The House on Dream Street (34 page)

I tried to push out of my mind thoughts of Tung’s last foreign business partner, Mr. Huey. “Who’s going to be the bartender?” I asked.

“G’day mate!” Tung beamed.

“G’day mate!” Huong, Phai, and even little Viet chimed in. They’d been practicing.

Sitting next to me, Paula was already plowing through a second bowl of noodles. “You’re going to have to get some really good music,” she said. Paula spoke Vietnamese so fluently that I could barely understand her. I told myself that her accent was off. But the truth was that her Vietnamese was better than mine had ever been. Now that I wasn’t a major participant in it, the conversation raced along. After a while, I didn’t even try to keep up.

“Duyen?” I must have fallen into a daze, because the voice startled me. I looked up at Phai. “Are you okay?” he asked.

His expression was so absolutely kind that I felt a sudden ache of love for him. “I’m fine,” I said as brightly as I could.

Huong pulled my bowl from my hands and filled it with another mound of noodles and pork. “Eat or you’ll get sick,” she chided.

I held the steaming bowl close to my face, letting the pungent smell of pork and bamboo shoots float up to my nose. It was a fragrance that nothing in California could match.

      Phai followed me upstairs after dinner, sat down next to me on the couch in my room, and took my hand. “So happy,” he said in English.

The feeling of love for Phai had, like some fickle ghost, vanished as quickly as it had appeared. “Let’s speak Vietnamese,” I said, trying to figure out how to pull my hand from his.

“Thank you for coming back,” Phai whispered. The expression of hurt I’d seen on his face this afternoon had shifted into something more steady and patient. He had waited ten months. He could wait longer.

I had once felt so confident in my love for Phai. Huong had warned me not to hurt him, and I’d hardly listened. I was convinced
that I wasn’t capable of hurting him. Now, less than a year after the last time I’d seen him, I looked at him and felt completely blank. Not only was I no longer in love with him, but I was having a hard time remembering why I had loved him to begin with. At other moments, when I didn’t feel so besieged by guilt, I could have remembered, easily, how much delight and happiness I had gotten during those months that he and I had spent together. It had been easy to think that I had focused upon Phai all the love I felt for Vietnam, but, really, that was completely unfair to him. After all, I had met many men in Vietnam and he was the one with whom I fell in love. Phai had a soul that seemed richer, deeper, and more generous than the souls of other people.

Of course, I had idealized him, too, and there was no way that the real person could sustain an image of himself that was based, in many fundamental ways, on the fact that I just didn’t know him very well. What I did know was that those qualities that made Phai seem so good were also ones that made him so vulnerable. I only had to look at the hope on his face. I felt a wave of nausea.

I dragged my hand out of Phai’s and rubbed my eyes. Without looking at him again, I said quietly, “I am so tired. I have to go to sleep.”

Phai stood up, ran his fingers across the top of my head, and said, “Sweet dreams, Duyen.” It was the way he’d always said good night to me, as we lay together in that same dark room, hearing the sounds of the street sweepers brushing their brooms across the pavement down below. I gave a little wave of acknowledgement with my hand. I kept my eyes shut, listening to the soft sound of his footsteps cross the room and the click of the door as it opened, then shut, behind him. Only then did I look up.

      A young woman I knew named Yen had been staying with Paula on the fourth floor. Early the next morning I walked upstairs to say hello. Yen was a recent graduate in English literature from Hanoi University. She spoke nearly perfect English and cultivated friendships with foreigners as if we were rare flowers in her garden.

She was in trouble now. Several years earlier, she’d fallen in love with an American graduate student named Nick, who had been her teacher in Hanoi. Their love affair hadn’t lasted long. Nick returned to the States, and to his girlfriend there. Yen was left in Vietnam with a broken heart. Then, a couple of years later, just when Yen thought she’d finally gotten over him, Nick returned to Vietnam. He asked her to translate the interviews for a documentary he was making about contemporary Vietnamese writers. She agreed to do the job, but resolved to keep her distance from him. He didn’t let her. As soon as he saw her again, he realized he’d been in love with her all along. He managed to wait twenty-four hours before asking her to marry him. She waited a couple of more hours before she accepted.

It seemed like the happy, rather saccharine ending to a bumpy romance, but then the Vietnamese government got involved. Nick didn’t have permission to film anything in Vietnam, particularly not the country’s politically controversial writers. Mysterious men on motorbikes began following the lovers around. Eventually, they were taken in for questioning, which lasted days. Nick and his American colleagues on the film were scared. Yen, who’d lived in Vietnam all her life and knew the limits of her rights here, was terrified. As the only Vietnamese on the crew, she bore the brunt of the inquisition. After a week of interrogations, Nick and his friends were expelled from the country. Yen, of course, was not allowed to follow them. It didn’t make for a very promising engagement.

Yen was lying in bed with a Vietnamese translation of
Jane Eyre
on the pillow beside her. She was small, like Tra, but while Tra was muscular and energetic, Yen was round-faced and languid. When she saw me, she smiled like a screen heroine and weakly reached for my hand. She’d been hiding out in Paula’s room for two days already, too afraid that her parents would be implicated if she ventured home, too weepy to get out of bed.

“Nick called,” she said quietly. “He told me he saw you.”

I’d run into Nick, whom I already knew from mutual friends in the States, at the hotel I’d stayed at in Bangkok. It was not as amazing a coincidence as it might sound. As a cheap hotel with basic amenities, it was frequented by English-teacher types like me and Nick. Yen and I talked for a while about Nick’s health, Nick’s emotional state, Nick’s desire to see Yen again. Hearing his name seemed to revive her, and after a while the color flowed back into her pale face and she managed to sit up in bed and eat a banana.

“The interrogations must have been terrible,” I said.

Yen shrugged. Nick, a fair-skinned, cynical Jewish historian, had complained that their story sounded like the script of a bad movie. But Yen took these circumstances as the normal course of events.

“What did they ask you?” I wanted to know.

Yen put the banana peel on the bedside table, then lay back down in bed. “They asked me about all my friends,” she said. “They wanted to know everything I know about foreigners.”

I got up and poured her a glass of water from a bottle sitting on the bureau, then sat back down and handed it to her. “They asked me about you, too,” she added.

I looked at her. Through my mind flashed those things that could make me suspicious: living in the home of a guy who’d been jailed, having a Vietnamese man spend the night. Nothing
very exciting. Even during the days when Phai left my bedroom by way of my neighbors’ roofs, I’d never been afraid that the Vietnamese government would really care about what I was doing. I couldn’t have been a very interesting subject. But the ominous quality in Yen’s voice made me nervous. “What did they want to know?” I asked.

Yen laughed and pinched my arm. “Don’t worry. They love you,” she said. “They think you’re so nice because you teach the children English. They just can’t understand why you fell in love with that low-class man.”

      I’d resolved, before I even returned to Hanoi, that I would not teach English again. I’d never been very good at it, and it didn’t pay the bills anyway. My friend Steve worked at the English-language
Vietnam Investment Review,
and his paper needed someone to write a column for prospective foreign investors. The editor didn’t seem to mind that I knew nothing about foreign investment, or business in general. All I had to do was pick a topic every week that focused on some aspect of investing money in Vietnam. I could start immediately.

The column promised to pay more money every week than my English teaching had brought in a month. After only a few days back in the city, I was already feeling flush. Then, a few days later, just as I was beginning work on my first column— “How to Find an Investment Partner”—Steve called again. He gave me the number of an American named Scott Stein who was looking for a writer. The job had something to do with condoms.

Scott Stein was the Vietnam director of RSI Worldwide, an American nonprofit organization that specialized in birth control and AIDS education. Using a standard Western-style marketing strategy, RSI had launched Rely, the first international-quality
condom to enter the Vietnamese market. RSI’s preliminary marketing efforts had focused on brand-name recognition, and, so far, had enjoyed resounding success. After decades of socialism, Vietnamese were hardly overloaded with corporate insignia and so, through extensive television and print ad campaigns, as well as a blitz of freebie T-shirts, baseball caps, key chains, and balloons, RSI succeeded in making the Rely logo, a romantic silhouette of two birds soaring across a pale blue sky, almost as well known among Vietnamese as the swirling white-on-red cursive of Coke.

Scott Stein was becoming well known, too. Westerners in Hanoi were always noticeable, and the ones who lived there eventually grew rather famous. My upstairs neighbor Paula had achieved near star status when a Hanoi newspaper referred to her as the “European beauty queen.” My friend Jack had so wide a reputation around town that people who’d never even met him swore he spoke the best Vietnamese of any foreigner in the country. Six or eight months into his Vietnam tenure, Scott Stein had become nearly as famous as the others. Scott drove around town on a motorbike with racing stripes. Plastered on the back of his chili-pepper red helmet was a sticker bearing the now-familiar sky blue and black Rely logo. Vietnam was hardly a country that discussed its sexuality openly and, now that Scott Stein had begun to market his condoms all over Vietnam, a linguistic switch had taken place. Just as Americans hear the word “Vietnam” and think of war, Vietnamese now heard the otherwise incomprehensible English word “rely” and thought “sex.” Scott quickly became known as Mr. Sex around Hanoi.

As it turned out, Mr. Sex was actually a dark-haired, bearded Jewish guy from Boston (along with me, Nick, and Steve from the newspaper, Scott added to the already significant
number of Jews in Hanoi and supported the conclusion among some Hanoians that about half the U.S. population was Jewish). I followed him into his private office, its white walls decorated with safe-sex posters from across the developing world.

The RSI operation, he explained, was bare-bones, employing a small network of regional salespeople, but its goals were extensive: to get the Rely insignia into the window, and the condoms into the inventory, of every pharmacy in the country.