The House on Dream Street (37 page)

Both of them assumed that my interest in the impending arrival was a result of how tardy I’d been in starting a family of my own. Though their assumptions were the same, their conclusions were different. Tung suspected that I had no intention of ever having children, and he took it as his mission to convince me that I should. Huong, on the other hand, believed I wanted children, and she assumed that my interest in her pregnancy was a sign that, at long last, I’d be getting down to business pretty soon myself.

Both of them were wrong, but Huong came closer to the truth. I did want a child, but I didn’t want one immediately. For nearly two years, I’d been listening to Vietnamese tell me that if I didn’t go ahead and have a family I’d be “
ế,
” as they called it, rotten fruit. There was a gap between when Vietnamese considered a woman “on the shelf” (mid-twenties) and when Americans did (mid-thirties or even forties). I preferred to follow the American standard, which, supposedly, had more to do with biological clocks than with one’s waning ability to catch a man. But now that I was over thirty, I was starting to take even the American schedule more seriously. I worried that I’d never find anyone I’d want to settle down with, and I also began to see my future as a choice: husband and family, or Vietnam.

The question of husband and family had begun to weigh on me even more of late. I hadn’t told Phai, or anyone in Hanoi, the entire truth. I did have a new boyfriend. Sort of. It was one of those situations that I thought Vietnamese would not be able to understand. I had met Todd in San Francisco in February, eight months earlier. He was a tall, dark-haired graduate student from the English Department at U.C. Berkeley, miserably writing his dissertation. Todd’s biological clock wasn’t ticking quite as quickly as mine was and, after a couple of dates, he told me that he wanted to continue to go out with different people. After that, our relationship was determinedly casual. We agreed that we weren’t monogamous, but he was the only one who actually wasn’t. I kept meaning to call the whole thing off. Somehow, I never did. I loved going out to movies with him, eating pizza, debating the merits of Shakespeare’s plays. When we fought, we ended up laughing. We grew to like each other more and more. Strangely, what seemed destined to fall apart didn’t. Still, it was impossible to define what was happening, and after a while that became hard to take. The idea of marriage and family had started to loom over my life, and I had to know whether I wanted to be with him or not. After six months of not being able to decide how I felt, I had tabled it for both of us and gone back to Vietnam.

My flying halfway around the world had, not surprisingly, forced a change. Letters started arriving once, twice, sometimes three times a week. Consciously, I dismissed it, but, unconsciously, riding my bike through the crowded streets of Hanoi, I found myself composing long letters to Todd in my head. I couldn’t figure it out at all, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell Tung and Huong, much less Phai, about it.

With that strange prescience of hers, however, Huong had guessed. “You’re in love with someone new,” she said one day, not even bothering to pose it as a question.

I denied it. “Love” was a word that came easily to couples in Vietnam, as I, from experience, could attest. In the United States, people could have sex with each other for weeks, or months, or even years and never say they loved each other. When Todd and I were together, the word “love” came up to describe favored toppings for pizza, Martin Scorsese movies, two-year-old nieces and nephews, but never each other. “I am not,” I told Huong, and I believed it.

      Despite Huong’s impending labor, I managed to leave the house long enough to earn some money. My column on foreign investment was taking me into the business community, the sphere of Vietnamese society that, these days, was getting all the attention in the national and international press. Riding from appointment to appointment on my rickety borrowed bicycle, I interviewed heads of banks, high-level government officials, directors of multinational companies, and in-ter national business consultants. Normally, business and finance didn’t interest me, but I knew that economic development in Vietnam was having a transformative effect on topics that did interest me—the social, political, and cultural life of the country. In Vietnam, which traditionally placed so high a value on scholarship that it set aside a day every year to honor its teachers, money had taken on such importance that the country’s best students were dropping out of school to become real estate developers and tour guides. The change was, of course, most trans-parent in the cities. I only had to remember the anxiety with which the young Hanoi actress had asked for the proper pronunciation of “Rémy Martin” to understand just how deeply the commodities of the international market were beginning to affect the once-insular life of this city.

One day, I went to the restored colonial-era mansion that now served as the Vietnam headquarters of the Korean conglomerate Bright Star. As part of my research on how foreign companies set up businesses in Vietnam, I was going to interview Mr. Choi, a high-level official there. Mr. Choi’s secretary, Mrs. Lien, ushered me into Mr. Choi’s office, which was more spacious than an entire floor of Huong and Tung’s house and filled with solid, finely crafted furniture. As Mrs. Lien poured hot coffee into a porcelain cup for me, I looked at the framed photographs on the walls, most of which showed groups of Asian businessmen smiling widely and shaking hands. For the next fifteen or twenty minutes, I heard about Mrs. Lien’s studies at Hanoi University, her husband and children, and how she’d managed to land this coveted job at Bright Star. “And you,” she asked. “Please tell me how you feel about our country, Vietnam?”

The charming thing about Mrs. Lien was that she wasn’t stalling at all. Western-style business practices were still new in Vietnam, and though a secretary like Mrs. Lien seemed capable of scheduling appointments, typing, filing, and taking messages as well as any secretary in New York, she didn’t make the same distinctions between work life and home life, between the personal and professional as, I imagined, a New Yorker would. As I’d noticed so many times before, Vietnamese do not value personal space as much as Americans do. “
Càng đong càng vui,
” Vietnamese like to say. The more crowded, the better. By the time Mr. Choi finally showed up for our meeting, I’d given Mrs. Lien advice on how to teach her children English, and she’d told me which shop on Hang Gai Street was the best place to buy silk and which market in the city sold the highest quality velvet. Then, as smoothly as she’d transformed herself into a mother and connoisseur of fine fabric, she reverted back into
the demure and efficient secretary and installed herself silently behind her desk.

Mr. Choi was nearing middle age, a tall, robust bureaucrat who wore his dark business suit very naturally. He carried out the interview with the same professional ease and confidence as any executive in the States. But, in contrast to the frankness of his secretary, Mr. Choi displayed much more reserve than I would have expected from a typical American executive, who might, at least, have asked me how long I’d worked for the newspaper or where I grew up. He seemed convinced that the reputation of his company depended on erasing any hint of his own personality. Polite and formal, he answered my questions carefully, jumping up to check in his files for any additional information he thought might help him make his points. There was only one glitch. Though his English was better than Mrs. Lien’s, his accent was much worse. I found myself in the embarrassing position of having to ask him to repeat such essential words as “authority,” “electronics,” and “Tuesday.” Several times, we had to turn to Mrs. Lien and ask for her translation. Somehow, I managed to get several pages of information on Bright Star projects, at least enough that I could write, with confidence, that the company was building an $82 million refrigerator manufacturing plant on the outskirts of Hanoi.

At the end of the interview, I stood up and put my notebook and pen in my bag. Mr. Choi got up and, from what I was able to gather, told me to call if I had any questions. I nodded, shook his hand, and followed the secretary out the door. As soon as he was out of earshot, Mrs. Lien took my hand and walked me down the stairs. “Don’t forget, buy the French velvet, not the Chinese, and definitely not the Vietnamese,” she told me. “It’s more expensive, of course, but it’s worth it.”

      In the middle of October, Susie, a friend of mine from California, came to visit. We decided to go to Ha Long Bay and invited Linh to join us. Then, the day before our departure, Huong went into labor. I came home from my Vietnamese lesson in the morning and found the front door to the house closed. When I opened it, the living room was deserted. Even the new servant who’d been hired to replace Sa wasn’t in the kitchen. I threw my bag on the floor and ran up the stairs to Tung and Huong’s loft. Huong was leaning against the pillows in her Buddha position, and Tung was sitting beside her massaging her legs. The new girl, Ly, was as reserved as Sa had been exuberant, as calm as Sa had been energetic. She was squatting in a corner, folding clothes and packing them neatly into a bag. “Finally,” Tung said, not bothering to hide the smirk on his face. “We couldn’t leave for the hospital before you got home.”

I couldn’t even joke about this moment. Stepping into the room and squatting down next to the bed, I took Huong’s hand. “Are you okay?” I asked.

She nodded, but before she could say anything another contraction came on. She pushed her legs over the side of the bed and doubled over, her eyes closed, her face frozen in a wince. The contraction lasted about fifteen seconds, then she exhaled loudly, opened her eyes, and sat back against the pillow. The contractions had started at about eight that morning and they were coming more frequently, every eight minutes. Despite Tung’s comment about leaving for the hospital, it was still too early for them to go.

I quickly realized that my presence was more distracting than helpful. I went upstairs, but came back down every hour or so to see how things were going. As the day wore on, Huong’s contractions grew more painful, but didn’t speed up. Her mother
and Nga came over. Everyone talked between contractions, then fell silent, breathless, watching her face contort in pain. By early evening, Tung was gathering up their things for the hospital. Nga helped Huong down the stairs and over to the couch. I followed Tung outside, watching him carefully hang their bags on the handlebars of the motorbike.

“Can’t you take a taxi?” I asked.

He shook his head. A taxi would take every bump in the road, he told me. At least on his motorbike he could avoid the potholes, drive slowly, inflict on Huong the least possible pain. Tung moved methodically through his tasks, with a seriousness and confidence I never would have predicted. It reminded me of how Huong had acted after Tung’s arrest, how she had taken care of the family and the guesthouse, made trips to the jail every week to see him and bring him food. When things were good, Tung and Huong complained so much about each other that you would think only inertia kept them from divorce. Then, in a crisis, they seemed ready to sacrifice everything for each other.

Tung finished preparing the bike and we walked back inside. He sat down next to Huong and said quietly, “We’ll go after the next one.”

She nodded, looking straight ahead, then slipped into it.

A few minutes later, Ly and Nga helped Huong out the door and onto the motorbike behind Tung. Huong was calm, but distant. She sat sidesaddle, with her right arm around her husband and her left clutching the metal bar at the back of the seat. Her stomach was so big that she had to lean backward just to keep her balance. Tung started the engine and carefully maneuvered the vehicle off the sidewalk and down into the street.

I walked slowly back upstairs. Susie, Linh, and I were scheduled to leave for Ha Long Bay the next morning. Now the trip
only seemed inconvenient, but I didn’t want to disappoint them by canceling. I knew I wouldn’t be helping Huong by remaining in Hanoi.

I was still ruminating over my predicament early the next morning when I heard a knock on my door. I opened it and found Phai standing on the landing. He was smiling slightly and his eyes were filled with concern. It was the first time he’d come up to my room in more than a month. My friend Kelly, the Hanoi representative for an environmental engineering firm, had hired Phai to deliver packages, make photocopies, and take mail to the post office. Sometimes, I ran into Phai at Kelly’s and had no idea how to act. It was easier at my house, where he did the same things he’d always done: wrestled with Viet, drank beer with Tung, and spent afternoons squatting in the kitchen, fixing leaks. Occasionally, standing out on my balcony, I would see him down below, talking to Tung. He looked so normal. But as soon as I walked into a room where he was sitting, his grin would freeze, his laugh would get louder and his gestures more theatrical, and I somehow ended up responding with frozen grins, loud laughs, and theatrical gestures of my own. Someone might have guessed that we were two bad actors rehearsing for a play.