apologetic smile and escaped.

The kitchen was tiny. Huong and another woman were squatting on the only available floor space, hovering over large wooden cutting boards. Huong merely smiled when I appeared, but the other woman’s entire face lit up. “Duyen,” she exclaimed, as if she’d been waiting years for me to show up. She stood, rubbed bits of Chinese broccoli off her hands, then pointed her index finger to herself, said, “Nga!” and broke into laughter.

Huong watched the two of us and grinned, then turned her eyes back to the large fish she was in the midst of gutting.

“
Chào, Nga,
” I said. Hello, Nga.

Nga had long, wavy hair, a curvaceous body, and a face that, were she just a few years younger, might have adorned the glossy photo calendars I’d seen for sale at the post office. She pointed to Huong and said, “
Em,
” then pointed to herself and said, “
Chị,
” then back to Huong—“
Em
”—and back to herself—“
Chị
.” For once, my intensive Vietnamese course did me justice because I understood that Nga was telling me she was Huong’s older sister. I felt like I’d cracked a secret code.

The Vietnamese system of pronouns feels immensely complicated to Americans. The language has no simple word for “you,” and, despite a Communist-era effort to promote the word “
tôi
” as an all-purpose, egalitarian “I,” most people still rely on the ancient system of pronouns, which honors age and status. To put it simply, in Vietnamese one must modify the words for “I” and “you” depending on one’s own identity and that of the person with whom one is speaking. Thus, a thirty-year-old woman would call herself “little sister” when speaking to someone ten years older than herself and “niece” or “daughter” if she were speaking to someone even older. With a child, she’d call herself “aunt,” with a younger friend, she’d be “older sister.” With a dear friend, she’d use her given name, and with a colleague, she’d call herself “friend.” In a culture less concerned with personal individuality than with one’s relationship to others, identity itself was relative in Vietnamese. Who you were depended on whom you were with.