The House on Dream Street (30 page)

For a while, Hugo said nothing, although the glimmer in his eyes told me that he was pleased. He leaned forward, took a lychee out of the bowl on the table, peeled it and pulled out the seed, then slid the smooth white fruit into his mouth. “I don’t
know why the people don’t rise up and overthrow the bastards,” he said.

The words were barely out of his mouth before Huong, like a soap opera fan desperate for the next installment, yanked my sleeve for translation. I leaned back, giving up. “He wants to see a revolution,” I said.

Huong and Phai went speechless with laughter then, leaving Hugo and me to sit there silently, watching them in wonder. Huong’s laughter was something beautiful to behold. For those few minutes at least, it smoothed the tension from her face, as if erasing the many weeks of worry.

The next day, I asked Huong why she’d found Hugo’s comments so hilarious. Perhaps the simplicity of Hugo’s judgment had struck her and Phai as comically naïve. Or perhaps she felt exhilarated to hear someone declare, so emphatically and fearlessly, ideas that most Vietnamese would be afraid to utter, even to their closest friends. But Huong wouldn’t say. Hugo, a foreigner, could say whatever he wanted, in English, about Vietnam. But Huong had a $5,000 debt to the government and a husband in jail. Speaking openly about politics was a luxury she could not afford. In answer to my question, she only replied, “Hugo’s so
vui,
” and refused to say more.

      I had a recurring dream in Vietnam, and each time I woke up I felt shaken. In the dream, I found myself back in America. Friends rushed over to see me. My family gushed with pleasure that I’d finally come home. My garden spontaneously bloomed with a dozen varieties of beautiful flowers. I couldn’t tell anyone the truth: It was all a mistake. I wasn’t supposed to be in the States. I was still supposed to be in Vietnam.
Somehow, and I never could figure out exactly how, I’d ended up back home
by accident.

I always woke up relieved from that nightmare, grateful to hear the blaring noise of morning traffic and to see the dirty teacups and candy wrappers scattered across the glass coffee table by my bed. I had to lie there for a long time, thankful that I was still in Vietnam and that I hadn’t even set a date to go home yet.

I was not hiding out in Hanoi, or afraid to go back to the States. Of course, there were things back home I didn’t like. It was tiring, hustling for writing assignments from editors who didn’t care if I wrote for them or not. But life there did have attractions. I had good friends in San Francisco and no language problems in communicating with them. Despite the aggravations of the career, I liked being a journalist—more, surely, than I liked teaching English in Hanoi. I missed my family. The noodle soup and rice I ate almost every day in Vietnam had gotten very boring. Still, I loved Hanoi. Despite the nearly intolerable summer heat, the fatigue I felt bargaining for every tomato, I was as consistently happy as I’d ever been in my life. I got an extraordinary sense of satisfaction out of simply managing to survive here. I didn’t take a single thing for granted about being an American living in Vietnam: not the fact that the Vietnamese government had been willing to grant me a long-term visa to study here, not the fact that I could have a friendly conversation with a man who’d had his leg shot off by my countrymen, not the fact that I could fall in love with a man who had grown up being taught that I was the enemy.

Still, I knew I’d leave, and soon. While I remained in my third-floor bedroom, riding a wobbly borrowed bike and working at a low-paying job teaching English, other Americans I knew with no more skills than I had found lucrative permanent positions
with international organizations. They rented apartments with kitchens and invested in powerful motorbikes. They were willing to settle down here, while I couldn’t move beyond the early bloom of romance. On some level, I considered Vietnam, and my happiness there, a luxury that, if I stayed too long, I’d use up. I kept my life in Vietnam slightly temporary and considered it a sojourn that I’d eventually leave behind. Vietnam was the dream, I knew, not the States.

One morning late in August, my mother called from Memphis.

“When are you coming home?” she asked. The question caught me unprepared. Mom had never questioned my decision to come to Hanoi. In fact, she was so proud of me that she had developed a devious tendency, when speaking with friends, to drop apparently offhanded comments about her daughter living in Vietnam. While I was in Hanoi, most of our communication was through letters. Phone calls were harder. We’d speak for five or ten minutes, but neither of us enjoyed those conversations. She always seemed distracted during these trans-Pacific calls, as if half of her brain were occupied with the knowledge of how much money the call would cost.

This morning, her voice sounded not distracted, but sad. “I just think you’ve been away long enough,” she said.

I closed my eyes. “It’s hard,” I said.

“Every month you say, ‘Next month,’” she told me. “We miss you.”

I could see my mother’s face, my house, the dry heat of a San Francisco autumn. It would be liberating to walk down a city street unnoticed, to buy food that had a price tag on it, to feel absolutely comfortable in the language being spoken all around me. Getting back to real life might not be such a bad thing. “I’ll
come back in early September,” I told my mother, surprising even myself with the certainty of the statement. “I’ll be home for my birthday.”

I set the phone down and looked around my beloved room, not quite sure how I’d happened to make a commitment, so suddenly, to leave it. I felt a little shaken, but also relieved. My birthday was only a month away, and I didn’t want to turn thirty here. It would be impossible to exaggerate the number of times every day I was asked how old I was. As a foreigner who could speak Vietnamese, I was always getting into conversations with strangers, and they were always asking me my age. Partly, they needed to know what to call me—“older sister,” “younger sister,” “aunt,” “niece.” But they were also nosy. The most important single bit of information they seemed to learn from me was that an American woman could be twenty-nine years old and not married yet.

My approaching birthday loomed large in my consciousness. I imagined everyone I knew nagging me with their conviction that I was avoiding my destiny, that I needed to settle down. I was tired of defending myself, tired of asserting that I still valued my independence and freedom.

That afternoon, I pulled my plane ticket out of the back of a drawer, rode my bike over to the airline office, and set the date of my departure. I gave myself two weeks.

      My other reason for leaving Vietnam was Phai. And the two were, of course, related. If I was going to marry, then, surely, the man I should marry would be him. But I couldn’t see it. In the two months since we’d first become intimate, I hadn’t fallen out of love, but I’d become increasingly sure that I
couldn’t spend my life with him. Differences of language and culture had always existed as a gap between us, but they’d once been part of the attraction as well. Ironically, as I got to know him better, as we communicated ever more easily, the factors that divided us became more overwhelming.

I had hit what linguists refer to as a “plateau” in my language acquisition, a brick wall, a point at which a language learner perfects old skills rather than obtaining new ones. I now felt extremely comfortable speaking simple Vietnamese, but, over the last few weeks, my vocabulary had started to frustrate me. I had to characterize everything in life, it seemed, as “interesting,” “sad,” “happy,” “difficult,” “complicated,” or “
vui.
”

Huong had no qualms about teasing me when I forgot a word she’d taught me. She considered me ignorant, and perhaps a little bit slow, because I still couldn’t communicate at a more expert level. Sometimes, in the midst of a serious conversation, she’d simply give up, shrug her shoulders, and, looking at me as if I were a seven-year-old, say, “It’s just too complicated for you to understand.” Huong’s intelligence seemed boundless to me.

Phai, on the other hand, was kinder. Whenever I happened to come out with a new word, he would clap his hands and shower me with kisses. At the same time, he limited his own conversation to the capacities of mine, speaking so simply that I never had trouble understanding how “complicated” opening a bike rental business might be, how “sad” he was after his mother sold the family pig, or how “happy” he felt whenever the two of us were together. After a while, I became as impatient with him as I was with myself. Phai started to strike me as annoyingly simple.

The conversation we had after I’d set the date for my departure didn’t help. Phai was sitting on my bed that night, watching me wander around the room, getting my things together before
we went to Linh’s house for dinner. I sat down beside him and picked up his hand. “I’m going home soon,” I told him. “In two weeks.”

The expression on Phai’s face shifted, but only briefly, like the shadow of a cloud passing over, then moving on. “Well, it’s good,” he responded. “Your family needs you.”

During dinner, Phai seemed as relaxed and content as ever, but when we got back to my room, he sat down on the bed and put his face in his hands. After being so “happy” with me, he now felt “sad” that I was leaving and he knew that his feelings would become even more “complicated” once I was gone. I sat down next to him and ran my fingers through his hair, explaining that I, too, would be “sad” to say good-bye, especially because he made me so “happy,” but my reasons for leaving were “complicated,” and so I hoped that he could understand. Of course, both of us were more distraught and confused than our words could express.

There was one thing I couldn’t have told Phai, even if I had actually had the words to say it. Over the course of the past month, I had come to realize that, as much as I loved him, that love had bloomed, in part, because I had wanted a human object of my passion for Vietnam. I couldn’t tell how much of my love was for Phai himself and how much was for this place he came from. Sometimes, when the two of us were together, I’d look into his eyes and try to separate my love for him from my sense of his country. Maybe Phai had similar trouble distinguishing me from America, but I couldn’t know for sure. I never asked.

Leaving Vietnam seemed the simplest and least painful way out of this relationship. Let distance separate us, I thought. Let us miss each other across the span of the ocean, not across the streets of Hanoi.

      In a practical sense, I had very few responsibilities in Hanoi, and it wasn’t hard for me to extricate myself from any of them. None of my jobs demanded long-term commitments. My teacher and I planned my lessons week by week. All I had to do, really, was pack up and go.

Emotionally, of course, my situation was much more complicated. I knew that the more time I had to say good-bye, the harder it would be to do it. Two weeks was plenty of time to say good-bye to everyone. Except for Tung.

He was in still in jail. According to Huong, the authorities were holding him in some nondescript building behind a district police station on the other side of town. He shared a cell with two other men, and though he’d grown pale from lack of sunlight, he was otherwise still healthy. We knew these things because Huong was finally allowed to visit him once a week. Every Sunday, she filled plastic bags with bunches of rambutan fruit, a kilo of fresh
phở
noodles, packages of pork pâté, and several loaves of bread, then hung the bags on the handlebar of the Dream and drove off to the jail. She always came back late in the afternoon, tired but no sadder looking than when she had left. Now that she was running the household, raising her son, managing a guesthouse, and trying to get her husband out of jail, she didn’t have time for extraneous emotions.