The House on Dream Street (36 page)

“What do you want to eat?” he grumbled.

Duc and Van ordered fish porridge. I asked for a
Bảy Up
—Vietnamese for 7 Up.

Both of my friends were still feeling dazzled by the movie. They were used to the grainy black and white or washed-out color that characterized Vietnamese cinema. In contrast, the French film’s luscious palette and perfectly defined contrasts of light and dark left them breathless. They didn’t like the movie, though.

“The French!” Van said, with a dismissive wave of his hand. “They don’t know anything about the war. It’s worse than that movie, I’ll tell you.” Van, who was my age, was a thin, often grouchy man whose delight in the world only became evident in his gentle, romantic paintings. In contrast, Duc, who was nearly forty, was lumbering and cheerful, with a quiet voice and a shag of bushy hair.

Van lit a cigarette. During the movie, he’d smoked his way through half a dozen 555s. “Westerners will see that film and think they understand Vietnam,” he said. “It’s like me saying, because I’ve seen a few videos, that life is easy in America, that it’s just Walt Disney over there.”

Duc and I laughed. The proprietor came over and plopped the rice porridge and
Bảy Up
down in the center of the table. Van hardly noticed the food. Duc immediately took his bowl and spoon and began stirring sprigs of fresh dill into the thick mass of porridge.

I pulled open my drink and took a sip of the warm soda. “It’s true,” I said. I knew that Van and Duc had both seen Hollywood war movies. “The only thing most Americans know about the Vietnam War is what they’ve seen in
Apocalypse Now
or
Platoon.
”

Instead of laughing, Van looked irritated, as if he found America’s myopia more disturbing than Vietnam’s. “Americans don’t know anything about war,” he told me. “You haven’t had a war in your country in over one hundred years. You’re lucky! But still, whenever a single American dies in battle, you’re fu-rious. You lost fifty-eight thousand Americans in Vietnam. We lost two million Vietnamese. You bombed us. We never bombed you. But still, it was the United States, not Vietnam, who held a grudge.”

In another situation, I would probably have agreed with Van. After all, at that time, the United States was still maintaining its vituperative trade embargo against Vietnam, keeping the struggling nation from fully recovering from the double economic disasters of the war and several decades of communism. But the antagonism in Van’s voice made me defensive. Not bothering to hide my sarcasm, I answered, “Oh, right. The Vietnamese would never, ever hold a grudge.”

We looked at each other for a long moment, each of us trying to decide how far to let this conversation go. Finally, Van pulled back a little. “It’s just sad, that’s all,” he said, his tone only slightly less caustic. “All over the world, people know about American hamburgers, American blue jeans, American cars. These are good things. They help to build a strong country. We Vietnamese beat the Americans and what are we famous for? War! In this century alone we’ve fought the French, Japanese, Americans, Cambodians, and Chinese. If we didn’t have to fight all those wars, maybe we’d be rich now. We’d be the ones visiting Walt Disneyland and making blue jeans.”

Van pulled his bowl of porridge closer, as if to signal that he’d had enough of this conversation. After only a couple of spoonfuls, though, he looked up again. This time he had a grin on his face, and I could see that he’d thought of a way to move the
conversation toward friendlier ground. He leaned forward and poked Duc in the arm. “Remember the Gulf War?” he asked.

Duc laughed. “Yeah,” he said. He kept eating his porridge.

Van turned to me. “We Vietnamese appreciated the Gulf War. For once, there was this huge international conflict going on and we didn’t have to fight in it. We just sat around like everybody else in the world, watching it on TV.”

Loud voices behind us made us turn around. The proprietor, back on his stool by the charcoal cookers, was yelling at a newspaper boy, one of the hundreds of often homeless children who spent their days walking the city streets, selling papers, cheap magazines, and horoscopes. The “boy” was at least twenty, with a slightly deranged look on his face. He wasn’t arguing as much as whining, but the angry proprietor suddenly jumped up and boxed his ear. The newspaper boy raised his hand to his head and howled.

“I’m bleeding,” he screamed.

The proprietor sat back down, pulled out a rag, and began to wipe the table in front of him.

“My ear! I’m bleeding,” the newspaper boy screamed again. I had a momentary worry that he would pull out a gun and shoot us all, but this was not America. He cried for a few more seconds, then turned and wandered off down the street, holding his hand to his ear.

Street fights took place so regularly here that spectators watched them like fireworks, focusing for the instant of the flare and then losing interest as soon as it faded. I had more trouble forgetting such incidents. An American could hardly complain about the violence in Vietnam—after all, violent crime was relatively rare here—but the easy acceptance of petty brutality always bothered me. I watched the newspaper boy, who was peering into the rearview mirror of a parked motorbike, checking for signs of blood.

“Let’s go,” I said.

As we got up to leave, Duc pulled a pack of chewing gum out of his pocket and handed sticks to me and Van. Van tore the wrapper off his gum and tossed the paper onto the asphalt of the road.

“What’s wrong with you?” I snapped. “How can you pollute your country?”

Van turned and looked at me. “Americans,” he said calmly. “You think you can tell us how to keep our country clean after you dropped napalm and Agent Orange on us?”

I was so angry and humiliated that I couldn’t look at him. But I no longer felt the guilt I’d always experienced when I thought about the war in Vietnam, as if, just by being an American, I was responsible for what my country had done. I regretted the war more than I ever had, having seen how it affected this city and the lives of the people I’d come to know. But over the past eighteen months, my sense of this place had changed dramatically. I’d once thought of Vietnam with the same stereotypes that one would use to describe a battered woman: miserable, victimized, helpless. Now, I would have used an entirely different set of adjectives: tough, resilient, passionate. As much as Vietnam had suffered, it didn’t need my guilt. It might need my help—normalizing relations was a good start—but what Van had said was true. The only thing Vietnam was famous for were the wars. I’d come to see the place as more complex than that. If I could go for weeks at a time in Hanoi without even remembering the wars, perhaps Americans could forge a different kind of relationship with Vietnam and move beyond the past.

So I didn’t break down when Van mentioned the napalm, and I didn’t apologize either. And that was a good thing, too, because when I looked over at him, I saw that he was grinning, waiting to see how I’d react. I looked at him for a moment. “I
don’t know,” I said. “Napalm or a Wrigley’s wrapper. It’s not an easy call.”

In what might have been the clearest sign that the war was truly over, a Vietnamese and an American discovered that it wasn’t that hard, actually, to joke about it.

      Something happens in the last few weeks of a woman’s pregnancy. Just when it seems impossible that her belly can grow any larger, it does. She totters under all the weight, can’t bend over, needs help simply to stand up. Her body becomes the object of public fascination. Strangers stop to stare, as if they think she’ll go into labor at that very moment. In Vietnam, the whole neighborhood becomes expectant.

Huong reached that point at the end of September, after I’d been back in Hanoi for about two months. Moving around became so difficult that she spent most of her time in bed, lying on her side reading magazines, or propped up on pillows like a Buddha. Huong had never been an energetic person, so she didn’t complain about her sedentary lifestyle. Aside from the discomforts of heartburn and the muscle strains associated with carrying forty extra pounds, she seemed perfectly content. Often in the late afternoons I’d lie on the bed with her and watch her stomach. At that time of day, the baby pushed against her belly with such force and in so many places at the same time that it looked like little animals were scurrying beneath her shirt. It was a peaceful time in the house. Tung wasn’t in jail. He and Huong weren’t fighting. Another American graduate student, Whitney, had rented the last room in the house.

It was during one of those quiet afternoons that Huong finally told me what had happened to Sa. After I left Vietnam, Huong had rented my room out to a string of long-term travelers,
young Western backpackers who usually stayed a week or two in Hanoi before moving on to Laos, or Thailand, or China. Two Dutch women had stayed for three weeks. They were nice women, friendly, and Huong liked having them around. Then one day, one of the women discovered that $100 was missing from the spot where she’d hidden it at the bottom of a drawer. Huong was horrified. Nothing had ever been stolen from her house and, with Tung still in jail, the last thing she needed was more trouble with the police. The only person who’d been alone in that room was Sa, and Huong confronted her.

At first, Sa had only laughed, denying the charge. Then she’d gotten angry at Huong, declaring that she wasn’t a thief. Huong remembered that, in recent days, Sa had shown up in a new pair of blue jeans. And she had a wristwatch that her wages would never have enabled her to afford.

“Where did you get the watch?” Huong had asked.

Sa looked startled, but then she recovered. “I found it,” she declared.

“Where?”

“On the street!”

The chance of that was close to impossible. This was a country where scavengers competed for old newspapers and random bits of string. One of them would have grabbed a fallen wristwatch before Sa’s mind could even register that she’d seen it.

Sa finally broke down and confessed that she’d taken the money. She still had most of it left, squirreled away with the rest of her meager belongings, which hung in a plastic shopping bag on a hook in the kitchen. Huong replaced what was missing and gave the $100 back to the Dutch woman. Then she sent Sa, who was now hysterical, back to her father in the countryside.

Huong was more sad than angry about the incident. “Sa swore that she would never steal again, but I couldn’t let her
stay,” she said. “I have to have someone here that I trust. I couldn’t keep a thief.”

I nodded.

“I can guess what happened when she got back home,” she continued. “Her father beat her, I’m sure. He was a mean man. She hates it there.”

I’d never seen Huong so regretful, so uncertain about a decision she’d made. But her choice had been difficult. She cared about Sa, but her livelihood depended on the reputation of the guesthouse. She couldn’t have people stealing from her guests. Still, both of us felt terrible. Here was a girl who had never seen anything but the desperate poverty of the countryside, suddenly confronted by more wealth than she could have possibly imagined. She’d seen foreigners spend more money on a cyclo ride than she could earn in a week. The temptation must have been unbearable, particularly to a girl like Sa, who’d only known the thinnest joys of life and ached for more.

“She’s not a bad girl,” Huong had sighed. “I just got a letter from her last week, apologizing all over again, and telling me how much she wished she hadn’t done it.”

      The last days of Huong’s pregnancy seemed to pass in slow motion. I’d never been so close to one before. Babies, in my experience, arrived prepackaged. A pregnant woman disappeared into the hospital and reappeared a day or two later, thinner, and with a newborn neatly swaddled in her arms. I’d never seen anyone go into labor. I’d never timed contractions or tried to ease the pain by massaging a lower back. The whole process was quite fascinating to me, but Vietnam wasn’t like the States, where pregnant women could invite almost anyone they
liked into the birthing room with them. When Huong went into labor, she would disappear until she had the baby.

These days, I had a hard time leaving the house because I was so afraid that she would go into labor while I was gone. Every morning, I rushed down the stairs to find out whether or not her contractions had started. Every night before I went to bed, I made Tung promise that if anything happened during the night he wouldn’t forget to wake me. Tung started to joke that this was my pregnancy, not his wife’s. Whenever I appeared in the doorway, Huong would simply smile and say, “Not yet, Duyen. Not yet.”